11: Are emotions stored in the hips?

Matt explores the popular claim that emotions and trauma are stored in the hips. Drawing on his background as a yoga teacher and anatomy educator with a master's in exercise science, he reviews scientific evidence to debunk this myth. The episode discusses how oversimplified views on trauma can create unnecessary fears and misconceptions, emphasizing the importance of precise language in yoga teaching. Additionally, Matt explains the real impacts of trauma on the brain and nervous system and considers why certain yoga poses might evoke emotional responses. The episode concludes with practical advice for yoga instructors on how to create a supportive environment without reinforcing unscientific beliefs.

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:13 Exploring Emotions and Trauma in the Hips

01:44 The Science Behind Emotions and Trauma

02:13 Common Misconceptions and Their Impact

04:25 Origins of the Emotions-in-Hips Theory

05:36 Understanding Trauma and Its Effects

08:07 Yoga's Role in Addressing Trauma

19:59 Practical Advice for Yoga Teachers

23:38 Conclusion and Personal Stories

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Transcript

Matt: 0:00

So, hello and welcome to episode 11 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast. We have had a little bit of a break with a busy summer, and I'm back on it with, you could say, what is season two. Today we're going to be looking at the question of whether emotions are stored in the hips, and along with that comes the idea of trauma'cause it's also sometimes said that trauma is stored in the hips. Well, what does the science say? Let's have a deep dive in and hope you enjoy today's episode So this episode is a curious exploration into the topic of emotions and hips and hip openers. Trauma. This is definitely not a diagnosis. It's not therapy. It is not a substitute for mental healthcare. I am not a therapist. I don't have PTSD. I'm a yoga teacher, anatomy educator, and a science communicator. I have a master's in exercise science, and I love sharing science with the public, particularly yoga teachers. It's my absolute passion and I like distilling what the evidence says. It's difficult to read scientific articles. My job is to read them, share it with you. So we're going to look today what the evidence says on this topic and what it doesn't say. First of all, why this topic? Well, the phrase we store emotions in our hips is everywhere. It's in classes, it's in trainings, it's on Instagram for sure, and other social media platforms, memes. It's often said as though it's a given. Like it's just a fact handed down through the generations. But is it true? So why does this topic matter? Well, it matters because when teachers speak about trauma in overly simplified ways, which is exactly what that claim is, we risk creating shame or fear. For example, someone might think, well, what's wrong with me that I don't feel anything. For me, that's the case. Like I don't feel particularly emotional during hip openers. I do remember feeling really emotional once during a yoga class, and it was just at the beginning. And I had been going through a really stressful time in my life and I remember the teacher had us just lie down and start with a Shavasana and I nearly started to cry. For me it was just slowing down from this busy pace that I was in to realize, wow, what I've been going through has been really difficult emotionally. But then at the same time, if I'm told hip openers are emotional, but I don't feel those emotions, I, I might personally feel that there's something wrong with me or I'm, I'm not doing it properly. And other people could feel that. Similarly, as I'm going to share with you at the end, this idea of holding trauma in our hips and just being able to release it by doing more pigeon pose or more yoga can, one, prevent someone from getting the therapy and treatment that they actually need, which could help in a more evidence-based way. And number two, it can make them think, well what trauma do I have if I have tight hips? And why can't I just let go of this trauma? So other reasons to talk about this topic are that such oversimplified thinking reinforces magical thinking or misinformation, and it confuses metaphor with fact. Especially for clients with real trauma histories, inaccurate claims can trigger dissociation or self-blame. They can misdirect expectation of what yoga can and cannot do. And they can blur the line between yoga and psychotherapy. Our words definitely matter. And yoga is a powerful space and that power to serves precision. Also understanding this helps teachers honor the emotional side of yoga without pretending to be therapists. So where did this idea of emotions stored in the hip first come from? It seems to be a melange of different theories and, uh, somatic practices. This idea of emotions in the hips might come from a blending of Eastern philosophy. Often chakras and koshas are implicated, and these are really sort of metaphors for the inner world. Often, fascia is blamed or or mentioned. Fascia is richly innervated and responds to stress. But spoiler alert, there's no evidence that your fascia stores emotions like a hard drive. That's not how it works. Um, it's just a myth that your, so as stores trauma, it sounds scientific, but it's not based on research. And lastly, it's got a catchy title too. Emotions are stored in the hips. You know, it's something succinct that you can say quickly. So it's more of a poetic metaphor rather than an actual physiological mechanism of what's going on. Now what