Hi Reader,
This week, there's been a recurring theme in many discussions: the apparent link between our physical pains and our emotional turmoil. Maybe you've had this experience too: You get angry, and all of a sudden, the pain in your shoulder flares up. Or maybe you start having pain in your jaw, and realize you've been clenching your teeth because you're worried about something. People say some version of this to me all the time in my office: “I know this pain is connected to this emotion or memory.” Or simply, “My body is storing my trauma.”
We experience emotion in and through the body. Fear and anxiety can change our breathing, our heart rate and the way we organize ourselves to move. Grief can feel heavy. Anxiety can knot our stomach before we wakeup. A memory can come with a very recognizable tightening of the jaw, the chest, the belly or the shoulders, just like certain positions or movements can evoke strong memories.
But does that mean that the emotion, or the memory, is actually stored there?
Musings
I think this is one of those places where the language we use can be both helpful and misleading at the same time. Saying that we “hold” something in the body gives words to a very real experience. The trouble begins when the metaphor becomes an explanation.
A painful hip does not necessarily contain an old memory. A tight jaw is not automatically unexpressed anger. Back pain is not proof of unresolved trauma. There is an important relationship between what we feel physically and what we have lived through emotionally, but there may also be injury, inflammation, changes in load or movement, sensitization, fatigue, sleep, stress, illness, or several of these things interacting at once.
And then there is another layer that fascinates me: the meaning we give to sensation.
Our brains are constantly trying to make sense of information. They look for patterns, draw on previous experience, make predictions about what is likely to happen next, and revise those predictions as new information comes in. The signals coming from the body are part of that process, but they do not arrive with little labels attached to them saying “grief,” “danger,” “trauma,” or even “this is why your hip hurts.”
A sensation occurs in a context. That context includes what is happening around us, what has happened before, what we are paying attention to, what we expect, what we remember, and the state of the body itself. Somewhere in that ongoing conversation, we make meaning.
This is one reason I’m cautious when someone tells me that a particular part of the body “means” a particular emotion. Maybe there is an association there. Maybe the nervous system learned to brace, withdraw, become still, hold the breath or prepare for action in a particular situation, and some version of that organization appears again when something reminds the system of the past. But that is very different from saying that the memory itself is sitting inside a muscle waiting to be released.
The same tendency to search for meaning appears in anxiety and repetitive thinking. When something feels uncertain or unresolved, the mind can return to it again and again, looking for the pattern or explanation that will finally make it coherent. Sometimes that search helps us solve a problem. Sometimes it becomes rumination and generates more uncertainty instead.
Pain can become caught in similarly complex loops. Pain is real, but it is not a simple readout of tissue damage. Sensory information, attention, expectation, previous experience, threat, movement, emotion and context can all influence what we experience. That does not make pain “psychological,” and it certainly does not mean that every pain has an emotional cause. It means that the relationship between brain and body is more interesting - and infinitely more multilayered - than we think.
So perhaps the useful question is not, “What emotion is stored here?” but, “What is happening in me when I feel this?” What do I notice? What does my system expect? What memories or meanings appear? What happens to my breathing, my posture, my movement and my attention? What becomes possible or impossible? And what changes when I give my nervous system a slightly different experience?
Come explore this with me in the NeuroSomatic Lab !🧠
This week, instead of giving you a practice to try on your own, I’m inviting you into the Lab. We’ll take this question out of the realm of theory and explore it through sensation, movement, attention and perception. Not to decode what your body “means,” but to get curious about the relationship between sensation, context, memory and prediction.
The NeuroSomatic Lab is a monthly live class. If you can’t make it live, there will be a replay, so you can still register and do the exploration in your own time.
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🧠 NeuroMinute...
Neuroscience gives us good reasons to be careful with the idea that memories are literally stored in body parts. Research on memory shows that memory is best understood as a change in brain networks involved in encoding, consolidation and retrieval. Memories are representations that are not static files: they can be reactivated, updated and linked with new information. They can also be re-imagined, and are not 100% accurate reflections of reality.
At the same time, the brain is continually receiving information from the body and using it, together with past experience and the present context, to regulate the body and guide action. So a memory can absolutely be accompanied by a familiar bodily pattern without the memory itself being located in the hip, jaw or shoulder.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett puts the distinction rather provocatively: “Your brain keeps the score. Your body is the scorecard.” The body is constantly providing information that participates in what the brain predicts and constructs. What she challenges is the idea that a bodily symptom can simply be decoded as evidence of a particular stored emotion or trauma.
Pain science points in a similarly nuanced direction. Pain is an experience produced by the nervous system in response to many kinds of information; the relationship between pain and tissue state is important, but not one-to-one. Context, learning, expectation, attention and perceived threat can influence pain, alongside biological and mechanical factors.
Which brings me back to the person who tells me, “I hold this memory in my hip.” Something has led them to experience those two things together, and that relationship may be worth exploring. I’m also very interested in the next question: what is your nervous system doing, right now, when the hip and the memory meet?
Warmly,
Joana
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