What My New Hip is Teaching Me
Personal perspective: As we heal, we become stronger than before.
KEY POINTS
Human beings are built to heal, grow, and change.
Recovery from anything, including trauma, anxiety, and depression, is hard work—but healing is possible.
Human connection releases a powerful cascade of healing hormones and neurotransmitters.
Through hard work, and with the help of someone we trust, we can recover and grow even stronger.
I have a new right hip. It’s a big improvement over the old one. It means I can take long walks again with my beloved labradoodle, Tinker. It means I can take to the dance floor.
And like anyone who has gotten a new joint or is recovering from a serious injury of any sort, my doctor ordered physical therapy. That’s why I am working with a wonderful physical therapist named John.
We meet twice a week, sometimes three times. John puts me through my paces. Specifically, he is helping me strengthen my hip socket muscles. He has me doing clam shells, so many clamshells. He has me doing one-legged bridges and squats.
And here’s my favorite, called the monster walk. This exercise involves putting a band above my knees and taking diagonal steps forward and backward. The name is apt!
Working Through Pain
John tells me the pain I am working against is important, that I won’t heal without it. At my last session, as I was straining through a set of abductor slides, John looked me squarely in the eye and said, “You know, the injury you have is going to make your muscles stronger. Muscles get stronger after they have been injured.”
I was smiling at this point, but John kept explaining. He said that when a muscle gets injured, the body releases a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters so the muscle grows stronger as it heals. It is one of the most magical things about the human body, and actually the mind too—the capacity to heal and become stronger.
Growing Magic Muscles
The reason I was smiling is that I am a physician, and what John had just told me about my muscles is exactly what I told my patients about their anxiety, depression, learning differences, and, most of all, about their trauma. Some of my patients had known terrible trauma. But as they recovered, as we worked together on their healing, I would tell them they were building "magic muscles," muscles that would become their superpowers.
The muscles my patients built—the muscles anyone builds when they are recovering from an injury—are the kinds you can only build when you face an obstacle. It’s hard work, and most of us cannot do it alone. In fact, it is very hard to do it alone.
The Healing Power of Human Connection
With a trusted therapist, trainer, coach, teacher, parent, or friend, we can heal, grow, change, and surmount really difficult things. This is because of another biochemical cascade—the one that gets released through human connection.
Hormones and neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and dopamine provide the energy source that healing requires. They spur recovery and get us ready to take on new challenges.
Even our brains are wired for change and healing. This is known as Hebb’s law, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” And as they do, we develop the capacities to learn new things. For a child, it might mean learning to read or solve a word problem; for an athlete, let’s say a figure skater, it might mean trying a double axel and landing it cleanly.
Chunking Challenge
Change doesn’t come overnight, of course. When I started physical therapy with John, it took weeks before I could walk with confidence, and John didn’t expect me to right away. He worked me up to it, chunking the challenges.
When my patients got better, they grew magic muscles, and then there was no stopping them. As for me, I am happy I get to take hikes with my dog—much longer hikes than before.
Read the article on Psychology Today.
