Those Old Visceral Reactions

I have recently swallowed too many of my own (not terribly good or fun) feelings, and found that I had reawakened my good old buddy, IBS.

I really prefer referring to him by his initials, because initials sound more relevant and important. When I say Irritable Bowel Syndrome it sounds like a cop-out, like nothing terribly serious let alone painful. I mean, come on, irritation is just that, irritating. Not painful or hurtful or really very serious. When my mood is irritable I rarely do any real physical harm to anyone. But when my you-know-what is irritable, some heavy duty pain is the result.

When I was 11-years-old (before the local docs had discovered the term Irritable Bowel Syndrome) some fairly acute abdominal pain led me to the hospital and surgery. When I say acute, I'm talking writhing around on a the bed, floor and backseart of my grandmother's car moaning and crying, clutching the area just below center of my body with all my might, hoping that the outside pressure would relieve some of what was going on inside.

When the surgeon didn't find what he had expected, he yanked out my perfectly healthy appendix so as not to have wasted a trip. Over the years, each time I returned to a doctor with similar complaints, they ran tests and determined that there was nothing physically wrong.

Of course there was something physically wrong, it just wasn't caused by something physical. It was caused my something emotional: When I was eleven I was swallowing words and worries that surrounded the sexual abuse I experienced. As a teen, well, as a teen there is plenty of angst anyway, and I always managed to get myself into difficult emotional situations. As an adult it was several years before I understood the connection between emotional pain and physical pain.

Thankfully in recent years I have understood (and accepted) what causes the pain, that severe feelings can be directly tied into severe physical pain. After all, before medical science put an nondescript medical term to it, there were plenty of terms to describe when emotions have a physical effect.

Think about it, someone is a pain in the neck. She makes me sick to my stomach. He is a pain in the ass. There is bad blood between us. I've had a change of heart. The cat has his tongue. I'm waiting with bated breath. I'm in a blue funk. Blue funk?

Okay, so I'd rather be in a blue funk than feel the IBS symptoms. So I'm back on the emotional wagon. I'm working on vocalizing my feelings instead of keeping them inside.

For those of you who know me fairly well, it may be hard for you to believe that I EVER keep feelings to myself. I assure you that I do, and you might want to feel a little bit grateful about that. ;-)