Sitting it out
Hip pain, endurance and the things we learn to tolerate
My hip started hurting on moving day.
You might reasonably assume that moving house had something to do with it… lifting boxes, carrying furniture, climbing stairs, doing far too much in a short space of time. Except my hip started hurting before I’d lifted a single box.
I was sitting alone at the kitchen table in the house I was about to leave when I suddenly felt this strong anger. I’d spent years in that house during a period of my life when I often didn’t feel emotionally safe. I had felt oppressed, unable to fully occupy my own space or always defend my boundaries. Perhaps leaving finally created enough distance for some of that anger to surface.
The anger had a very physical quality. I remember having an overwhelming urge to kick away. And somewhere around that same time, my left hip began to hurt.
What does my hip want to do?
The discomfort continued for several months. There may, of course, be physical reasons for it: bodies hurt, muscles compensate and movement patterns change. I’m not someone who believes that a specific symptom has a singular universal psycho-somatic meaning. But I am interested in what can happen when physical therapies only bring temporary relief, as well as what is possible when we become curious about what else might be happening in relation to the way our body is contracting or tightening.
So instead of only asking: what’s wrong with my hip? …I spent some time really listening to it… What does it feel like? What does it remind me of? And eventually: what does my hip want to do?
Firstly, an image appeared of a piece of pink fabric pinned down in the middle and twisted, with everything else contorting and pivoting around that fixed central point. This image interested me because I actually have a visible and felt twist through the left side of my body, which seems to centre around this same hip. The image wasn’t entirely metaphorical. It felt like something I could recognise in the way my body holds itself.
As I stayed with the sensation, I became aware of a dense point of contraction around my side glute and a lot of anger held there too. When I asked what my body wanted to do, the answer was very physical: stamp, kick, push away, move. It didn’t feel like wanting to hurt somebody. It felt defensive and protective: enough!
And then underneath it, I found something a very familiar way of being: endurance.
Sitting it out
Years ago, through my root cause health coach training, I encountered a theme associated with hips around “sitting something out” – particularly experiences in which we feel unable to defend ourselves against somebody who we experience as dominant. (That’s not to say that when we experience hip pain this is always the root cause. There are many reasons for hip pain, and I don’t believe our bodies can be reduced to an emotional dictionary.) But this particular theme around endurance resonated profoundly with my experience.
There have been times in my life when pushing back hasn’t felt safe. When the best option available to me seemed to be to keep quiet, wait, get through it and endure. Sometimes endurance is necessary. Sometimes we really can’t change the situation we’re in. Sometimes fighting back could escalate things. But what happens when the situation changes and some part of us is still sitting it out?
The image of the twisted fabric suddenly seemed even more interesting: everything moving and adapting around a fixed stuck point, that couldn’t move. Yet when I actually listened to my hip, what it wanted was the opposite: movement, to push away. It seemed to be saying: I don’t have to just sit here and take it.
When an old pattern meets the present
As I explored this through EFT tapping, it became clear that this feeling of having to endure was much older than anything happening in my life now.
There had been experiences early in my life when pushing back genuinely hadn’t felt safe. When somebody else felt more powerful, and keeping quiet, waiting or sitting something out had sometimes been the best option available to me. I think somewhere along the way that became more than a response to particular situations. It became a pattern: when I don’t feel safe to push back, I endure.
Patterns learnt in one part of our lives can have a habit of showing up elsewhere.
I’ve experienced stalking as an adult, for example, and that brought some of the same feelings sharply back into focus. There was real uncertainty involved. I couldn’t control another person’s behaviour, and asserting a boundary didn’t guarantee that it would be respected.
But as I tapped, I began to notice an important difference between being unable to control somebody else’s behaviour and being powerless. I have choices now that weren’t always available to me in my earlier life. I can leave, seek support, choose not to engage and decide who has access to me.
