A gunshot in April 2023 sent Leslie Brewer running to her partner and the horror of seeing him dead from a self-inflicted wound at their Hanahan home.
Brewer said the shock of that sudden end of their two-year relationship severed her ties with reality. She began to hallucinate. “I saw my mother go outside and shoot herself in the head,” she said in an interview.
To avoid spiraling in a cycle of trauma and to ward off grief, Brewer tried acupuncture, one-on-one meetings with a therapist and group sessions.
None of it worked. But two weeks after her partner’s death, a family friend encouraged her to see Kim Hallin and her four horses in rural Ravenel.
“The experience helped me to slow down, be in nature and breathe,” Brewer said.
At that time, two of Hallin’s horses — Puck and her daughter Tempo — were experiencing grief over the loss of a member of their herd. Brewer said watching how the horses respectfully interacted with one another and how they grieved helped her. “It was almost like they could sense the grief I was struggling with,” she said.
“I am still working on healing, but I don’t think I would have made it this far without having gone to Kim,” she added. For additional support, Hallin connected her with Charleston therapist Bonnie Compton, who referred Brewer to other specialists.
“Putting all those other people in front of me helped me to grieve properly and give up an alcohol addiction,” she revealed. She has been sober for seven months.
Non-verbal communication
At Hallin’s three-acre horse farm — Unbridled — animals live in an unconventional surrounding. They roam their paddock as if they were in the wild, and humans don’t ride or touch them unless they approve of it. In this setting, people experiencing trauma observe horses in a healthy herd relationship that gives humans a model to follow, Hallin said.
In a self-published book in 2022, Horse Wisdom, Hallin writes that during the pandemic’s isolation, she connected with her horses’ highly evolved emotional intelligence.
From this interaction, she sensed the horses were telling her: ‘“We can help you separate your understanding of life from everything the human world has taught you to believe. Life existed — and has been thriving — since long before human thinking took the reins.’ ”
This horse farm is a place of self-reflection where humans observe the animals’ interactions with limited touching of one another, said Hallin, who once trained horses and competed in equine events.
Visitors to the farm, she said, sometimes comment they wished they were a horse so they could be with other people without them invading their space, whether it is physical, mental or emotional.
Lessons learned
When Hallin was the executive director of the Trident Technical College Foundation and the college’s associate vice president for development, she bred Puck with the intent to train Tempo for equine competitions.
But in 2008, a developmental bone disorder in one of Tempo’s hind hooves dashed Hallin’s plans. To heal Tempo, Hallin confined her to give her medication daily.
“As a young horse, she didn’t understand what was going on, and it stressed her,” Hallin remembered. Tempo associated people with the loss of her autonomy, and she became aggressive and protective of her herd mates.
Hallin didn’t understand the emotional toll that was having on Tempo. She also didn’t read Tempo’s body language that signaled she was stressed.
After a few years of dealing with Tempo’s aggression, Hallin took a course on how to train aggressive dogs. It taught her that when Tempo was tense, she should stop, back away and acknowledge her feelings. Eventually, she established a trusting relationship with Tempo.
Hallin then began to read the body language of her other horses, Shiloh and Reli (pronounced ray-lee). They were telling me “they weren’t enjoying [riding] the way I thought they were enjoying it,” she said. They would do it, but wrinkled nostrils, squinted eyes and swishing tails could be their subtle way to say they were not happy about it, Hallin explained. Eventually, she stopped riding her horses.
Horse church
The idea of using horses to heal to gain self-awareness emerged unexpectedly in 2013 when one of Hallin’s friends, a woman who was going through a tough time, visited the farm on Sunday mornings to sit quietly with her to observe the horses.
Instead of riding the animals, they asked them if they wanted to be touched or groomed. Hallin began to see that the horses became friendlier and were more willing to hang out.
She, her friend and the horses benefitted from the weekly interactions, she said. They called the sessions “horse church.” From there the idea grew to use horses to foster mutual emotional healing for humans and the animals.
In the horse industry, Hallin said, there is an increasing understanding that when horses are being difficult they are trying to say something.
“But the idea of using horses to help people heal is still on the fringe, especially when it comes to the horse’s experience,” she said. “Their value is not seen as much if they are not being trained to be ridden.”
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