Have you been told that there is no known cause (or cure) for your irritable bowel disorder? What depressing information! Without a cause, how can you find a solution?

Well here is some good news.

Recent evidence from neurology and rehabilitation medicine shows that the little-known cause of IBS is a “trick” your brain plays on your body.

Your brain is incredibly powerful!

In fact, it’s so powerful that when you go through an intense and challenging experience, your brain takes action to protect you from feeling the full impact. And this happens without your conscious knowledge. This is crazy, but no one said humans were easy to understand…

So how does your brain trick you into having irritable bowel disorder?

There are two different answers to this question. One is from pain expert and Rehabilitation Medicine specialist, Dr. John Sarno. The other comes from traumatologist and brain scientist Dr. Robert Scaer. Both physicians have helped thousands of patients recover from chronic pain and other recurring health problems during their decades as practicing physicians.

Dr. Sarno believes that all of us are under some kind of pressure, whether it’s from daily life and work, unresolved childhood events, or our expectations of ourselves to be nice, good, and perfect people. (Do you already recognize yourself?)

Maybe you’re good at dealing with pressure. But if you have irritable bowel disorder, Dr. Sarno suggests he open your mind to another possibility.

He says that however calm and civilized you may be on the conscious level, beneath your smooth surface another beast lurks. On the unconscious level, the pressure creates intense feelings of anger. In fact, we ALL have these feelings. they’re normal. Except we don’t know we’re having them because they’re not aware.

Now it gets even weirder. Because anger is so unacceptable, so unpleasant, and so threatening, this is what your brain does to keep you from realizing you’re feeling it…

your brain actually creates a physical problem to distract your attention!

How rare is that? Yet it happens to millions of people. This is how your brain tricks you with irritable bowel disorder or fibromyalgia, back, neck or shoulder pain, leg pain, TMJ, tendinitis, carpal tunnel, skin disorders and some circulatory or heart problems. Your brain is trying to protect you by distracting you from that unbearable (and unconscious) emotion with physical symptoms.

Although your symptoms stem from a trick your brain is playing on you, Dr. Sarno does NOT consider them imaginary in any way. They are very real. In fact, since many of us have chronic pain and symptoms, Dr. Sarno believes they are a normal response to pressure and repressed rage.

Because Robert Scaer is a neurologist, he sees things a little differently than John Sarno. He says it’s his brain’s reaction to trauma that triggers his symptoms when he has irritable bowel disorder, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, migraine, or one of several other chronic conditions.

Dr. Scaer defines “trauma” as any event your brain perceives as a threat to your survival when you can’t do anything about it. The trauma can be physical, like a car accident, or emotional, like bullying. There are many possibilities.

Usually when you are threatened, you go into fight or flight mode. These are normal survival reactions. There is a third reaction that occurs when you experience the combination of threat and helplessness. You “freeze”.

Prey animals that cannot escape from the predator will freeze in a last ditch attempt to survive. “If I look dead, maybe that big hungry lion won’t eat me.” Then, if the lion walks away, the prey gets up and shakes off the ice.

We humans, on the other hand, train ourselves NOT to shake it off. Shaking and shivering looks ridiculous and no one wants to be that old-fashioned. So we repress it. (Here’s that word again. Repression is a real killer.) This creates havoc with your Autonomic Nervous System, which controls a host of processes in your body, including your digestion….

Now, this is where the trick comes in. When you freeze, your brain remembers everything about that trauma, and I mean everything. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings – everything that was happening outside of your body AND inside of you. So later, when any little thing reminds your brain of that experience, it thinks you’re in danger again and triggers your Autonomic Nervous System to overreact.

That’s what triggers the symptoms of an irritable bowel disorder. Your brain “tricks” your body into thinking the trauma is happening again. Then your poor body reacts by blocking your digestion (constipation) or losing control (diarrhea, urgency) or swinging wildly between the two (twitches, cramps).

Sarno and Scaer aren’t the only doctors to blame the brain for irritable bowel disorder. Two neuroscientists, David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD, author of “The Instinct to Heal” and Robert Sapolsky, PhD, author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” point out that it’s your brain’s response to threats. and stress that leads to gastrointestinal problems.

So, according to these scientists, the real cause of an irritable bowel disorder isn’t “all in your head,” but comes from the unconscious processes of your mind and brain. Fortunately, you can use drug-free methods like the Emotional Freedom Technique or Somatic Experiencing to do some “reprogramming” and resolve your symptoms.