IBS

I felt initially that I should write this piece in the style of those websites usually from the USA as a sort of FAQ’s.

The first question would be,

1. Can Hypnotherapy help cure IBS? - Depends ...

2. Can gut-directed therapy work for me? - Don’t know

Then it became obvious pretty quickly that this format wasn’t going to get me very far.

My Experience

Some of the people I’ve helped who have had IBS came to see me with other issues that they wanted to deal with and somewhere along the way their IBS went away.

One person who had this complaint for years came to see me specifically to deal with IBS simply because my clinic was handier than the one doing “gut-directed hypnotherapy,” down the road. We never really got around to “gut-directed” therapy but for the first time in their life this person spoke at length about how she and her sister used to sit on the stairs night after night throughout their childhood as their dad abused her mother. We talked about how that felt; the helplessness, the need to keep all their emotions under wraps and go along with the parents’ desire to keep up the front that all was fine. The father was, as you might expect, a pillar of the local community, a friend to all and never abused his children directly in any way.

When this person asked, “And is all this related to the IBS I’ve had all these years?" I could only answer that, at that point, I didn’t know. The IBS went away.

OK, so what did that suggest to me?

Well, it confirmed my own experience that I and many, many people experience fear as a physical “gut-wrenching,” experience. It also suggested to me that the way in which we learn to manage our emotions as children can be locked in and become the default response for the rest of our lives - no matter how different our adult lives are from our childhoods; no matter how autonomous, successful and confident we become in our adult roles, no matter how courageous and fearless we become on behalf of others. There are circumstances that somehow manage to press the right combination of buttons and instantly we fall back on our default response.

As I write this I’m aware that George Orwell, Alice Miller and Martin Seligman have pinned some of this down before ever I did. And if I was better read I’m confident that there was someone in a toga who had also written something on these lines - so nothing too insightful there.

Alas, I’m also confident that when next someone shows up at my office with similar symptoms and with a similar story they may find a different way of expressing their emotions or go away with their IBS unchanged in any way.

In a similar way to the person who came with IBS, a lady I got to know very well suffered cruelly from PMT. Her GP had referred her to a variety of specialists and tried a whole Pharmacy of medicaments. She felt trapped in a marriage that restricted her from perusing her dreams and aspirations. On reflection, I’m not sure what combination of circumstances conspired to give her the strength to bail out of the marriage, leave her domineering husband and set up home with her physically handicapped son but once she did the PMS went away. (If “handicapped,” hasn’t made a comeback- my apologies)

So, what does that tell us?

I’m not sure, other than that we are more than machines; more than a collection of tissue, guts and hormones. We are all that and more. We are social animals with a constellation of emotions. We are learning animals that come up with strategies that “work;” strategies we stick with or fall back on even when the context that we adapted to, sometimes decades ago, has gone forever. There’s often a wee voice at the back somewhere saying, “I but you never know.”

So, we, you, I and society in general have to somehow accept that all talking therapies are like setting off on a journey. Accept also that some companions are more compatible than others and some journeys are better with this companion than that one. That you may be better off delaying setting off and that sometimes delay can be awful. Sometimes you can feel you’re getting lost. And for sure sometimes your companion can feel the same but that’s OK - you have a companion. Whoops, this was just going to be about IBS.

Feel free to extend this metaphor before I wander into writing a book titled, “Find a friend, Get yer boots on and see where it takes you,” with the subtitle, “You don’t have to climb Everest but looking back from the hill just over there might be good”

I’ll post news on this site when it’s published