The Mind’s Role
For 20 years, I leapfrogged from treatment to treatment for my IBS. My diet included alternating between Pepto Bismol and Imodium on a daily basis. By my mid twenties, I had seen every doctor within a 100-mile radius.
Several years ago, while doing physical therapy for my IBS, the physical therapist told me all injuries, and even some diseases, have the capacity to heal on their own naturally, within a few months. If that’s the case, why had I been experiencing chronic digestive issues for 20 years? And why had I been treating the symptoms with harmful medications, if I had the capacity to get better on my own?
It never occurred to me at the time that my thoughts about my IBS were contributing to (and dare I say, mostly responsible for) my lengthy healing process.
I had a story about myself. We all have stories about ourselves. But I wasn’t aware of the story I was repeatedly telling myself. It has become such an ingrained part of my mental chatter, it was nearly impossible to notice… until I gave it some attention.
Each time I experienced a flare-up or a setback, it perpetuated this idea that “I’d never get better.” This was the title of my story: I’ll Never Get Better: A Tale of Life-Long Struggle by Heather Sarit Freudenthal.
This idea was a recurring sentence, paragraph, and chapter in my overall story. “Here we go again!” I’d tell myself any time I had a stomach ache. My brain held onto these thoughts and my body learned to expect these outcomes. It’s these thoughts, associations, and expectations which fueled my chronic pain (not some undiagnosed biological abnormality).
How I was thinking about and reacting to the pain directly affected how I physically felt. I was constantly telling myself there was something wrong with me, and shocker, that’s exactly how it felt.
To feel better, it would mean a complete overhaul of my thoughts, a story re-write. I was skeptical at first. After all, my mental story had always “proved to be true.” It felt silly to tell myself I was fine, and that there was nothing wrong with me, without first having proof. It felt even sillier to tell myself I was fine WHILE I was experiencing pain.
So I’d need to take a leap of faith.
It took quite a while to take this leap without a net, and trust that, not only could I begin to feel better by just thinking of myself as better, but that I could heal with thoughts alone, without any medication or medical treatment.
This leap of faith forced me to change how I thought about myself, and how I viewed my condition (and separate the two—I am not my IBS!). But this change didn’t happen overnight, nor is it something I take for granted will stick without continual practice. Keeping a positive frame of mind is a daily routine, and to this day, I have to avoid the pitfalls of fear, stress, and blame that can aggravate my sensitive stomach.
I had to give credit to the significance of psychosomatic illness, and redefine what I thought it meant. It does not mean, “all in your head.” Rather, psychosomatic actually means that the pain is real (a little too real, if you ask me) but the origin of the pain is emotional. That’s an important distinction. Physiological sensations and aggravations occur in the body, but they are brought on by our emotional state. Examples include:
Breaking out in a nervous sweat
Blushing due to embarrassment
Sexual arousal
PRO TIP: Retrainpain.org is a great resource for understanding the correlation between thoughts and pain.
Am I completely healed? Of course not! We are all works in progress. I still get bouts of “bathroom issues” (which is code for diarrhea), but I’m more in tune with the negative thinking, stress, and other emotional discomforts that can cause them.
Once I stopped fixating on my IBS, it became less pervasive in my life. I traded the outdated view of myself (“I’ll always have pain”) for an upgrade (“There is nothing wrong with me”). I changed my story. It’s great to know I can continue to write and re-write my story as I continued to grow.
What is your story?