Instead of viewing the universe as a confusing, scary place, try seeing the universe like a social media algorithm.

Defining one’s spirituality isn’t always easy. If we are raised in a religious context, the rules are laid out and all the answers are provided for us, usually by a book or an authority figure who can tell us why there’s suffering in the world and why bad things happen to good people. Believing in something outside of those dominant narratives can be a bit more challenging—we still want to know why horrible things happen, why praying doesn’t always get us what we want, and why it hurts so much to be a human being so much of the time.

Spirituality and therapy have been intertwined since before psychotherapy became a respected field of study. Explore some of the complexities at the intersection of spiritual life and therapy.

Since psychotherapy was essentially invented by Sigmund Freud in the 1900s, the therapeutic industry has tried to present itself as hard science; as something that can be studied and that can produce predictable results. This idea has been touch and go, with some therapies showing great promise in scientific settings, and others falling flat.

These beliefs also give us a sense of control over our lives. When bad things happen to good people—or, specifically, when we ourselves align with goodness and bad things happen anyway—we’re left adrift, feeling abandoned by our gods. Many of us have no choice but to blame ourselves for tragedies. “If only” and “what if” haunt our day-to-day lives. We can’t find a good reason for why something bad happened, so we start to believe we must be bad in some deep, unchangeable way; that we must have deserved this pain. What else could possibly explain it?

For many people with IBS, especially people with childhood trauma, one of the strategies we’ve used to survive what is happening in our lives is to try to digest too much: to take on other people’s energy, to swallow our own feelings, to eat our needs and boundaries so we can get through the day.