I became a health coach because doctors couldn’t help and told me I could only manage symptoms with medication or reducing stress (but how??). Meanwhile my symptoms kept getting worse.
Gut healing is NOT easy. Many struggle for years, trying many things, spending thousands, and slowly losing hope. But it is doable, because both myself and some of my clients have defied their prognosis and recovered fully.
The people still struggling are missing core principles that matter more than any protocol, supplement, or diet ever could.
Below are the three principles that make all the difference, because they help you focus on what really works.
Principle 1: Information Doesn’t Heal the Gut
You need MORE than information to heal.
Most people constantly research or search for the next test, expert, or protocol. Education matters, but past a certain point, more information creates confusion, not clarity.
There is very little consensus in the gut health world. Everyone is confident their way is the only way. It may work for a small percentage, but everyone else is left discouraged.
What’s missing isn’t more knowledge. It’s connection.
Most people with chronic gut issues live almost entirely in their minds.
Disconnecting from the body helps people survive and get through life when the body doesn’t feel like a safe place anymore. The body is where pain, symptoms, emotions, trauma, and overwhelm live. For the sake of surviving, it makes sense to distance yourself from your body. But it’s not great for healing.
Gut healing requires some bodily connection. Learning to listen again instead of overriding, worrying about, or trying to control the body.
The best way to connect to the body is through movement and your senses. I show how to do this for your nervous system in my free nervous system guide.
Principle 2: Healing Is Experiential
Healing doesn’t happen through insight alone. It happens through experience in the body.
If an overwhelming event knocked the nervous system out of whack and triggered a stress response that won’t end, we can’t talk our way out of it.
This is where talk therapy often falls short. It can bring understanding, but not completion.
The body doesn’t resolve trauma, overwhelm or find balance through understanding or explanation alone. These resolves through felt experience.
To work with felt experiences safely, without analyzing or reliving what happened, I use hypnosis.
Hypnosis is a progressive relaxation that slows brainwaves and puts the conscious mind to “sleep”.
When the conscious mind is quiet there is direct access to body intelligence and the subconscious. Most emotions, perception, habits, memories and beliefs are stored in the subconscious.
Because it’s subconscious, we don’t know or can’t feel what’s there.
Unfinished experiences (unresolved stress or trauma) or unfelt emotions are stored subconsciously and hypnosis allows the nervous system to complete a response that was never finished.
Here are other ways to do this aside from hypnosis (that’s just the modality that I use)
- EMDR
- Somatic experiencing
- Breath work (caution for freeze types)
- Family constellation therapy or parts work
What they share is helping people access primary emotions, or emotions that live in the body and are stored in the subconscious.
Many people stay stuck in secondary emotions by talking or thinking about what happened.
When we discuss, analyze or ruminate about difficult past events it reinforces secondary emotions from revisiting the experience, but doesn’t release primary emotions.
Even if we cry when talking about past events, we’re reacting to our own story about what happened, not feeling the emotion in our body.
With each retelling the story solidifies in our mind but is not experienced and released through the body. This distance from feeling protects us from tough emotions, but also keeps the emotion and nervous system stuck. When the nervous system is stuck, it can’t regulate.
Talking rarely releases the stored physical charge we are carrying. We need to feel the primary emotion to resolve it and let it go.
Enough unresolved primary emotions keep the nervous system in survival/stress/freeze, which can lead to tension, fatigue, digestive issues, anxiety, anger, brain fog or depression.
Journaling, meditating, or affirmations are helpful for the mind, which can help support the body. But without the physical experience, it’s hard to release what bogs our nervous system down.
Experiencing and releasing stuck emotions from the nervous system is one of the most powerful healing interventions we can do.
Principle 3: Making the Subconscious Conscious
The answers for healing are inside us and so are the blocks to healing.
Now you understand how the subconscious stores emotions, beliefs, identities and programming we’re not aware of. This is why it’s challenging to fix what we don’t see.
I wrote a Substack post that dives deeper into how to make the subconscious conscious and you can read it here.
Interventions like transformational coaching, self-inquiry and somatic work can help subconscious patterns surface.
As we see and experience the beliefs, identities, and survival strategies that once protected us, but now keep us stuck and sick, we can begin to rewire them.
Most people live their lives from subconscious programming, not free will. This makes change hard, even when we want it. But free will comes with more awareness and connection to the old strategies and what you want to do instead.
Some subconscious programming can be inherited from family but most comes from early childhood experiences (whether we remember them or not, because our body never forgets). What happened to you as a baby can still affect your nervous system now.
We fiercely protect our subconscious programming because it feels safe and familiar, even when it causes us pain. Change can feel threatening when we swap the familiar with something new and unknown. Most self sabotage is subconscious. We often don’t realize we’re defending old patterns (even painful ones).
We are built to resist change, but still have capacity to change. That is the beauty of being human. You can live from programming and then one day wake up. When we see what we’re doing, we have the choice to choose something different.
Making the subconscious conscious is bringing clarity and connection to your subconscious programming, so you can make deep and lasting changes that seemed impossible before.
“Until you make the subconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.
Carl Jung
The Best Way to Heal
Getting out of our mind & connecting to our body (embodiment), feeling primary emotions, and making the subconscious conscious are key principles most people miss.
Food, supplements, or protocols can be supportive but they won’t override a nervous system stuck in stress, survival, freeze and disconnection.
Rebuilding trust with our body, rewire subconscious patterns and allowing the nervous system to experience completion is what gets us UNSTUCK.
When you understand AND experience these principles for healing you realize what’s been missing and suddenly healing becomes possible.
If this resonated with you but you don’t know where to start, get in touch at angelaprivin@yahoo.com to get the support to heal at the root, body and mind.
