3 valuable lessons I learned from IBS

   04/02/2025
Lessons I learned from IBS

I learned SO much from IBS.

I used to think that my IBS was just this challenging set of symptoms I had to get rid of. Little did I know that researching IBS would help me understand myself, my health – and how to take charge of my wellbeing.

Here are 3 valuable lessons I learned from IBS:

#1 My body is here to help, not hinder

Sick and tired of IBS

As a child had seen ill health around me. People were scared of health problems, and you could die from them.

To cope with that, in my family we tended to ignore sickness.

I saw my parents going to work when they were sick. And I went to school when I was sick. If I got really sick we went to see a doctor.

The general message was ignore your physical state and carry on.

So I pushed my body away. I ignored it. And cursed it if I didn’t feel good. (Which was often, as I started reacting to food.)

Through IBS I learned that my body is a precious source of wisdom. It expresses my thoughts, my emotions and my desires. It is there to support me in everything I want to be, experience or achieve.

From my IBS I learned that “health problems” are signals showing me imbalance. And I discovered that much of the imbalance in my body is revealing emotional pain.

#2 Emotional pain needs expression

IBS emotional pain

By researching and experimenting with IBS, I learned that the symptoms I was experiencing had a great deal to do with my emotions.

I didn’t realise that I had learnt to suppress many of my emotions and fit nicely into a box.

As a child I had experienced a great deal of shaming. I didn’t know what to do with that. I thought it was a part of me, that I wasn’t enough.

SO I kept that feeling well hidden. Until as a young adult IBS suddenly started up. That shame was expressing itself as embarrassing IBS symptoms!

#3 It is healthy to feel

what I learned from IBS: feel emotion

Through recovering from IBS I learned that it was actualy safe to feel. In fact, we are meant to feel and let the emotions pass through us, like ripples.

When we don’t, we can back up those feelings in our system. That’s when certain feelings can feel like a daunting, huge wave. And we push them away even more.

My feelings were telling me what I had “learnt” from past situations. They were information about my perception of a situation.

I had assumed it was the situation or person creating the difficult feelings.

I didn’t know that it was the memory of difficult feelings that was being triggered. And that it could be express itself as physical symptoms.

So I decided to learn NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and how to change perceptions. And went on to discover other, faster ways of changing perception.

When you are no longer scared of feeling, you can go right to the feeling itself and acknowledge it. Just take the information, and let go of the energy.

While this can feel uncomfortable, there is huge payoff. You let go of being reactive. Situations and people don’t trigger you as they used to. And your IBS symptoms gently lose their grip.

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