This published work is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon as medical, psychological, coaching, or other professional advice of any kind or nature. Enjoy my full disclaimer for more information!
When I was 41 or 42, my hips started to hurt. I would go to bed, lying on my side, with a pillow between my knees, and easily fall asleep. But an hour or so later, I’d wake up with the hip pressed to the bed aching deep inside the joint. So I‘d roll over to the other side, pillow between my knees. Ah! Blessed relief! Back to sleep! Until another hour or so passed. Then, the other hip would wake me up with a deep, impossible-to-ignore pain. So I'd roll back to the first side. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Everyone knows people who get their hips replaced around age 40, but I didn't want to be one of them! I had been tapping a little while by then, and as my nightly pain got worse and worse I realized I had better give tapping about it a real try. Tapping just on the discomfort, “even though I have this hip pain, I truly and deeply accept myself,” didn't do much. If I was going to get relief, I was going to have to go deeper and try to find the root cause. (You would think I would have considered this sooner, wouldn't you? Aren’t I smart and educated? But no!)
So, I tried to remember when my hips first started to give me trouble. It was in my first pregnancy, 12 years earlier. I was really big with the baby, and when I went to bed I used a pillow between my knees to help me keep my back from getting pulled over to the belly-side. And after my son was born, I'd just continued with the pillow. I hadn’t thought any more about it.
Back then I felt no pain sleeping with the pillow, but felt really uncomfortable without it.
Now, I've been really lucky in life to have had healthy pregnancies and babies, so my hip pain problem probably wasn't about the pregnancies or the kids. However, the first time I gave birth I'd had a pretty horrible medicalized labor that had resulted in a C-section. I was induced, and I was one of the women who has closer to a uterine seizure than a labor. It’s more common than you’d hope, and is one of the reasons women are told not to deliver vaginally after a C-section — because if they have a bad response to induction and labor drugs the next time, they can tear open the scar and die.
My contractions lasted 10 minutes each, with no breaks in between them. I'd gotten an epidural after several hours of this, but after 27 total hours I was unable to push out the baby and agreed to the C-section. My son and I lived to tell the tale, but I was traumatized.
Traumatic events usually contain both pain (emotional, physical, or both) and an inability to escape the situation. Check! And a memory that is stored as a trauma memory contains the who, what, when, and where of the event, and the emotion of the trauma, stored new in package just as if the event was still happening. Again, check! When I remembered the labor, I felt my helplessness as vividly as at the time it happened. Trauma memories can also resurface when a reminder triggers them: There was a documentary by Ricki Lake called "The Business of Being Born" about medicalized labor, and just looking at the title card of it brought a sob out of my throat. Check.
Trauma memory = "New in package" painful emotion.
So, back to my hips. The origination of the pain wasn't exactly related to that birth experience, but it had the right timing. Only one way to find out.
Now I'm also really lucky in this next part. I've been writing and performing poems since I was 27, and I had written a really grisly performance poem about this labor. In fact, when I was pregnant with my second child, I made it to the Finals stage of the National Poetry Slam on the strength of this poem. Trust me, it was vivid! I also had a recording of me performing it.
Writing and performing this work helped me to acknowledge and cope with my traumatic experience, but the memory itself was still devastating. I knew I could use the poem in an adapted “Tell the Story” tapping protocol.
For my setup statement I used something like, "Even though I have this true poem about this thing that happened, I truly and deeply accept myself." And then I played the poem on repeat for three hours, tapping the EFT points over and over again. When I got up after that three hours, my hips felt much, much better — and my arms were tired from tapping so long!
I felt like I had done all I could with the poem, but I still had some pain and I was afraid that if I didn't eradicate it completely that it would come back. So the next thing I did, over three or four days, was to tap with that "Business of Being Born" documentary. I spent a whole hour just tapping and crying looking at the cover image on my computer screen. Then, when I felt close to balanced looking at the cover image, I tapped to the film itself. Every time I felt an upsetting emotional spike, I stopped the film and tapped until the intensity abated.
When I finally finished tapping through the film, I could tell by my emotions that I had mended a huge part of that emotionally traumatic incident. I stopped sleeping with a pillow between my knees. And my hips never hurt like that again.