Martin Conway is a therapist at Bristol Counselling and Psychotherapy who understands the complexity of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Martin draws on his lived experience and has gone on to specialise in providing a program of sessions that are specifically designed to address the common issues linked with IBD. He explains more here.

What Is IBD? Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a term for two conditions (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) that are characterised by chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and prolonged inflammation results in damage to the GI tract.

You might be wondering how counselling could help with your inflammatory bowel condition.  It’s a fair question, particularly as it is rarely something suggested by medical professionals*, (however, neither is seeing a nutritionist which I find just as bizarre).  I myself was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease 9 years ago and found after some time that counselling was in fact incredibly helpful in helping me to live better with my condition, for a variety of reasons, which brings us to the first point:

1. Your medical treatment will only do so much.  

This is by no means a denigration of medical treatments, medicine works wonders and saves lives, and this therapy is designed to go alongside it, not to replace it, but a great deal of the time your medication is only treating the symptoms and is only part of the healing.  If you continue with your same lifestyle and with the same stress and anxiety in your life, then flare-ups are likely to continue and medication will only act to put out those fires.  It’s not anti-science to focus on your thoughts and feelings to heal you either, as every specialist will tell you (and I’m sure you know yourself) that your symptoms are at least exacerbated by stress and anxiety in your life.  Medication is only part of what can keep you healthy, but is no more important than sleep, lifestyle, diet and mental well-being.

2. Help you to change your behaviours and live more healthily.

A lot of the time we know what we need to do to improve our health and reduce the risk of flare-ups.  We know we should quit smoking, drink less, avoid certain foods, rest well, meditate, etc, etc.  But this is much easier said than done.  Therapy can help you to be more aware of what you need and coaching can really help you stick to and achieve your health goals.

3. Emotions are held in the gut.

Anger, anxiety, sadness and elation are all held primarily in the gut.  The brain has a direct effect on the stomach and intestines.  Getting in touch with these emotions in therapy and being able to explore, identify, understand, accept and share these issues can be of tremendous relief to your gut.  Just as a massage can free a knot in your back, expressing emotions stored in the gut can untie emotional knots in your stomach.  Finding effective ways for you (everyone is different and this work will be bespoke to you) to deal better with stress and anxiety, will almost certainly lead to your condition improving.  Particularly as many of the ways we tend to cope are often detrimental to our health.

4. Accepting Your Condition

It is very common to live in denial and battle on, as if you are not sick.  It might have been a healthy coping mechanism for many other aspects of your life, as positivity and soldiering on can be beneficial, but it can become an unhealthy form of denial that is preventing you from taking the care you need.  Through therapy you can learn to accept your diagnosis and come to terms with it, rather than running from it.  It might only be once you have accepted it you can take the necessary steps to live more healthily.  Often this can lead to a better quality of life, such as learning how to relax and embracing that relaxation, rather than feeling guilty about it.  Learning to find joy in doing less.  Counterintuitively you might find that your condition can become a blessing if it leads to your perspective on life changing as a result of this work.  

5. Expressing Yourself

Firstly, in the therapy room, learning to share what is going on for us inside, and then taking this into our relationships in the wider world can really help with that holding on we might be doing in our gut.  The more comfortable we can feel with being our authentic self and not hiding our condition can be of great benefit, both to our condition and the quality of our relationships.

6. Going deeper

Where has your condition come from?  Sometimes the roots of our condition can date back long before our diagnosis.  This psychodynamic approach can allow us to explore these possible roots.  Did you keep things in as a child?  What was your relationship with food? How did you feel about going to the toilet?  How did you experience illness?  This can all be part of painting a picture of how you live with your condition today and untangling this can help you to free yourself from unconsciously learnt beliefs and behaviours that may no longer be beneficial for you.

* Crohn’s and Colitis UK does suggest counselling for IBD.

If you would like to seek counselling in Bristol for IBD or Crohn’s disease, our team can help. At Bristol Counselling and Psychotherapy, we have a team of experienced counsellors who are ready to offer support for a wide range of mental health issues, welcoming individuals into safe and non-judgemental spaces within which to begin their journey to recovery. For more information or to book an initial consultation, please email hello@bristolcounsellingandpsychotherapy.co.uk. Alternatively, to speak to us directly, please contact 07751 271 709.