actually is trauma? And this is a clinical definition because we can often throw this term around saying things like, oh, that last haircut traumatized me. But what trauma actually is, in a scientific definition, is an event involving actual or perceived threat to life, safety, or bodily integrity. And for it to be qualified as. Trauma. It must overwhelm a person's capacity to cope at the time. So we all go through stressful events, but not all stress is trauma. In fact, as we mentioned our book, the Physiology of Yoga, there are different stressors in life. ORS stressors, for example, someone turning on the light. If you're in a healthy state, turning on the light is nothing, you know, that's that. That's a stressor, which our body can easily manage. Our pupils constrict and you know, we return to homeostasis. However, imagine if you have a migraine. And you're hungover and, and you know you're exhausted. You haven't slept well. Someone turning on a light could be a stressor that could be really intense and overpowering, but still that wouldn't be considered trauma. It's not something that you can't cope with. And as Dr. Gabor Mate says, trauma is not what happens to you. It's what happens inside you. Same with the idea of stressors and stress. Lots of events are happening outside of us, but it's our body's stress response that makes it either stressful or not stressful, like someone turning on the light. Not all hardship is trauma, and in fact, you know, hardship can be really useful in helping us form our personalities or helping us shape our lives. It can help us find direction in our life and overusing the term trauma dilutes its clinical meaning and may invalidate people's lived experience of it. There are at least three different types of trauma. There is acute trauma, which is a single event, chronic trauma, which is repeated exposure to that. And then finally, developmental trauma, which is often relationship based. It usually happens in early life and in or, or it could be ongoing. Consequences of trauma now: here's where we can actually think about how trauma affects the body, and then how yoga then might also affect the body and therefore trauma. This is based on neurobiology and psychology, current research findings, not just things that people have made up, which sound good as sound bites. So the consequences of trauma include impaired emotion regulation. So, you know., Feeling upset very quickly. Irritable without much of a, of a cause or maybe overly elated or often trauma over the long term can lead to depressive symptoms and anxiety. Trauma can lead to changes in attention and memory and even a distorted sense of time, self, and body, which is where a yoga practice can be really powerful. Some useful references if you wanna look further into this idea of trauma are the American Psychiatric Association and Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery. But for now, let's dive a little bit further into this idea of what trauma actually does to the body. First of all, it's not about where trauma is. It's not just in your hips, and it's not like heartache is just in your heart, but really trauma and, and deep emotions can change our experience as humans. There's no microchip of sadness embedded in your gluteus medias. Even when I say the idea, it sounds silly, but it's, it's the same idea as saying emotions are in the hips, but we do know trauma changes the brain and the nervous system. So key systems that are affected include the amygdala, which can lead to a heightened threat detection, um, the amygdala, an almond shaped organ within the brain is implicated in quite often the fear response and it seems like past trauma can affect someone's amygdala function. Similarly, the hippocampus is another part of the brain which can be affected by trauma, and this shows up as disrupted memory sequencing. The prefrontal cortex. Another part of the brain is implicated in trauma and it can lead to impaired executive function, which means making poor decisions, basically making decisions that you know are bad for you, but you still make them anyway. So this is what research shows about the way that trauma can show up in people and the way it can affect our nervous systems. One last one is in the autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your nervous system associated with your heart rate, your breathing rate, your digestion rate, a lot of the physiological processes that happen in the background that you don't think about. And we see that people with trauma at show what you can describe as dysregulated autonomic nervous system responses. So this can include a dominance of the sympathetic branch, what's often referred to as the fight or flight on the extreme end um, but you can also think of it as the arousal response or the excitatory response. So basically being in a, a heightened vigilant sense. It can also lead to vagal suppression. Perhaps you've heard of the vagus nerve, and this is what controls the parasympathetic or the rest and digest mode of our autonomic nervous system. Well, trauma can actually lead to vagal suppression or decreased vagal tone as it's sometimes called, so you're less able to get into that relaxed state that we often associate with yoga and mindfulness. Also interoception can be affected by trauma, and interoception is the ability to perceive internal bodily states. So this can include your heart rate. You may or may not be able to sense your exact heart rate any moment, but you can get an idea of it. And in fact, before you have a cold or an infection, quite often your heart rate will increase