That felt much more believable to my body and especially my hip than trying to persuade myself that as a woman I am always completely safe. There is risk in the world. Sometimes our fear is there for good reason. But risk isn’t the same as inevitability, and uncertainty isn’t the same as a helplessness or a need to simply endure.
My hip let go
After a couple of rounds of EFT tapping, something quite striking happened. My hip felt dramatically better. In fact, for a while it felt better than it had in ages. I’m wary writing that, because I don’t want to turn my experience into a claim that EFT can “cure” hip pain. There can be physical contributors to what’s happening in our body too. But the change was quick – and significant enough for me to be curious about it.
I’d started with a physical sensation. By staying with it, I’d found an image, a movement impulse, anger and eventually this much older stuck pattern and limiting belief about endurance. Something had shifted and my old black and white thinking had expanded too.
A softer type of endurance
I have had some twinges of hip pain in the week since I tapped, which I could have taken to mean that nothing had really changed. However, when I became curious once again, something much softer connected to the theme of endurance emerged.
This time there was no danger and nobody I needed to defend myself against. It was about availability. I noticed how difficult I sometimes find it to simply make myself unavailable to other people.
If I have free time, do I have to give it to somebody? If somebody I love wants to see me, am I allowed to want time alone instead? Can I say no when nobody has done anything wrong? That brought me to a slightly different version of the same question.
The first had been: am I allowed to push away what feels threatening?
This one was: am I allowed to create distance even when I’m safe?
Creating distance can carry other fears: someone might experience it as rejection; it might damage the relationship; if I push somebody away, perhaps they won’t come back.
Sometimes the people around us may even be encouraging us to take the space we need, however, the difficulty can remain inside us: can I need space simply because I need space? Or, can I love somebody and not be available to them?
It made me wonder whether “sitting it out” isn’t always about enduring something overtly difficult. Perhaps it can also look like overriding the quieter impulse to move away. Staying available and overriding ourselves. Staying engaged, staying put, when what we actually need is some room of our own.
I don't have to keep sitting it out
My hip is a lot better now. I don’t believe that every persistent physical symptom all have an emotional cause. But for me, I do think my body was coping around a set of psychological and behavioural patterns and beliefs. The pattern I found was endurance.
Somewhere along the way, I’d learnt a fairly black-and-white version of what happens when I don’t feel able to push back or step back: either I fight or I put up with it. Or, in the softer version, either I stay available or I risk loss. Sometimes power might mean speaking up or saying no, or walking away rather than engaging. Sometimes it can mean asking for help or involving somebody else. And then sometimes, in a safe relationship, it might simply mean allowing myself to say, I need some space today. Having choices feels very different from believing my only option is to stay and endure.
Perhaps that’s what has been most significant about this exploration. It hasn’t been about convincing myself that I’m always safe, or that I can control what other people do. It’s been about recognising that I have more power in what happens next than my old patterns sometimes allowed me to feel.
My hip led me into all of this simply because I stopped asking only “How do I make this pain go away?” and became curious and started listening to the messages beneath the pain and tension.
For me, the connection between my hip and these patterns feels real. My body seemed to be coping around beliefs and behaviours that had been with me for a very long time. As those began to shift, my hip shifted too. This has left me with a different question to take into my work with others:
What might become possible when, alongside tending to hip pain physically, we get curious about what our body has been adapting around?
For me, what emerged was endurance.
And my hip is teaching me that I no longer have to keep sitting it out.
Curious about what your body might be communicating?
If you’re living with persistent pain, tension or another symptom and feel curious about exploring it from a different perspective, there are two ways we can approach this work together.
- Somatic Bodywork offers a hands-on doorway – slowing down, listening to the body through touch, sensation and movement, and allowing the session to respond to what emerges.
- Embodied Health offers a more exploratory doorway using conversation, body awareness and approaches such as EFT Tapping to become curious about the patterns, experiences and beliefs that may be sitting alongside a symptom.
Neither approach assumes what your symptom means or tries to force an answer. We begin with what you’re noticing and listen from there.