During Covid I worked with a sweet client who lost their soul dog a short while prior to developing digestive issues such as reflux and bloating. There were other digestive symptoms also, but the reflux and bloating were most disruptive and caused anxiety and despair.
We ran a GI Map and SIBO test and found that h. pylori and SIBO were present. According to the principles of functional medicine, h. pylori and SIBO were the “root cause” of the digestive symptoms.
I used all the tools I knew of to help her find relief. We did a natural h. pylori protocol, followed by a SIBO protocol. We made dietary changes to help reduce the reflux and bloat.
While there was a slight improvement during the h. pylori protocol, there was no significant resolution after both protocols were completed. I typically highlight client success stories that respond well to testing, supplements, dietary change and gut repair.
But not everyone gets better with this approach. I think it’s important to try the basics first. But if they don’t work, it’s important to dig and try something deeper instead of repeating the same version of an approach that did not work.
If the real root cause is repression of intense emotions, you can’t solve it with diet and supplements.
As an intuitive and empathic healing professional, I knew down deep in my bones that root cause of my client’s digestive issues was the inability to emotionally process the loss of her dog.
I know this because of my own relationship with my dog and my sensitivity. My emotional and physical body are so closely linked that my intense emotional pain is almost always felt physically, in my stomach and my upper chest.
I understood the enormity of the loss. Being cut off from a dependable source of unconditional love and support can cause devastating and overwhelming grief. Even more so than the loss of a human family member.
Dogs help regulate our limbic system, which supports our fear and stress response. The love we share with our animals are deep, pure, innocent, uncomplicated, and unconditional. And could cause trauma triggers of abandonment.
When emotions are too big and overwhelming to cope and we hide them away in our body, we call it trauma. And trauma can lead to an unregulated nervous system, causing it to malfunction prevent healing of conditions like SIBO and h. pylori. Both of these bacterial overgrowths are dependent on immune and nervous system resilience to resolved. Stuck or repressed emotions can weaken the function of both systems.
Traumatic feelings of abandonment, loss of control, loneliness and grief can be too much to process, so we have the ability to repress difficult memories and emotions. We freeze them in the body through a set of muscular tensions and contractions, so we don’t have to feel them.
We save ourselves from experiencing overwhelming pain or suffering in the moment. The problem with this is that our bodies hold onto the emotions, staying tight and contracted, to do so. This can impact our breathing, digestion and nervous system function.
When we don’t breath well, digest well or have a healthy nervous system, it’s a recipe for developing digestive issues labeled that can be labeled as IBS. Then we think something is wrong with us but we don’t know what.
The only way to help someone with this particular root cause of digestive issues is to help them recognizing and processing their feelings.
Many people are resistant to this. There are many reasons why. Repressed emotions are well hidden, most people don’t know they are they. They don’t believe what they can’t feel or see.
There is also such a strong bias towards treating symptoms with medicines. Herbs are just a natural way to do this. Diet and supplements are far easier and less painful than emotional work.
And as someone who has done plenty of emotional work, I can tell you that you get the same detox and die off symptoms as doing an herbal or antimicrobial protocol. Pretty wild.
Emotional work takes bravery and resolve. It is not easy. We all want to get as far away from pain as possible and the idea that moving towards it to release it is extremely foreign. Just not a popularly recognized idea in our quick fix culture. And people build fortunes on selling us quick fixes that never work, chipping away at our confidence that healing is even possible.
It is if you are open to doing whatever it takes. Even if it’s hard. Physical symptoms can slowly resolve as the grief or stuck emotion is slowly felt and metabolized in the body in small and manageable doses. With grief, sometime all it takes is time.
I took note of this case as what can happen when you don’t metabolize your grief. When it came my turn to experience the grief of losing my beloved dog, I promised myself that I would let myself feel it all. Because I did not want the physical complication.
The impact of stuck emotions
I have had many clients who suffered from stuck emotion. Some of them I was able to help with hypnosis and other emotional work.
Those who were open to more than just supplements, protocols, testing and diets. Those who wanted to work deeply got better with minimal protocol intervention. Some people just wanted to stick to the supplements and protocols and diets because that felt safe. I never judge. I always meet people where they are at, explaining and offering suggestions but I never push. People don’t heal until they are ready.
Two weeks ago I put my beloved 17 year old pup to sleep. He was healthy until the last few months when lymphatic cancer started to devour his tiny body.
The experience of watching him decline was beyond stressful. At the time I was working on strengthening my adrenals and supporting my thyroid with mineral balancing.
The stress of my loss incredibly high. And I realized how strong I was. My anxious mind never imagine I could survive watching him decline, deciding to let him go and saying goodbye. But I did.
I went in and out of shock and numbness. I lost my appetite and ability to sleep. The first week I followed every instinct I had about what I needed in every moment. Moving. Resting. Connecting. Allowing everything. I needed to be outside a lot. I treated myself with so much self compassion. And asking the universe for help and support. And it delivered. I survived without any major crash of any body systems.
I know that emotional suffering can be expressed physically so tried not to bury the pain. I got help from friends, therapists and my chi gong teacher. I accepted any support I was offered. I stopped pushing myself and trying to control things. I allowed my heart to hurt. To break down in public. I traveled. I rode my bike. I gave generously to clients. I talked to my beloved Mishka, wherever he was…. I accepted the fatigue I felt without panic of judgement.