by about five beats per minute. This can be one of the ways that we can sense, oh, I feel like I'm coming down with something. So even if you can't sense every pulse, perhaps within your chest, you can probably sense your heart rate better than you think. Um, also, gut feelings, hunger, breath, all of these things. We, we, we can sense them somehow within us. That's because we have more than just our five senses. We have these internal senses. It's basically how you know what you're feeling and research has shown trauma can make interoception hypersensitive. So in other words, there can be too much input, or it could be blunted, as in there can be not enough. So basically someone's sense of what's happening inside their body can be affected, whether that's hyper or hypo. So whether that's increased or decreased. A great source if you wanna look into this further is The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Even that term, the body keeps a score, that sounds a bit like emotions are stored in the hips, but it is meant as a metaphor rather than. An actual physical storage locker within the body, and within that book, he goes into all the science behind trauma. So if emotions are not stored in the hips and trauma is a complex thing that can affect the nervous system and other systems of the body. Then why is it that hip openers might feel emotional in people? Well, first of all, the term hip opener is a difficult one to define because what are you actually opening? Usually people refer to opening the back of the hip, so they're often thinking of pigeon pose, which is basically a glute stretch and a stretch on the posterior joint capsule of the hip socket. But then also people might describe hip openers as stretching the inner thighs. So for example, goddess pose or a straddle stretch, happy baby pose, which are stretching the adductors. And you could say the opposite side of the hip. But actually often people don't think of hamstring stretches as hip openers. And in fact, your hamstrings attach to your sitting bone and cross the hip, so they very much affect the hip. So even the term hip opener has questionable definitions. It's hard to define, but let's go with slower stretches that you often find at the end of a yoga class, such as pigeon pose or bound angle pose, baddha konasana, that sort of thing, and things that you often hold for a longer period of time than just vinyasa-ing through it, if you will, or flowing through it. Here are a couple of possible explanations of why someone might have an emotional experience during these hip openers. A parasympathetic shift. So I mentioned how the sympathetic system is often described as the arousal response, and on the extreme end, the fight or flight response versus the parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest mode. If you are slowing down, and we know that slowing your breathing does lead to a shift towards the parasympathetic, towards the rest and digest mode, so it's possible that this can downregulate you, it can allow you to focus on your emotions. Like I said, it wasn't a hip opener that made me feel emotional in a class, but simply slowing down from my busy life of teaching yoga in London to realizing, oh wow, this is a a difficult, challenging time. It didn't matter what pose I was in. It's also possible that a certain pose could have an associative memory. Not to get into too many specifics, but perhaps a suppose could resemble a past experience that is associated with trauma. And so then it's obvious how then this posture could trigger an emotional response in a person. And another reason a person might have an emotional response is what's called cognitive priming. Basically, expectation shapes perception. If I tell you something is going to hurt, it's more likely to hurt. If I tell you something is going to make it feel better, it's more likely to feel better. This is known as the placebo and nocebo effects in medicine. If your yoga teacher is saying to you, you are going to release trauma here, you're going to have an emotional experience, your brain goes looking for evidence of that and it can set up this, this space where also the teacher is saying this is a safe space to have an emotional experience, which is a good thing. Right? so. It's important to remember that beliefs can amplify sensation. And I'm not saying never say that again. And I think it is important to allow our yoga classes to be a safe space, but I'm just pointing to how this sometimes can then confuse an emotional experience as being the mechanism for emotions being stored in the hips. And that's just not exactly how it works. In summary, an emotional response is not the same thing as trauma being stored in a specific location. Now let's look at what yoga actually can offer, how yoga actually might help someone with trauma or just having an emotional experience. Yoga may help with increasing interoceptive awareness, or potentially just our sense of improving it, even if it doesn't actually improve our interceptive awareness. So basically we can sense what's going on inside us better, or at least we can believe that we are, which actually weirdly has a similar effect. Yoga may help by reducing sympathetic arousal, so this fight or flight mechanism, the arousal response or that hyper vigilance that you might see in someone. This is sometimes called nervous system downregulation, but really when you downregulate the sympathetic, you upregulate the parasympathetic so you increase relaxation as you decrease that arousal response. Yoga, however, is not a treatment for trauma unless, of