In much of Western culture, counseling still carries a stigma. For generations, toughness has been measured by silence, endurance, and the ability to shoulder pain alone. But what happens when that silence starts costing lives, marriages and futures? Listening closely to voices from within the culture itself reveals that counseling — when done well — doesn’t look like weakness at all. It looks like learning how to live again. In Part Two of this series Britton Collum of 4014 Consulting explains what counseling can look like for the cowboy.
Counseling, in this context, becomes less about pathology and more about permission — permission to feel, to speak and to be seen. That’s why alternative entry points matter. Horses, for example, have become bridges.
“We can learn, approaches, methodologies, topics, but at the end of the day, nobody needs to feel like you’re being fixed. Nobody needs to feel like they’re being talked at,” Collum says. “One of my passions in my art is to be really authentic with people but try to take practical, everyday life applications and just explore those relationally so that we can try to figure out OK, ‘Where do you feel like you’re not being seen? Or where do you feel like you’re not being heard? Where do you struggle being known?’ If we can answer those questions then it typically becomes the barriers to getting in the way of them having healthy relationships. And that’s what we’re all created for is healthy relationships.”
Often what counseling looks like at its best: space held carefully, without agenda. When people first reach out, apprehension is common. Sessions may be one-on-one, monthly, weekly, or in groups. Sometimes they include horses. Sometimes they include long silences. What they always include is choice.
“The frequency is also always set up by the client,” he says. “My goal as a coach is to just hold the space to ask the hard questions that maybe somebody isn’t able to ask them and then and then expect them to come up with a solution for the problem that keep hitting which is kind of the unique nature of coaching versus counseling.”
With Collum’s area of expertise of life coaching versus traditional counseling, he’s found a way to interact with the cowboy community that is more authentic and often more easily accepted by those in the ranching and cowboy communities. This approach challenges another myth: that counseling is a transaction. That distinction matters, especially in communities that value authenticity and can spot insincerity instantly.
“I don’t want this to be a transaction. I want it to be a relationship,” Collum says. “What I have found is that when I’ve been able to interact with some people that are more steeped in the [Western] culture, and I’m able to have conversations around horses in our interactions, it’s really opened up probably a quicker pace to their breakthrough or their goals and what it is that they’re trying to go after.”
There’s also a hard truth about value. Many cowboys will invest thousands in saddles, horses, and gear, but balk at investing in themselves.
“You’re watering your life down to you’re less valuable than a custom saddle,” Collum says. “That’s just me being real. There is such pride in all of that aspect of our lives.”
Collum’s goal, like many who are pioneering this shift in culture is to help those in the community realize their mental health is worth the investment. Counseling or working with a life coach doesn’t magically transform people into someone else. Often times change can’t be measured in tangible factors or dramatic turnarounds. Sometimes success is quieter, and sometimes success is simply survival.
Perhaps the clearest picture of what counseling can be like comes down to this: it is a place where masks are unnecessary. A place where pride loosens its grip. A place where someone finally hears that their worth isn’t tied to toughness, productivity, or silence.
“As soon as somebody simply changes the narrative that they can be seen, known or heard, we may never know the impact honestly,” Collum says “My hope is that they stop recreating the lie that keeps them so isolated in their journey, whatever that greatest fear is for them.”
For a culture built on independence, that may be the bravest step of all.
