Gut Instinct & IFS - How your parts and Self can support gut health
If you’ve ever felt butterflies in your stomach or had a gut-wrenching experience you already know that the connection between your gut and your emotional brain is strong. These common experiences and a growing body of research make it clear: the gut is sensitive to emotion, and emotions are sensitive to the gut. Our bodies and minds are inseparable, and in a constant feedback loop of communication. It makes sense, then, that your parts are inevitably affected by what’s going on in the belly and digestive system. Sadness, anxiety, and anger—and other emotions—can all be trailheads, pointing the way to different parts sending signals in the body, whether significant or slight. Just as often, other parts may have learned to override, manage, or avoid these signals, for protective or other survival reasons.
Phrases like trust your gut and gut instinct are also more than simple cliches - they reflect inherent resources we all possess, and that Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy reliably helps to restore.
If you’re suffering from digestive issues, you know too well how they keep you from functioning at full speed. Your parts may feel stressed out, drained, and hopeless in pursuit of relief. You are not alone. Complaints of poor gut health are on the rise globally; a 2022 American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) study found that forty percent of Americans’ daily lives are disrupted by digestive troubles, and remedies may feel elusive or endlessly complex.
Learning about gut health and inflammation is useful whether you’re experiencing digestive issues or not. Combining this knowledge with IFS is invaluable for anyone wanting to feel a greater sense of wholeness, and most especially if you’re dealing with chronic gastrointestinal distress and related conditions. In this article, we’ll take a look at how parts affect the body and the body affects our parts—especially with regard to gut health—with personal insights from Mariel Pastor, IFS Lead Trainer and IFS Telehealth Collective Clinical Director.
IFS - A Systemic Approach
Richard Schwartz, PhD began his career enamored by systems theory, and developed the IFS Model upon seeing the interconnected feedback loops that parallel what happens between people and within individuals. As the model evolved, IFS commonly brought awareness to how parts of the mind could be located in or around the physical body, offering interventions to release more Self energy to support healing parts and the body.
IFS was gaining ground as a powerful psychotherapy in the 1990s just as pivotal research about trauma and the body emerged with the advent of the functional MRI. This new kind of brain imaging revealed the vagus nerve - the longest and perhaps most influential nerve within humans. The vagus nerve acts as a communication superhighway traveling from deep within the brain to deep within the gut, with impact throughout the entire nervous system, heart and lungs.
Around the same time, renewed interest in the role of bacteria and the human microbiome started to gather more steam. In the last 20 years, the links between bacteria—both beneficial and toxic —and gut health, inflammation, and the brain’s chemistry, have been at the forefront of much medical research.
There’s never been a better time to unite mind and body through the vagus nerve and IFS.
The Gut-Brain Axis: An Emotional Feedback Loop
The gut-brain axis is a network linking the central nervous system bidirectionally. This connection facilitates constant communication between the brain and gastro-intestinal system, influencing physiological processes including digestion, immune function, and mood regulation.
Your gut is like a second brain, producing neurotransmitters like serotonin that play a big role in regulating mood. Picture the gut-brain axis as a hotline between your brain and your digestive system, with messages relayed back and forth all day. This axis influences everything from how you break down food to your emotional reactions.
Unmanaged stress can lead to chronic dysregulation of the nervous system. Because many of the brain’s neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine originate in the gut and travel up to the brain, if the gut is overworking and can’t rest or digest well, it will affect your brain chemistry.
In fight, flight, or freeze mode, it becomes difficult for your gut to rest and digest. This can create significant challenges for how parts of your personality feel and function. When things are really off in the gut, it impacts your body, energy, and sleep, which in turn impacts your parts. The activation of your parts will then influence your gut. In this way, the gut-brain connection is a constant feedback loop of information.
Mind, Body, Spirit - Parts, Self, and Gut
Self-energy is also reflected in the body and is only empowered when it is embodied. For this reason, trauma can make it difficult to access Self-energy—when someone has experienced a lot of trauma the emotions and sensations feel overwhelming and the mind may mercifully cut off awareness with some form of dissociation; it's often hard to rest attention calmly in the body. Often, our burdens will create separation from or disconnect within the body. Shame lights up the nervous system, so when a part experiences shame, other parts will often try to dominate or suppress what we feel in the body because they’re afraid.