course, it's being offered by a trauma informed clinician as part of a larger treatment and even trauma sensitive yoga or trauma informed yoga, this is simply being sensitive to it and to the cues that could trigger a person rather than being a treatment or a cure for it. Yoga is not a guarantee of emotional release. It, it, it might come, it might not. But where yoga might be valuable is when an emotional release processing a trauma does come about is that we can observe it and we can simply be present with it. And for some, the mat may become a space to process trauma, but that's not the same thing as releasing trauma. So how as yoga teachers, but also just friends and informed people, can we speak more accurately about this idea of trauma and the hips? Well, I would avoid saying you're storing trauma here because that's telling someone what's going on in their body, number one and number two we know from this discussion that it's not true that trauma is stored in specific places in the body. We should also avoid saying something like, this pose will unlock grief, or this pose will release any trauma that you have, but instead offer things like you may feel strong emotions here, physical or emotional. You may or you may not, and notice how those feel. You could say things like. You don't have to fix or interpret any sensations as they come up, just notice them. And of course, let your breath be your anchor if anything feels intense because there's nothing like the breath for bringing us back to the present moment. We can also empower students by giving them a sense of agency to stay or come out of a pose. And I, and I think most yoga teachers these days don't say, no, you must stay here no matter what. And most of us say, you know, do what you can within your limits. At the same time, there is value in, in asking someone to hold that balance a little bit longer, even though they wanna stop and have a water break. So all of these things that I'm suggesting carry with them nuance. And I, I don't want you to take this as a, a hard, fast rule. We can also empower students by normalizing a range of experiences. So whether that's feeling emotional or, or not feeling emotional. And finally, we can empower our clients by avoiding over pathologizing responses, like things about trauma and the hips. There is a certain magic and power and yoga, and I, I, I don't want to lessen that by sprinkling in some evidence and science, so let's preserve the poetry of yoga. Let's appreciate that we might speak in metaphors, which are not necessarily physiological mechanisms, but let's also do our best to honor precision in our language and in our teaching. I think it's useful to ask why do we reach for these kinds of phrases? What, what do they give us? Does it provide meaning to your teaching? Does it provide mystery? Connection? Quite often I think the most powerful thing that we can share in a yoga class and we can give to others is just a bit of stillness and quiet. And the reason I was able to have that emotional experience in London at, at the beginning of the yoga class was just because the teacher was quiet and the space was available for it. The, the, the fruit was ripe as it were. So I would ask you if you have ever had any unexpected emotion during yoga and, and how do you talk about emotion in the body in a way that's honest and helpful? I think reflecting on these prompts can be useful in our teaching and you know, it's okay to not know everything, but let's make it our practice to keep learning. So I wrote this blog post on this same topic of whether emotions are stored in the hips, i sent it out my to my newsletter, and this person responded by saying,"Thank you so much for this information. It's really liberating to know that I don't have trauma in my hips, that I haven't been doing something wrong all my life." And as it turns out. She was born with some sort of developmental hip dysplasia, which means her bones are formed in a different way than you could say the rest of us. In her teacher training, she always felt like the, the least flexible person and that she had some trauma stored there and she was told this. And actually it was really reassuring to, to get a diagnosis of, of this hip dysplasia and to realize that it wasn't just her own fault. And as much as I love alternative approaches to healing, one problem is that quite often they suggest that the person is to blame for their condition. Like they didn't do enough juice detoxes, or they didn't have enough, um, sunlight on their belly or, or, you know, whatever the current trend is. And the reality is, bad stuff sometimes happens. You know, children die of cancer, people die of malaria. People die of preventable diseases, not because of any fault of their own. My own father actually died of methicillin resistant staphylococcus, an infection that he picked up from a hospital. This is no fault of his own, he was just going for routine bunion surgery. And that just sucks, you know, and life happens like that sometimes, and it's not that he did anything wrong. And so I think we need to be aware of how things that we say and alternative healing can have this idea that you've done something wrong. And if you just do this correctly, like drink apple cider vinegar, you'll be better. So on that note. I hope that we can all be liberated through the study of knowledge and we all appreciate the value of yoga without having to add on these extra things that are not evidence-based. On that, thank you very much, and tune in next time to the next episode of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast