A horse that you get rid of smoking. It sounds like a fairy tale, but in Drunen it is serious. Brenda Prinsen (58) works here as a stop-smoking coach. She not only helps people in her consultation room, but also in the horse box. And precisely there, with the legs in the mud and between the whinnik, the quarters often fall.
October has been ‘Stoptober’ for years: the month in which thousands of people say goodbye to their cigarette or vape. That sounds easier than it is. Because stopping still succeeds, but stopping? That is often the real fight. Sandra Banks (40) knows everything about that. Plasters, medicines and the packages that resolutely disappeared into the trash, but persisted did not work. “A few weeks, but it’s such a strong habit, you don’t keep that up for a lifetime,” she says.
She made stop attempts on her own for almost ten years, when she entered the horse box at Brenda Prinsen (58). “Now I stopped for a year, I would probably not have succeeded without those horses.”
“Horses are very good lie detectors, you don’t fool them.”
Brenda explains how that works, and especially why those horses are such a handy ‘tool’ when quitting smoking. “Horses are flight animals. They constantly scan their environment: is it safe, can I trust this herd?” They use that trust in their feelings and environment in the coaching. “Even with people they feel what is going on. They are very good lie detectors.”
So Brenda looks in the container how the horse responds to the questions and answers of the smoker. Together with the participant – the coachee – she discusses that. “Stopping smoking almost always goes further than simply throwing that package away. Smoking often has a function for the smoker, for example habit, boredom, uncertainty, sadness or stress,” explains Brenda.
According to her, the horses make it clear why someone smokes. “With one of my coachees, the horse kept rolling, for horses a way to shake off something. So we found out that she had unprocessed loss in her childhood. Later it turned out that she had started smoking, because her mother did not accept her. If you first get rid of that feeling, stopping smoking is easier.”
“They are just mirrors, very honest.”
So horses show what is underneath. “They are just mirrors, very honest.” Because in the consultation room someone can still tell himself a bit, a horse does not fall for it.
That becomes clear during a session with Sandra. She lays down pawns for the moments when she often smoked: in the morning with coffee, during a walk, after dinner. Together with Doortje, Brenda’s Belgian draft horse of almost a thousand kilos, she walks along the course.
With the pawn that must present ‘lunch break’, Doortje stops abruptly. Sandra frowned. “I didn’t think this was a difficult moment, but in the lunch break my colleagues always smoked. I participated. Now that I don’t do that anymore, I sometimes don’t know what to do with myself.” Brenda nods. “Look, that’s such an insight that you don’t get from a standard conversation.”
“It’s confronting but helps.”
As far as Brenda knows, she is the only one in the Netherlands who helps smokers in this way. The health insurers reimburse the approach from the basic insurance. “I am affiliated with the ZoHealthy coaching organization, and they have contact with the insurers.”
Sandra has now stopped smoking for almost a year. And she is very proud of that. “I didn’t expect that,” she admits. “I smoked because I wanted to have control over my emotions and daily schedule, I learned. It is confronting but helps.”