So many of us try to heal IBS like heroes — we go to war with our bodies, chase the perfect diet, and think if we just do enough, we’ll win. This is the way we are raised and what we are taught “works” —we must work and strive to get better.
But healing, especially from something like IBS, isn’t a hero’s journey. It’s a heroine’s journey. It’s not about conquering. It’s about unveiling something unseen or something lost.
Today, I want to walk you through the stages of the Heroine’s Journey — and how each stage has shown up in my own healing — so you can start to see where you might be on your path, too.
Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at healingheribs.com/40
My IBS as a Heroine’s Journey
I’m very excited today to continue talking about the Heroine’s Journey-before I do I wanted to let you know that in January 2026 I will be leading a group program for Healing IBS called the Healing Her IBS collective—in that ten week group we will do a deep personal and group investigation into the most powerful areas of how we can heal IBS. We’ll practice nervous system safety, activating the Vegas Nerve and finding joy in our lives, as well as much work into how to use food to help us heal, we will create rituals and boundaries in our lives that ensure we are protecting ourselves and dipping into the deeper messages IBS is sending you and how to practically digest emotions that are stuck in your body. If this sounds like what you need right now, email me at erin@nullhealingheribs.com to get on the waitlist or check out my website-www.healingheribs.com for how to sign up directly once that is up. I am grateful to be holding this space for you and look forward to welcoming you into this circle of women that know what this experience is and want to be there for each other as you heal.
The Heroine’s Journey was described by Maureen Murdock as a path of inner transformation — not about conquering the world and slaying dragons, but about coming home to yourself.
It often starts with separation from your intuition or body, moves through struggle and descent, and ends with integration — a deep, peaceful alignment between who you are and how you live. If you haven’t listened to Episode 38 yet, I would recommend you go back and listen to that episode first before listening to today’s episode—because they go together kind of like twins.
I want to mention before we move on that I am not trying to say that women should only have feminine energy or that masculine energy is bad or wrong in any sense. I truly believe that we are all unique with different percentages of these types of energies and accessing masculine energy can also be very helpful for healing and natural for women and men.
What I do want to say is that culturally I think that overall women have received the message that the way that we are isn’t the “right” way. We aren’t logical enough, trying to fit into the social norms and function with the overarching masculine archetype has often left us feeling out of place, overly emotional or simply just an offputting sense of feeling wrong, either like we are too much, or we are not enough.
We have been socially conditioned to be caretakers and to care for our homes and to take on the primary responsibilities of childcare and even caring for our elders. We hold the social schedule—we hold so much and our societies depend upon this work we do. As we have gained more and more equal rights legally and have risen economically—we now have the added obligation to have a great career, to work hard and to achieve financially as well.
Many of us are waking up to the reality and we just don’t know how to sit on this fence. We don’t know how to put our energy into so many different funnels an the word priority has lost all sense of what it meant before. For me, this overstretching and this overperforming was breaking me until it broke me and I was diagnosed with IBS. Now, as I look at the person that I was in those years I can see how I had been formed into the type of woman who could and should do everything.
The truth is though we can’t do everything, and we probably shouldn’t be doing everything. Part of the objective of the feminist movement was to bring choice into our lives—but in those years, my late 20s and early 30s I didn’t feel I had a choice about where to put my life force—it was just dispersed into ten thousand different things I needed to do in order to keep my life going and in order to do what I thought I had to do in order to be a good person.
I wanted to be good, and that’s a beautiful thing—but the question now is: Good according to whom? That question continues to ring in my ears everyday as I come face to face with my conditioning and my authenticity.
So when I speak about this separation from the feminine this is what I mean. The separation that we have had from that part of us that isn’t striving, that isn’t performing or achieving and controlling and making things happen. Finding the archetypical feminine is about valuing our emotional side as much as we do our logical side and finding the balance that honors our whole selves, instead of putting on a mask that was given to us in a culture that holds up the masculine way of being as the end all be all of existence.
My IBS Journey Through the Stages
1. Separation from the Feminine:
For me, this began when I stopped trusting my body. I pushed through exhaustion, ignored my gut feelings, and tried to be productive and perfect all the time. IBS became the body’s way of saying, ‘Enough.’
Many women start here — disconnected from rest, pleasure, and intuition. Overwhelmed by all the doing.
Have you been living from your mind instead of your body? Ignoring what your gut has been trying to tell you?
2. Identification with the Masculine: Trying to Control and Make Sense of Chaos
Once my symptoms started, I went into full-on control mode — researching, fixing, trying every diet. I believed if I just worked hard enough, I could outsmart my gut and I could fix it.
But the more I controlled, the worse I felt. This became a theme not just for my IBS but so much else in my life.
How much time are you spending trying to manage your symptoms?
3. The Illusion of Success:
There were moments I thought I’d found the answer — a new supplement, a food list, a morning routine. But the relief was always temporary.
That illusion of control gave me comfort for a time, but it kept me from deeper healing.
Have you ever had that high of finding something that ‘works’ — only for symptoms to return and leave you discouraged?
4. The Descent to the Goddess: Surrender and Confusion
Eventually, I burned out. My body stopped cooperating. That was my descent — the moment I had to stop fighting and start feeling. It was terrifying. I felt out of control and like I was giving up. But it was also the beginning of my healing.
Maybe your descent looks like a flare, burnout, or emotional breakdown. What if that’s not failure, but your invitation to surrender?
5. Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with the Feminine
This was when I started learning about nervous system regulation, slowing down, eating more intuitively, and letting my body lead. I began trusting small cues — hunger, rest, emotions — instead of ignoring them.
What helps you feel safe in your body? What practices remind you you’re not broken?
6. Intergration of Masculine/Femine:
Now I live with both energies: I use structure — like gentle routines and smart food choices — but I balance it with intuition and flexibility. I no longer push my body. I partner with it.
Integration isn’t a finish line; it’s a cyclical sometimes daily process.
Where can you invite more softness into your structure — more being into your doing? What can you let go of?
7. Integration: Awakening. Where are you Now?
You might be in the early stages — still trying to control and fix. You might be in the descent — exhausted, unsure. Or you might be integrating — learning to live from trust.
Wherever you are, there’s nothing wrong with your stage. Each one is meaningful and necessary. Each one is part of coming home to yourself
Can you journal today and ask yourself:
What is my body asking me to listen to right now? Where am I today?
Why Myths Can Help Us Heal
Myths and archetypes are powerful ways for humans to understand ourselves, our lives and the extremely difficult and painful things that often happen to you in life.
How are you meant to understand these trials, these horrible things that happen to you or to the people you love. When you lack a framework for understanding life, it just makes it so much harder.
When you connect your stories and your experiences to the lives of others, to the suffering of others—you are part of something so much bigger and you feel less alone. By understanding stories and myths and the arcs of these stories, you can start to see yourself as part of the bigger picture.
Your suffering, descent, confusion and pain could be a stage in your life that is setting you up for a beautiful transformation. If you are in the beginning stages of IBS, struggling with asserting control over all of these aspects that have gone awry, if you have tried and tried to fix yourself and it’s just not working—that doesn’t mean that it’s hopeless or that you will never heal.
It likely means that you are being pulled to see more of where you are out of alignment, where you are tight and need release. Today is not the day to blame yourself and hurt yourself emotionally for where you are; but going through this particular heroine’s journey does require courage and persistence as life finds a way to communicate through you, through your most powerful body.
Thank you for listening today and I hope you found today’s episode useful.