A PC game actually trained me to solve my IBS.
Before we had children, my husband and I would spend the dark autumn and winter evenings playing a game.
It was a brilliant strategy game for PC called Timelapse.
The game was based around the great civilisations: the Egyptians, the Incas, even the lost city of Atlantis.
What the game taught me
To move forward in the game you had to be patient, look around you, observe, pay attention to detail, and experiment. And look for patterns to find how to open doors.
You had to be willing to try and fail. And try again and again until you cracked it.
And you had to be willing to accept that there was more than just meets the eye. And dig for solutions!
The game took us MANY months to complete, but I loved it!
And after many hours of this fun and frustrating training I found it exhilarating finding which lever here opened a door somewhere over there, out of sight.
Sometimes those doors opened a path into a totally new world of discovery.
How the game helped me solve my IBS
Little did I know it back then, but these are the very qualities I needed to solve my IBS:
Patience, observation, attention to detail (patterns) and experimentation.
When I hit a medical wall and my symptoms got really bad, my mind got to work on looking outside the obvious and linking together research in other areas.
I felt the urge to look further than classic mechanical approach of digestion, diets and meds that had not been working for me. It turns out that this is what is called a holistic approach.
I came across work on pressure points, OCD, behavioural psychology, energy and quantum physics.
And I tried to see what happened when I linked them together and pulled this lever over here.
Unlike in the PC game, there were no walkthroughs available when I got stuck.
However by persisting I actually stumbled across the solutions I needed to solve my IBS, and release it for good. I write about all of these on this blog.
May they shed light on your IBS journey.
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