As I allowed the tears to flow, my body released chemicals to numb the pain. The crying fits would be followed by peaceful breaks from the suffering. It amazed me that my body had all these built in protections to make the grieving process bearable. Bodies are built to grieve. It will not destroy us if we go with the waves of emotion without resisting.
It felt like I may never be happy or whole again, but instead of forecasting the future, I noticed how my experience changed moment to moment, sometimes feeling bad and other times ok, normal even. And then bad again and then deeply, deeply appreciative of kindness or beauty.
Health is flow. Allowing emotions to flow. Just like blood, lymph and energy needs to flow.
Our response to our emotions
Grief is a difficult response to loss and can come from losing anything you value: a career/job, sense of belonging, your youth, a relationship or your self confidence.
We try to find ways to bypass pain. We distract with food, alcohol, binge watching, scrolling, over exercising, over working, sleeping too much, drugs, alcohol, sex, porn or anti-depressants. The list goes on.
Disassociation and emotional repression is one of the most common strategies, done subconsciously, to avoid emotional pain. Because it happens subconsciously, we are protected and shielded from it. Not even knowing that we’re doing it, that any emotion is lodged inside.
Deeply repressed emotions can manifest as numbness, depression, anxiety, irritation, apathy, physical pain or digestive issues.
Physical pain can be an unpleasant distraction, yet still a distraction from feeling intense grief, guilt or shame. As we focus on fixing the physical symptoms.
How emotions trigger gut symptomsM
After working with many clients, I suspect that symptoms like reflux can be, in part, caused by repressed emotions struggling to come to the surface to be felt.
Constipation may point to an inability to let go, holding on tightly to something that can’t be processed or accepted. And diarrhea can point to feeling out of control and powerless.
Of course, there can be medical reasons behind these symptoms. But when all the typical interventions don’t work, it may be time to explore emotional and nervous system root causes.
Some of my clients have healed completely without medications, herbs or any dietary change. Not because the root cause was “in their head” but because they addressed the stored emotion in their body. Those emotions were like a clog a in pipe that was finally cleared and things flowed like they were designed to.
Emotions are created in the physical body and stored in the physical body.
While emotions can lead to thoughts, perceptions or experiences, they are not mental. Emotions need to be felt, experienced in all their body sensations to be released. And often they don’t last for more than 90 seconds, if fully felt.
After an uncomfortable 90 seconds, they tend to dissipate.
Conversely, clamping down on emotions by physically repressing them leaves them in the body, creating tension, tightness and contraction until they are felt and released.
It’s not something we are familiar with because it’s not something we are taught. But it is often a root cause of an unregulated nervous system. You may not feel the emotions or the stress, but it is still effecting how your body functions.
How do you measure this hidden tension and emotional repression? That hair tissue mineral analysis test reveals emotional stress and holding patterns by measuring mineral patterns. Minerals are depleted with lots of hidden stress, tension and emotional dysregulation.
How to work with buried and repressed emotion
How do you keep deeply buried, subconscious emotions from hijacking your health?
Start with open curiosity. Writing about what was going on in your life 3 to 12 months before symptoms started. As you write, notice what emotions come up. Or notice where in your body you are holding tension.
The story of what happened is not important. It’s how you feel when you tell the story or think about the events that led up to your health issues.
Hypnosis is another way to access subconscious emotions and release them in a safe and supported way. I studied hypnosis because of its ability to connect to emotions we are not even aware of. It can provide breakthroughs when you are stuck.
To sum up: while digestive issues are NOT just in your head, they could be exacerbated by anxious reactions to deeply buried emotions, tucked “under the rug” for safe keeping.
You may run into resistance when you start down this healing path. Your subconscious mind is protecting you from experiencing pain in the moment, but at the expense of your physical and mental wellbeing in the future.
Practicing preventative emotional medicine
It is our deepest pain that shapes who we are, strengthening our capacity to feel, to accept, to learn, to grow. Whether we wanted it or not, it is always an opportunity to move forward, to heal deeper and to find the gratitude for the support in our lives. You can’t feel deep joy if you are unwilling to feel deep pain.
This may be one of my heaviest and most intense posts. And if you find this of interest there is probably something here for you to explore.
I want to end this post with tribute to my amazingly talented Mishka, who had the cutest howl and we captured it in a song we recorded with good friends.
Dogs show us what life would be like if we wore our emotions on our sleeves. And that joy and connection is a result of feeling all our feelings, not matter how yucky some of them are.
I hope you enjoy the song and the message behind it. You have to feel it to heal it.
o
Angela Privin is proof that IBS is NOT an incurable disease, but a cry for help from a gut out of balance. When the body AND mind are complaining, it’s an opportunity to examine what’s not working and change it. After solving her own IBS mystery almost two decades ago, Angela became as a health coach to help others. Angela uses root cause medicine protocols personalized to the individual to solve each IBS mystery. Her tools are lab testing, dietary changes, supplementation, subconscious mind work and nervous system rebalancing . Learn more here.