I think a lot of women who have had or still have had IBS struggle with the timeline of having this disorder—maybe asking yourself:
When will I heal? When will I get better?
This struggle is so real and visceral and truthfully there is no one answer fits all for every woman—a truth that can sometimes kill the motivation to keep going.
Lately I have made an observation while speaking to real women who have healed their IBS. They say that the key to healing is being patient and being persistent.
Today we will talk about this magical combination and how you can use these two-character traits to get you through healing and to the finish line.
Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at healingheribs.com/42.
Slow and Steady Wins the Game
Today’s episode was inspired by the recent podcast interviews that I have done with several women who have, for the most part, fully recovered from IBS. When I have asked them what they think that women who are now currently struggling with IBS should know, what they say is that healing requires time and it requires persistence.
Commonly you hear women who have tried to heal their IBS going through rounds and rounds of different approaches, doctors, therapies, diets, etc.
I know that when I first started having symptoms of IBS and then officially got the diagnosis, my two main points of concern and questioning revolved around:
- How this had happened to me?
- How I could heal it?
- How long it would take?
Do you find yourself looping around and around in your mind with these same questions?
While it’s natural to wonder how this happened and what will happen, no one can tell for certain how long your specific and unique IBS will last. This depends on so many factors that are often unknowable, especially if you are not totally certain about why you got IBS in the first place, it can be hard to know a real “treatment plan” if that even exists, and when you can expect to recover.
And of course, with IBS as you have most likely heard, there can be recurrences and flare ups that happen in your life even after you have fully healed. Life is not usually a journey that is easy or expected for most humans walking this path. There are so many twists and turns that we need to float with, adapt to as we go along and it’s especially true when navigating IBS.
What I have loved so much about the women I have spoken with most recently is their insistence on not giving up hope on their goal of feeling better. They kept going consistently kept doing what they could do to help themselves feel better.
There are women who are for years trying to heal their IBS and sometimes even for a decade without completely losing hope. Or perhaps they have lost hope for a while and then they come back to find it, being open minded and curious about this condition and what is sparking it in their lives.
This quality of perseverance is inherent in all women who have healed IBS, who have sought answers to their questions, who have changed their diets and their mindsets and have gotten deeper into this mystery that has fallen into their laps.
Never Giving Up
Since you may not entirely know why you have gotten IBS, what is at the root specifically of your IBS—you cannot expect a very clearcut treatment plan from a doctor, therapist or healthcare professional. There are so many reasons that women get IBS that are a mixture of emotional and stress related issues, depleted microbiomes, post-traumatic stress, post infectious IBS, a misfiring gut to brain pathway.
IBS can be caused by lifestyle issues related to sleep, nutrition, hormonal shifts, movement habits and much more. It is often correlated to anxiety and depression as well and can start soon after a traumatic event in a woman’s life. IBS can begin after a gut infection or gut surgery; it can start after a round of antibiotics or after food poisoning.
For some women, IBS heals relatively quickly but for most women it is not an easy fix and requires several months, and likely several years to fully recover from. It’s not an easy thing to accept that you will have discomfort and symptoms for such a long period of time; but accepting a longer timeline for recovery does not mean accepting living with IBS forever.
In my experience, the women who do seem to experience IBS for a very long time it often seems to correlate with not being able to sustain the changes in their lives that they need to sustain in order to get better for the long term.
Women that have jobs that are very stressful that they can’t move out of, toxic relationships that they are not able to leave, nutritional changes they need to make that just don’t stick for whatever reason.
Changing habits isn’t just a matter of changing what we do, it often means changing who we are—how we see ourselves. There are unconscious patterns we have that get in the way of our incredibly good intentions.
None of these reasons I listed above are meant to make anyone feel badly about themselves or to make judgements about anyone or anything that is going on in our lives. They are meant to illuminate the fact that IBS is a disorder that you can recover from, and it is one that does require change in you and in your life.
It requires change that you repeat over and over, daily and for as long as you need, until they become new habit and new ways of being, leaving behind the woman that you were before.
Walking the IBS Perseverance and Patience Line
When it comes to IBS, every day and every week and every month that you are working on your gut health and your mental health and coming to terms with what’s happening for you and why it has happened, I will encourage you to walk the line between patience and perseverance and have that be the balancing act you focus your attention on.
It will not help to rush and it will not help to give up.
If you have been trying to heal for years, take an inventory today to see where you could improve this balancing act?
No woman is the same, we are all different with different personalities and lifestyles. Perhaps you are the type of woman who is impatient and rushed and overwhelmed. You want to heal already!!
Perhaps you are the type of woman who loses hope easily if you don’t see results quickly. Maybe you go back to a lifestyle that is natural and comfortable for you, but one that you know deep down isn’t in your best interests for healing and living freely.
I don’t pretend today to say any of these changes are easy or that they can happen overnight, what I wanted to point out if these mix of character traits, or beliefs that women share that help them heal.
If you are struggling with how to best heal your IBS or needing a mixture of care and accountability, I want to mention to you that I am starting a brand-new group healing offering called the Healing Her Collective, which will start on January 11th which is a Sunday and will meet weekly over zoom every Sunday at 12pm noon Eastern time (NY time). We will work together on a diversity of issues that are connected to IBS and we will support one another to be accountable and caring with ourselves and our fellow women in the collective.
I would love for you to join if you feel inspired, you can sign up at my website: healingheribs.com/healing-her-ibs-collective under the new offerings section of my website.
Thank you for listening today and I hope you found today’s episode inspiring!