Gut Feelings

IBS, intuition, and belonging

My sacred spot in Montreat. I come here to listen to my intuition.

In the first weeks of 2022, I lay on my side on an examining table at UCLA Medical Center, undergoing an outpatient test procedure so humiliating that I dare not speak its lurid name, although it involved a balloon and a kiddie toilet, and I’ll just leave it at that. After failing this test, I was given an old-lady diagnosis of “pelvic floor dyssynergia”: the muscles supporting my pelvic organs had forgotten how to function properly.

Moving your bowels is surprisingly complex. It requires nerves and muscles in your intestines synchronizing rhythmically in order to eliminate efficiently. It also requires your brain giving your colon the go-ahead to open and close the hatch at just the right times, sort of like an air traffic controller talking to a pilot.

After a lifetime spent struggling with IBS-C (irritable bowel syndrome with constipation), static had drowned out the messages between my air traffic controller and pilot. My gastroenterologist loaded me up with three medications — one of them, even with insurance, cost $149 a month — and referred me to the UCLA Digestive Health Clinic for a slew of expensive colon remediation remedies.

But I didn’t end up doing any of them. I’d lost almost all faith in gastroenterology by then — I’d had the first diagnostic test of my colon when I was 22 — and my frantic email to a journalist writing about her own IBS nightmare led me to a pelvic floor physical therapist in L.A. who changed my life. She taught me how to repair the relationship between my mind and my gut without invasive medical intervention.

Less than a year-and-a-half later, I take only half of the medications I used to, and visiting the loo is no longer traumatic. Through a combination plate of diaphragmatic breathing, exercises, a mostly plant-based diet, and an IBS self-hypnosis app, I’ve learned to listen to my body and trust that it knows what to do. Most of the time, except when I’m in acute stress, it does.

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Up to 15% of the population lives with IBS, a condition that feels like having PTSD in your intestines. Your colon chronically over- or under-reacts to stimuli, so you’re always worried about what to eat, and how close you’ll be to a bathroom should you need one right away. Because the gut and the brain are on a continuum — what’s going on in your innards affects your moods — healing from IBS has also required managing my anxiety, and on a deeper level, mending my relationship with myself that had been fractured due to adoption.

The traditional narratives about adoption — that love and nurture override nature, that a child adopted as an infant won’t experience trauma — are simply not true. When you hear these gaslight-y messages growing up — none of which make sense because you’ve felt that something was wrong as long as you can remember — you start to think that you’re crazy or ungrateful or just plain difficult. Because you want to fit in, you decide maybe you shouldn’t listen to yourself. And, after years of quashing your intuition, whatever sense of self you had is fragmented. You slice off the parts that you wrongly believe are bad, try to pretend they don’t exist, and then suture yourself up as best you can.

Of course, you don’t have to be adopted to suffer from brokenness. Walk into any 12-step meeting and you’ll find a room full of people with the same condition. Likewise for those burying their faces in a magazine in a therapist’s waiting room, disassociating in front of a smartphone, or curating their best lives on social media while privately dying inside. Look at how splintered our country is — books are being banned, children and teachers are being gunned down in schools, non-white, non-straight folks are targeted by bigots, working-class white men struggle for a toehold — and then tell me this chaotic landscape isn’t a metaphor for a body at war with itself.

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” - Ernest Hemingway

In January 2022, when IBS rendered me so debilitated that I could barely leave my home, I made the radical decision to think of my body as a messenger, and not as an opponent. What was my chronically spasming colon trying to tell me? The more I listened, the more I understood that the trouble in my innards was interwoven with the intergenerational trauma that led to my adoption. If I ever was going to heal my body, I decided, I’d also have to mend not only my anxious mind, but also my psychic homesickness.

But how? I’d done therapy, 12-step programs, and had a toolbox full of cognitive and mindfulness calm-down strategies. All of these interventions had been essential, yet still they were not enough. I realized I had to find ways to feel more connected — to my genetic legacy, to the spirits of my adoptive parents, and to the earth.

I took this photo while lying on my favorite rock in Montreat. When you look at the sky here — “Carolina Blue” — you feel like you’re ascending to another realm.

Every segment of my journey has begun with listening to my intuition. A New York Times book review lead me to Maud Newton’s memoir Ancestor Trouble, about her own intergenerational trauma. That led me to taking her class, Writing About Ancestor Trouble, which led me to working with an Ancestral Healing practitioner, which led me, most recently, to Land, Respect, and Belonging, a workshop on our sacred responsibility to the earth and “our non-human kin.”

The teacher, Daniel Foor, facilitated a Zoom session for over 200 participants from around the world. Most of them, like me, were “mature” individuals, and the ones who spoke seemed to be there to heal their own trauma as well as to participate in cultural healing. The central questions Foor asked us to consider were:

• What is my responsibility to the land I’m on?

• How does it impact me emotionally, physically, and spiritually?

• What are my conditions for feeling at home, and who’s already there when I arrive?

If you listen to people who are intentional in their relationship to culture and the earth, you’ll notice that they often reference the original inhabitants of the place where they reside — for instance, in western North Carolina, I live on land that belonged to the Cherokee people — and where their ancestors came from. In my case, that’s mainly Italy and Germany on my birthparents’ side, and Scotland, England, and France on my adoptive parents’ side.

While some might feel that this lengthy introduction smacks of performative virtue-signaling, Foor argues that belonging is earned by being culturally skillful. Those of us who don’t live from a felt sense of belonging can change through mindful participation in a group and in our relationship to the land that we live on. My note from the workshop reads:

“Connecting to the waters, earth, and trees, and to the ‘old wise powers’ there, strengthens our relationship with the ancestors so we have their backing and learn how to stay well.”

Banta Whitner, the Black Mountain therapist who facilitates my Ancestral Lineage Repair work, has helped me release the burdens I carried from ancestors who are not “vibrantly well,” and connect with “The Well Ones” who give me messages during sessions. And, no, I haven’t gone completely around the bend. If you’ve ever been to a hypnotherapist, or been deeply engaged during a meditation practice, or transcendently moved by a sermon in a church or temple, those experiences are akin to what it feels like connecting with ancestors you’ve never met. You’re conscious, but you’re also beckoning your subconscious. You understand something intellectually, but you also feel it in your body. It’s a bit like having a foot in two worlds.

Banta takes copious session notes and sends them to me afterwards, so I remember what I said during my trance-like state. Last time we met, the trusted powers told me to keep writing, to connect with kind people (especially supportive, wise women), to ignore my intrusive, critical self-talk, and to spend more time walking in nature.

So I have been doing all of those things. Last Sunday, I hiked Craggy Pinnacle with a new friend. A single woman of a certain age like me, she also moved to the Asheville area recently and is in the healing community. The wind blew cold and damp as we trod the twisty dirt path. Just one month away from rhododendron season, when purple blossoms blanket the mountainsides, the barren terrain showed no signs of spring. The trees, gnarled and ancient, were still bare.

As we stood at the pinnacle overlooking three different valleys, I noticed how relaxed my abdomen felt, how relieved I was not to be in pain. Then, washing over me, came a wave of gratitude for the people along my path who helped me heal. They taught me how to listen to my gut feelings. And those feelings led me home.

Craggy Pinnacle

“Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything, because it’s all written there.” - Brene Brown