Today, I want to take you back to where my IBS story really began. It wasn’t just about stomach pain, bloating, or food sensitivities — though all of that came later. For me, it started with one of the most transformational — and most traumatic — experiences of my life, which was the birth of my son in 2017.
I want to tell you this story because I believe it illustrates how sometimes the origins of our IBS can be hidden in clear day because we don’t quite understand what IBS and why it starts in the first place. The personal story I’m going to tell you today is meant to serve as a mirror, so you can look back and potentially trace the roots of your IBS.
Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at healingheribs.com/34.
How My IBS Started
Before we get into it the rest of today’s episode I want to make sure that you all knew about an incredible free resource for you that you can download from my website: www.healingheribs.com. You can also access that through the show notes of today’s episode. The resource is a free download called—4 Steps to Master IBS Triggers, Zap Flareups, Find Peace and Get Your Life Back! It’s a great overview of my personal approach to healing and I highly recommend you download it if you need an initial roadmap to healing.
My son was born in 2017 and soon after his first birthday, IBS came slamming into my life just when I was hoping to get some relief and recovery. The IBS diagnosis and symptoms felt so random and out of the blue and I couldn’t make sense of why this was happening to me at such a delicate time in my life.
So today I want to tell you this story, this lead up to my IBS diagnosis so that you can see if there’s anything in my story you connect with that could help you unravel the how and the why.
IBS doesn’t just show up out of nowhere, though it seems like that to many of us at the onset, and it was how it seemed to me at that time. See how your story, even if very different from mine, could potentially be thematically linked to mine.
Check in with the different parts of your life and that time and see where you were hurting, where this IBS could have been brewing in your body without you being aware of it.
Contemplating what was going on in your life in the 6 months to two years before IBS came on board is an incredible exercise if you are still unsure how the IBS started in the first part. Later on in today’s episode, I will give some very useful journal prompts that you can use yourself to help you discover where your IBS started if still aren’t sure of where yours began. If you would like the questions themselves, feel free to check out my website for the transcript to today’s episode, which is number 34.
Though it seemed to come on suddenly, IBS was most likely developing slowly over a certain period, your body’s response to emotional or physical stresses that were adding up in your life.
The IBS Backdrop-Traumatic Childbirth
In late 2017, after a long inner debate (and many years of therapy) about whether I even wanted to become a mother, I welcomed my first and only son into the world. His arrival was nothing like I had planned or hoped for.
After almost two exhausting days of labor at home with my midwife and I guess what you could call and “unsuccessful” home birth, I was rushed into an emergency C-section at the hospital.
On the operating table, my arms were strapped down. My body shook uncontrollably, my mind was foggy from exhaustion, and the pain was so great that I went numb, and I truly thought I was dying. Later, my husband admitted he thought the same at that exact moment in time.
My son entered the world screaming, with very low blood sugar, and was rushed to the NICU. I wasn’t allowed to see him for more than 24 hours as we were in separate sections of the hospital and I wasn’t well enough to move from my bed nor was he well enough to come to me. The month that followed was full of complications: postpartum preeclampsia, hospitalization, and later an infected c -section incision.
I share these details not to shock or scare anyone about birth or my experience but because, looking back now in 2025, it’s impossible not to see the connection between this trauma and the onset of my IBS.
Nevertheless, at the time, I was too overwhelmed with new motherhood and the incredible sleep deprivation I experienced, returning to my stressful teaching job, and just the sheer exhaustion to recognize what was happening in my body or understand it’s source.
About a year later, when I finally started to get a little more sleep, the symptoms began to show themselves clearly: unbearable abdominal pain that sent me to the ER multiple times, a belly so distended I looked pregnant again, jeans I couldn’t button, nights where I was truly hungry but couldn’t bear to eat due to the pain I anticipated after dinner.
I was completely confused about what was going on with me and I couldn’t understand for the life of my what was causing all these horrible stomach problems. Of course now I’ve had time to reflect and have researched for myself and others what causes IBS and it’s quite obvious to me. At the onset, it was a total mystery to me.
Does your IBS feel like a mystery to you as it did to me?
Making Sense of the Backdrop to IBS Onset
I invite you today if you are still confused about how your IBS started or why it began; to look at your life at the onset of your IBS and then circle back a year or two before you started experiencing symptoms.
What was going on with you during the year before your diagnosis?
If you have the time or space to do so, I invite you to stop this podcast and do a little journal exercise to delve deeper into what was your own personal backdrop to IBS. If you’ve just started experiencing this syndrome, what’s been going on with you the past year or so?
- Physically check in with your sleep, your movement and your eating patterns. Has there been a shift in any of these? Is it possible that you have had less than ideal habits for a long time that could have caught up with you?
- Emotionally check in and think about your stress levels in the recent past. Have you felt anxious or depressed recently?
- Have you been through a traumatic event? Were you able to process it? Do you still feel stuck anywhere with it?
- What has your relationship been like with yourself and others? Did you feel supportive and relaxed in your life?
I encourage you to do these journal prompts not in the hopes of making yourself culpable for your IBS, not to make yourself feel bad or to blame yourself. That is not the intention at all, and I know it well because that’s what I was initially doing to myself.
Do you recognize this tendency to want to blame yourself? Or on the other extreme- to blame others and not take any responsibility?
The point in this exercise is to see where you may need more care and more attention for yourself and to give yourself an answer (or at least a potential hypothesis) about what caused your IBS. It’s not meant to add more rocks to your back, more blame to carry; which I can almost guarantee is not what you need.
Look at your life as if it was the life of a dear friend and bring as much compassion to yourself as you can during this exploration. Life is meant for you to grow through, to evolve and to become even more deeply who you are meant to be. You aren’t meant to be perfect and you are designed to make mistakes, sometimes even really bad ones; over and over again.
Usually these really painful experiences are the ones that give us the deepest learning, the biggest impact. By becoming curious about your IBS and your life and seeing where it may have come from, you are given essential clues about how you must change going forward, you are given clues as to what needs your attention.
If you are a woman, notice that for us that usually means how we can start prioritizing our own care much more than we have in the past. For our own survival and for the thriving lives of those we love.
I recorded today’s episode for the past version of myself that was totally bewildered as why I got IBS. Though today’s episode isn’t an exclusive list in any sense of what has uniquely caused your IBS, it was written to inspire your own investigation and curiosity into some potential areas.
If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you. You can write me at : erin@ healingheribs.com and you can contact me at Instagram or Facebook at healingheribswellness. Please also I would love if you could share my podcast with a woman you know with IBS and if are enjoying the podcast, if you could review it that would also help me immensely. On another note- I am looking forward to including some interviews this year with women who have had IBS and have come healthfully to the other side. If you know of anyone who has an IBS success story to share, I would love for you to connect them with me so that we can all learn more through their experience.
Thank you very much for listening.