Healing Gut Disorders Through the Nervous System (or How I Ate My First Donut in 15 Years)

Watch the video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CB_ru3vhfH4/

In 2020, I ate my first donut in about 15 years. It was such a joy it brought tears to my eyes. And then fits of hysterical laughter. I had been recovering from SIBO, which is an intestinal disorder that I’d had since I was about 14. But no one knew what SIBO was at the time. My doctors couldn’t help me. Even a gastroenterologist didn’t have anything useful to say. It took some deep Googling late into the night in incognito mode to find out that my problems could be due to SIBO.

With the help of my naturopath (Dr. Kristen Brown), herbal supplements, and about two years of pretty intensive diet modification, my gut is about 90 percent improved. I’m still sensitive and certainly careful, but I no longer have any food intolerances and gluten is a part of my daily life. It still thrills me that I can go into a donut shop and order anything I want. 

Physical treatment mattered, for me. The SIBO-specific diet (https://www.siboinfo.com/diet.html) was a revelation. But I don’t think the treatment would have worked as well as it did without the work I had also been doing on healing my nervous system. 

I had been through some things in my life up to this point, including a sexual assault. I hadn’t been sleeping well in a long time and was plagued with nightmares almost every night. I was hyper vigilant, never feeling completely safe or calm, and my gut couldn’t fully heal until I could right the ship with a combination of practices including yoga, therapy, meditation, CBT, energy work, and so on (I tried a lot of things, you guys).

Even without the trauma, it’s not surprising that my nervous system was dysregulated. Most of our nervous systems are. We live in an era with far too much information, and, unless we put up very specific boundaries around it, the news can access us at any time of the day or night with terrifying headlines, images, and even video. Many of us don’t even realize we have vicarious trauma simply from watching the news. Social media adds its own pressures, and many of us suffer under capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, or all of the above. Not to mention intergenerational and personal trauma. Or, for that matter, a global pandemic that has cut us off from many of the things that used to help us feel normal. It’s no wonder we feel sick.

Women and people with female anatomy and/or hormones are said to suffer from chronic gut issues like IBS and Crohn’s disease more often than men (https://gi.org/topics/common-gi-problems-in-women/). This is partly physiological, but the more researchers look into these chronic conditions, the clearer it becomes that the nervous system and the gut-brain connection play a major role. Women and feminine people also tend to experience more violence, less security, make less money, and feel less powerful in their day to day lives. People who are raised to be women also tend to learn that they are supposed to take care of others at the expense of themselves. Some of us have learned to swallow our emotions rather than express them. To stuff down our needs rather than insist they get met. Many of us (including me) have a history of disordered eating. It makes sense: we’re trying to digest way more than food. 

That’s not to say, of course, that these conditions are all in our heads. They are not. There are medications and treatments that can really help with the physiological aspects of these chronic gut problems. But these issues might turn out to be symptoms of an imbalance of the nervous system rather than a root cause. 

The good news is that there is a lot we can do to help adjust the dials on the relationship between the nervous system and gut function. Gut directed hypnotherapy is a treatment that is getting more attention lately because it may be as effective as the FODMAP diet for treating irritable bowel syndrome (https://badgut.org/information-centre/a-z-digestive-topics/ibs-and-hypnosis-2/). 

We often like to think of our bodies and our minds as separate, but they aren’t—not really. In some ways, our bodies manifest what we’re experiencing in our minds. In the moment, it can be hard to tell if we’ve got anxiety, food poisoning, a heart attack, or, you know, COVID—the symptoms can be so similar! When we are in a habit of being stressed all the time, it can also start to seem normal to feel sick all the time, too. 

But that means that we can address gut issues not only with medications and other physical treatments, but by repatterning how the nervous system behaves within the gut. Hypnotherapy is one way to do this, and so is energy work (for the record, in my experience, hypnotherapy is energy work, it just has a more official name). These practices help to access the parts of your brain that are non-rational. This is important because the non-rational parts are the parts that are deciding whether or not you are safe or in danger. You know when you’re feeling nervous and you tell yourself it’s gonna be fine? And it doesn’t work at all, like even a little bit? That’s because it’s not your logical brain that is processing a threat. It’s your body. Energy work, meditation, visualization, and hypnotherapy can bypass your logical brain and help bring your body into a safe, calm present moment, thus reducing your symptoms.  

These practices work best when you feel safe and comfortable. A lot of it you can do at home, such as with an app-directed hypnotherapy program, guided meditations, or in a disciplined routine designed to help you calm your enteric nervous system. But in my experience, a guide or sacred witness that you trust can be incredibly helpful in allowing us to find the specific root of our own nervous system misfires and tap into the wisdom of the body to return to balance. However you’d like to approach it, addressing the nervous system alongside medications and treatments for your gut are likely to help you meet a donut one day that you won’t have to think twice about enjoying. 

If you have gut issues and would like to try talking to your nervous system about it, I may be able to help! Set up a complimentary discovery call with me here: https://www.juliepeters.ca/book

Image by Andi McLeish