Sometimes the newest ideas in therapy are really old wisdom in a new language.
This weekend, Durango is celebrating its annual Cowboy Gathering: a celebration of Western heritage filled with music, poetry, storytelling, horses, and community. The gathering runs September 30 through October 3, with cowboy poetry, music and storytelling happening throughout downtown on Friday and Saturday.
As a therapist, I find myself thinking about what we might learn from the people who came before us. Not because the past was simpler. It wasn’t. The people who lived and worked on the land faced extraordinary hardship. Cowboys dealt with predators threatening livestock, conflicts over water and land, family feuds, isolation, unpredictable weather, injury, loss and the constant demands of survival. And yet, they had something we sometimes seem to have lost:
They knew they weren’t supposed to carry it all alone.
Pull Up a Chair Around the Fire
At the end of a long day, people gathered. They told stories. Some stories were funny. Some were exaggerated. Some were probably told a hundred times. Some were about things that had gone terribly wrong. And some were about the day that everything went right.
The Durango Cowboy Gathering continues that tradition today through music, poetry, storytelling and camaraderie. There is something psychologically powerful about telling a story in the presence of other people. When we tell a story about something difficult that happened to us, we aren’t simply reporting the facts. We are organizing an experience. We are putting words around something that may have previously existed only as fear, anger, grief or confusion.
Hunters have gathered around fires to talk about the hunt – the successful ones and the ones that didn’t go so well. Cowboys told stories about cattle, horses, storms, accidents, disagreements and adventures. The story became a way of saying:
This happened. I survived it. And somebody else understands.
That is not so different from what happens in a therapy office.
The Horse Beneath You
There is another piece of cowboy life that fascinates me as a therapist: the horse.
Cowboys spent hours riding. Their bodies moved rhythmically with the movement of the horse: left, right, left, right. Today, one of the things we use in EMDR therapy is bilateral stimulation, often through guided eye movements or alternating taps or sounds. Research into EMDR has explored how bilateral stimulation and dual attention can affect the way emotionally charged memories are experienced and processed. I’m not suggesting that cowboys were unknowingly doing EMDR on horseback. They weren’t, but I do think there is an interesting parallel.
Imagine spending hours on horseback, moving rhythmically through the landscape while your mind wanders through the events of the day. You might think about the argument you had with your neighbor. The calf you lost. The decision you weren’t sure about. The family problem waiting for you at home. The storm that nearly took the roof off the barn. Your body was moving. Your attention was partly occupied by the horse, the terrain and the work. Your mind had room to wander. Perhaps some of the things that felt overwhelming in the moment became a little easier to think about once you were moving down the trail.
We now have sophisticated therapeutic methods for helping people engage with difficult memories while staying connected to the present. But humans have been using movement, rhythm, attention and community for a very long time.
The Wisdom of Indigenous Healing Traditions
There is another tradition we should approach with even greater humility and respect: the healing practices of Indigenous peoples.
There is no single “Native American culture” or single Native healing tradition. Hundreds of distinct tribal nations have their own histories, ceremonies, beliefs and practices. Across some Indigenous traditions, healing has included community, ceremony, storytelling, singing, drumming, dancing, prayer and connection often conducted by Native healers and spiritual facilitators. Stories carry history, values and lessons from one generation to another, while creating opportunities for reflection and connection. Music, singing and dance have long held important social, cultural and spiritual roles in many Indigenous communities.
There is an important distinction here. We shouldn’t take sacred Indigenous practices, remove them from their cultural meaning and simply relabel them as “therapy.” That would miss the point. What we can do is notice the wisdom underneath many of these traditions:
Healing happens in relationship.
Healing involves the whole person, not just thoughts. Movement matters. Rhythm matters. Story matters. Being witnessed matters. And sometimes, the burden becomes lighter simply because other people are willing to sit beside us while we carry it.
Somewhere Along the Way, We Lost the Fire
Modern life doesn’t always make room for these things. We sit at desks. We drive alone. We communicate through screens. We often keep our struggles private. When something hurts, we may be expected to “move on,” “get over it,” or handle it ourselves. We have incredible advances in medicine and psychology. We have medications, neuroscience, evidence-based therapies and technologies that our ancestors couldn’t have imagined. But sometimes I wonder if, in gaining all of that, we’ve also lost some of the simple ways humans have always regulated, connected and supported one another. We don’t necessarily gather around a fire at the end of the day. So we have to intentionally create new versions of the fire. Sometimes that’s meditation. Sometimes it’s sitting with a friend and telling the whole story. Sometimes it’s moving our bodies. Sometimes it’s gathering with our community. Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s ritual. And sometimes it’s therapy.
In EMDR, for example, we intentionally use bilateral stimulation while helping a person revisit difficult experiences in a way that maintains connection to the present. Research has explored how these dual-attention processes can affect the vividness and emotional intensity of memories. We have modern names for some of these processes. But the human need underneath them isn’t new.
Maybe We Don’t Need to Reinvent Everything
This is what I love about looking backward as a therapist.
Our ancestors didn’t have our vocabulary for nervous-system regulation. They didn’t talk about trauma processing or working memory. They didn’t have an EMDR protocol. But they were human beings trying to figure out how to live through loss, fear, uncertainty, conflict and change. And they developed ways to do it.
They gathered.
They moved.
They sang.
They danced.
They told stories.
They worked beside one another.
They laughed.
They remembered.
They leaned on each other.
They sat around fires.
They rode horses down long trails.
And they learned, generation after generation, how to survive life’s ups and downs.
Maybe our job isn’t to romanticize the past. And maybe it isn’t to abandon everything modern in search of some simpler time that never really existed. Maybe our job is to remember what worked.
Then, with everything we’ve learned since, find ways to bring some of that wisdom forward.
So this weekend, if you find yourself in Durango at the Cowboy Gathering, listen to the stories. Watch the horses. Notice the laughter between strangers. Sit around the fire if you get the chance. And pay attention to what happens when people gather together and tell the truth about life, the hard parts, the funny parts, the parts that went terribly wrong and the parts that somehow turned out okay. Because there may be something deeply therapeutic about all of it. Long before we had therapy rooms, humans knew something important:
You don’t have to carry the hard parts of life alone.
Sometimes healing begins when we simply sit down together and tell the story.
