will become less alarmed and upset by your gut's sensations. Instead, you will begin to befriend them. For this self-assessment exercise as well as for activities you'll work on throughout Trust Your Gut, you will need a diary dedicated to tracking your work. The CORE program will help you improve your self-awareness and self-observation—on mental, emotional, and physical levels. In other words, CORE will help you change your relationship with your body and how you react to its signals.
You Can't Change It If You Don't See or Feel It
It's human to avoid anything painful or upsetting. No wonder Prilosec sells so well—it's much easier to shut down gut communication altogether than to listen to it. Millions try to avoid their gut sensations; many others just feel a sense of defeat and hopelessness. Feeling anxiety, frustration, or worry in reaction to a gut symptom need not be judged. If you attach an emotional value to this sensation, don't fight it; just notice it.
These sensations are important forms of communication, and we need to listen. Nobody appreciates it when they don't feel heard or understood. After all, many clinical studies have shown that the act of being listened to is one of the most important aspects of the healing encounter between doctor and patient. So it stands to reason that it's also important that you learn to listen to yourself—to the signals from your own gut. That's not so easy when you've ignored, suppressed, and rejected messages from your gut for a long time.
A Breakdown in (Gut) Communication
The gut's ability to communicate to us has been understood as normal for thousands of years all over the world. References to the importance of the feelings of the gut can be found in the Bible as well as in traditional Japanese medicine. But when did gut communication break down in the Western tradition and become seen as symptoms—something abnormal? When did we start to shut down or dismiss these crucial internal lines of communication?
To answer, we need to go all the way back to ancient Greece during the days of Plato and Aristotle. These early philosophers were part of a movement to use reason to rule our life instead of being guided by our emotions or superstitions. Plato placed such a high value on reason and mathematics that he considered them to be the highest forms of knowledge, closer to the mind of God and the higher unchanging realm of pure ideas. Emotions yielded insignificant information about the ever-changing world of everyday existence. Aristotle, one of the founders of Western science, agreed on the value of reason over emotion. Even lower in esteem than emotions was the body, which was considered a crude vessel that imprisoned the soul.
By the 1600s, many influential philosophers, most famous among them René Descartes, argued that the mind and the body were separate substances, dual realities. The mind was eternal and invisible—known only by our own consciousness. Our body was considered to be merely a complex machine. And so began medicine's distrust of the body's knowledge and the body's wisdom.
These philosophers did not have the advantage of our 21st-century technology like functional MRI scanners that allow us to actually look into the brain and literally see the chemical reactions taking place. Scientists can now observe which genes get turned on and turned off by emotional response. Human beings can now measure scientifically the interactive effects of mind and body upon each other. However, hundreds of years ago, the mind was viewed as nonmaterial, considered only within the domain of religion. Somehow the mind was less real because you can't see it or put it in a wheelbarrow. Not so with the body. This was viewed as tangible, material, real—within the domain of science. The mind was split off from the body. Though this happened hundreds of years ago, these ideas shape how we view health, illness, and our relationship with our body today.
The Industrial Revolution disconnected us even further from our natural ability to communicate with our body. New inventions allowed us to predict, measure, and control aspects of our life that were previously impossible. Manufactured chemicals were produced on a mass scale for many uses. Germ theory and vaccinations helped contain life-threatening diseases like smallpox. Scientists looked at the body as if it were only a machine, an orientation that led to many scientific advances, such as organ transplants.
This great medical progress was a double-edged sword. Although we learned that it was possible to treat and eliminate many diseases, we increasingly came to believe that painful or unusual bodily sensations should be eradicated. Accepting and listening to sensations seemed pointless. Likewise, we rejected any connection between mind and body. How could a nonmaterial thing like the mind affect a material thing like the body? Such a crazy idea violates the laws of physics. After all, no matter how hard we think, pray, or believe, we cannot get a frozen car to start on a winter morning. Mind has no effect on machines.
Ignoring Feelings
Machines have no feelings, but people do. We can be happy, sad, frustrated, joyful, and more. We can experience emotional pain and emotional pleasure. Because we are geared toward pleasure, we developed psychological defenses against emotional pain. This is a normal way to cope with the difficulties of daily life. As children, we learn these natural ways of forgetting, avoiding, denying, or minimizing painful or difficult feelings. Nevertheless, we actually do experience our emotions in our body: tightening in the forehead, tensing the jaw, heaviness in the chest, rumbling in the stomach. So when we avoid feeling something emotionally uncomfortable, we also have to fight the sensations in our body—wherever we feel emotions. That's why the word feeling refers to emotions as well as to physical sensations. An ignored emotion that manifests as physical discomfort is like a secret kept from the mind but not from the body.
As it turns out, ignoring our feelings is not easy and definitely not helpful!
For hundreds of years now, Western science has separated mental activity—thoughts, emotions, and reasoning—from the physical body. Over the centuries, we as individuals have learned to downplay feelings and emotions as we have played up reason. The same is true for the culture of medicine, which focuses on controlling symptoms. Emotional responses were dismissed as too subjective—or at least irrelevant. If we can't find it in your body, then it must be in your head, they thought. If it's in your head, then it becomes an issue of irrational emotions and feelings—something to be treated by a psychologist.
Quiet Cindy
Cindy lived with her boyfriend, Jim. She felt very strongly about him. She liked the closeness they shared, but she was also afraid of conflict, so she never mentioned when she was angry with him. Then Jim got into a habit of making plans to go out with other friends in the evening without letting Cindy know in advance. This bothered her, but she didn't say anything to him. In recent weeks, though, she'd been experiencing a gnawing pain in her lower abdomen every time Jim made plans without telling her.
This could be considered a secret kept from the mind but not from the body. Ultimately, through her participation in the CORE program, Cindy learned that the more she expressed her anger and other uncomfortable emotions as they emerged, the gnawing pains in her abdomen diminished. Clearly, her gut was encouraging Cindy to speak up and be less quiet.
Somatic Wisdom
We see far too many people in our clinic who feel reduced to either their body or their mind. A 360-degree view of the person as a person, not as just a mind or as just a body, has been missing from modern medicine. The CORE program for gut recovery goes much further. The CORE program will allow you to discover your inner wisdom of how emotions and physiology interact. This is called somatic wisdom—the wisdom of the body (soma is Greek for “body”).
Nancy's Unfortunate Appetizer
