How I Healed My IBS

It all started with an injury and a bad stomach..

At 16 years old, I was playing football semi professionally and I severely injured my right knee. To go from playing football 5 times a week to barely being able to walk, was extremely challenging.  I couldn’t play for 6 months to a year.

I was a relaxed kind of guy (on the surface), so I didn’t realise how much being injured bothered me.

Around the same time my stomach started acting up, cramps, indigestion, gas, constipation.. to name a few. I was going through it all. Anyone who consistently visits the doctor with a bad stomach, knows the protocols.

They prod your stomach, you get tests done, they find nothing wrong.. so they call it IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). Otherwise known as,

‘We have no idea what is wrong with your stomach, we think maybe you’re making it up.. good luck!’

I had to take my health into my own hands..

I found relief in Movement and Diet Changes..

As part of my knee recovery, many people suggested I try yoga and pilates. Learning to move in unison with the breath is humbling and extremely rewarding. I didn’t realise how little I knew about my body, until I started focusing on my breath. Of course my knee got better, and I had found a new movement addiction.

If you had typed in ‘IBS relief’ into Google in the early 2000s, it was all about new superfoods and diets. I followed the advice of different ‘nutrition gurus’, made some changes and things improved. And like most IBS sufferers, I started telling everyone that my diet was the key to recovery!

With my new movement and diet changes, I thought I’d figured it out.

Of course, I had not figured anything out and more symptoms were to come..

It stopped ‘working’ and I discovered my emotional world..

For 10+ years, I spent my life exploring different movement practices and changing my diet when necessary. If my stomach acted up, I simply changed what I was eating and it would get better.

Until it stopped working…

I was going through a break up with a long term girlfriend and I hadn’t been enjoying my career for a long time. Around the same time, my stomach started getting bad. But this time no matter what changes I made to my diet and lifestyle, my stomach stayed bad.

Little did I know, my IBS symptoms were correlated to the stress in my life.

I did research and learnt about TMS, John Sarno and other pain specialists

In between trips to the gastroenterologists, acupuncturists and nutritionists, I was constantly doing research online on how other people healed their IBS.

Eventually, I found videos about people healing their chronic back pain, praising a doctor named John Sarno and his TMS approach. I looked him up and found a whole industry of pain specialists helping people heal their chronic pain, IBS being a main symptom.

I read all of the books, watched the lectures, listened to the podcasts and most importantly I did the work.

Emotional unpacking and new beliefs

The main focus in any pain sufferers journey to full recovery, is a fundamental shift in beliefs on how pain is being created in their body.

For me, it was the realisation that even though the pain was real, there was nothing physically wrong with my stomach. My gut flora and diet were perfectly fine, so my brain was creating pain signals for different reasons.

And it turns out those reasons were more about current day stress, adverse childhood experiences and certain personality traits I had.

Pain is created in the brain, and science is showing that the same areas of the brain light up whether the pain is emotional or physical. If like me, you never fully processed emotions from your past, or presently, your brain creates physical pain to protect you from feeling emotions you deem too harmful to feel.

Courage, trust and time

So I started doing the emotional unpacking and changed my beliefs on why I was feeling pain.

I worked with pain specialists to fully understand the parts of my personality which were perpetuating my pain. And I was given daily tools to effectively change my reaction to pain.

All there was left for me to do, was be courageous and trust that in time the pain would heal.

And it did!

You can also fully heal, not just manage, your IBS

If like me, you have been diagnosed with IBS, and can’t seem to find the cause. Then this work is for you.

If you’re ready to fully heal from IBS, and you’d like support, then visit my IBS page. Click the link below to discover a more detailed outline of the approach I undertake to heal IBS.