The vagus nerve is responsible for regulating the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for promoting rest, digestion, and relaxation. The vagus nerve is very connected to gut health, regulating inflammation of the gut, helping to modulate and release the production of enzymes and stomach acids, and transmitting signals from the gut microbiome to the brain.
When the vagus nerve is functioning optimally, it can help us access and maintain Self-energy. In IFS, we look at Self-energy within the person or therapeutic relationship as a healing container, which helps regulate the mind and the body. If your parts are experiencing a lot of intensity, they need the regulating container of Self-energy to hold them. If you struggle to access Self-energy, a skilled IFS therapist can help by holding Self-energy in your presence, creating a co-regulating container.
Mariel’s Story
In a recent interview, IFS Lead Trainer and IFS TC Co-Founder, Mariel Pastor noted that she never thought she had any gut health issues until they rudely interrupted an IFS Level 1 training weekend in 2010.
“We were in San Francisco and I went to dinner and a comedy show with some program assistants the first evening. Seemingly out of nowhere I got sidelined by gut issues that lasted roughly ten hours. It was awful. I remember calling on Self energy from within, from my ancestors, from the Universe, from anywhere. I even noted there were some nurses in the front row of the theater, just in case. I was in bad shape.”
“Somehow I made it through the night and finished the training. My hard working managers value being reliable and had me push through in spite of the pain. I should have gone to the hospital, but as I learned from a few hospital visits in the years that followed, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Rarely can they do much for abdominal pain.”
“It was a long, lonely, scary and painful road to get some answers, a journey that lasted several years and still isn’t entirely over. After just about every diagnostic test was done, ruling out different cancers and other illnesses, we tried a new antibiotic that I knew was the answer within the first 48 hours. I have SIBO–Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth. It’s incredibly common and caused by many things and involved in many conditions.”
“Much of SIBO is still a mystery to me, but I’m happy to say I’m doing much better thanks to a variety of interventions. Besides my naturopathic doctor and a supportive community, I’m particularly grateful to have had IFS to lean on. It felt like a huge relief to witness how well my parts got aligned around helping me heal. That can only be a testament to having used this model for so long.”
“My most sensitive parts were despairing and some very caring managers made sure I got the nourishment I needed. My award-winning rebellious firefighters knew they had to support the discipline required to heal, and happily relaxed.
“Of course, I had to keep checking in and doing all the hard work to care for myself, which included cooking every single meal and following a very restrictive diet. It was hard! And a little ridiculous. But my inner teamwork made all the difference.”
IFS helped Mariel not only to manage the effects of gut troubles on her life, but also to support her in choosing behaviors that would help her heal.
“I know it impacted my energy, which impacted my parts. It impacted my sleep, which impacted my parts. My inner team had to work well together, and not rebel with eating the bad things, and not be too freaked out about always doing it perfectly.”
Practice Checking in with the Gut
IFS starts with tending to internal sensations, and many parts can be discovered by checking in with feelings in the body—often, in fact, in the gut.
Take a moment to slow down and feel inside. What do you feel in your stomach, right now? Do you notice any sensations or emotions? Is there any message coming from there? If you had to give a color to the sensations you feel when you tune into your gut, what would this color be? If these experiences made sound, what sounds would they make?
You might also notice nothing—perhaps a feeling of blankness or numbness. Note that this blankness is also worth noticing, and might even point to a part (perhaps a part whose tendency it is to cut you off from your physical experience). What might this part need from you?
Practicing tending to sensations in the moment can be one step toward learning how to interact with your parts as they come into awareness. And in learning to listen and tend to your parts instead of acting from them, you begin to experience the world from the confident, calm, and compassionate place of Self-energy more often. Check out our blog post on mindfulness, IFS, and chronic stress to learn more about how to manage chronic stress and tend to your parts with IFS.
Conclusion: Unlocking the Mind-Body Connection with IFS and the Gut-Brain Axis
The gut-brain axis is an important conduit through which our parts and biology communicate with thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. This connection can greatly influence our overall health and well-being. Through the lens of IFS, we tune into our inseparable bodymind, learning to honor and tend to our diverse inner landscape of parts. Taking care to support the gut-brain axis can have a profound impact on both physical and emotional health, enabling us to access more Self-energy for deep internal work. IFS offers a safe and compassionate framework for navigating our system with compassion and curiosity.
A therapist at the IFS Telehealth Collective can help you find and connect with the parts that need to be seen, heard, and ultimately healed. If you live in California, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, or Oregon, please contact our Client Care Coordinator or call 503-447-3244.
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