The Gut Grief Connection

Hello, welcome. You’re listening to Dr. Martha Reid Naturopathic Doctor Vancouver at Doctor’s Choice Integrative Medicine in Downtown Vancouver, a space where I bring passion, inspiration and nourishment to the conversation of your health.

So one of the things I see on a regular basis in my practice is digestive concerns, all sorts of digestive concerns, bloating, gas, soft serve stool, I like to call it. It’s like mushy ice cream that’s just kind of melted, not properly formed. Constipation, full on diarrhoea, bloating, burping, a sense of heaviness and fullness, a sense of incomplete evacuation when we move our waste, I see all sorts of things.

And for many people, we don’t have a way of knowing whether this stuff is normal. What is a normal stool? Well, for various people, that can vary a little bit, but in a nutshell, the train should ultimately arrive at about the same time every day, kind of like a Swiss watch right on time, OK? And it should happen in the morning without needing coffee or exercise or food. The very fact that you wake up and your body is acidic, you’ve packed up your waste all night long because really, quite frankly, that’s what your body’s doing when it’s sleeping. Is it’s restoring your body, it’s cleaning up. It’s packing up the waste from the day before and dropping it off on the curb so that the recycling trucks and the garbage trucks come and pick it up and off you go. So that process of bowel evacuation should happen first thing when we wake up, it ought not to be a rush-ey urgent “Oh my gosh” thing, but just a comfortable “OK, I need to use the washroom” and off we go. When that’s not happening in a really well timed expected way, there might be something going on. And then if the stool itself is not well formed, easy to pass, not particularly messy to clean up from, you ought not to see tons of food in your stool, it shouldn’t hurt to move your waste. There should not be blood or mucus which looks like nasal mucus or frothiness. There ought not to be a sheen or a slick or oil patches on the surface of the water. But just a well formed, easy to pass, pretty clean stool. And for so many of my patients, this isn’t happening. And it should also happen at least once a day.

We have in the body what’s called a gastro colic reflex. Gastro meaning your gastric organs (your stomach), and then colic, meaning your colon. So when things come into the stomach, if you haven’t moved that waste first thing, right, and then something comes into the stomach, there’s a trigger to the bowel. “Oh, there’s more stuff coming in. We need to move the train out of the station.” And so you ought to have a bowel movement. And that should happen at least once a day, if not two and potentially three times, but well spaced out, having three stool bam, bam, bam in the morning straight, one after the other. That is not a normal bowel rhythm, right? So they should be spaced out. And for so many of us, we don’t have this.

We don’t have a regular rhythm, we don’t have regular consistency. And there are many, many factors that will contribute to this. But the one I’m going to speak to today is what I like to call the gut grief connection. Western medicine is exploding right now in terms of research about the gut brain axis and how these two things are connected, right? We talk about it colloquially. Gut feelings gut instincts, right? Oh, when I’m nervous, I feel it in my tummy. I get butterflies in my stomach. So we we’ve had this deeper understanding that there’s a connection there for a really long time. We may not just have had the science to explain it. Well, in traditional Chinese medicine, which is one of the areas that I studied in, in order to be a naturopathic doctor and being certified in acupuncture, I use traditional Chinese medicine and the philosophies and the theories behind it. Traditional Chinese medicine is thousands and thousands of years old, if I’m correct, and I may not be, but I believe the early texts of traditional Chinese medicine stretched back to over 8000 years, which is amazing. And that system of medicine is truly integrated. Every organ has an emotion associated with it and a colour and a taste and a food and a season and each organ has a marriage partner, has a spouse, and those marriage partners are a team. So what affects one organ channel the spouse has a role to help relieve and release that so the body can come back into balance. So the gut grief connection from a traditional Chinese medicine perspective, as I understand it, is that the lung meridian, the emotion of the lung in Chinese medicine is grief. It’s a marriage partner is the large bowel. And the emotion of the large bowel, although there isn’t, to my knowledge, a really great translation of potentially the traditional Chinese medicine term into English, but the emotion of the large bowel is letting go. So it’s the large bowels job to let go, the griefs we experience. And that to me makes perfect sense if I pop back into my western medical mind. The large bowel is a receptacle for waste. That’s one of its primary jobs and we remove that waste. We release it ideally first thing in the morning with or without a whole lot of stimulation right so that large bowel is meant to release the physical waste, but it also releases our emotional waste. And for many of us in our society, I don’t know that we’re all taught well how to release our emotional waste. I certainly know that being a mum of two “littles”… my kids tantrum, all kids do, right? And those tantrums can be really triggering for me. And I suspect what they’re triggering is my own inner child’s tantrums that perhaps might not have been given space to be heard or expressed, right?

So my instinct often when my little soul tantrum is  “you need to go and find a space by yourself until your behaviour is appropriate”. Is what I’m thinking in my head. How many people have experienced that directed towards them or have experienced that within themselves when some around them is tantruming? Well, when we do that, I don’t think we’re giving space for the emotions that are happening inside that little person or space for the emotions happening inside ourselves. I think we suppress those emotions because they become not appropriate, so to speak. So the grief that we’re experiencing, that we’re expressing through anger or frustration, we learn to not release. We learn to hold. Well, that large bowel from a Chinese medical perspective holds the grief of the lung meridian. So perhaps, and the large bowel not moving our waist comfortably and regularly has to do with our emotional space, has to do with our grief and clinically. I see this often in my practice. So when patients come in and their digestive systems are giving them a rough go and we dig into a little bit and I look at it from that traditional Chinese medicine perspective, we start talking about grief. And grief isn’t always a trauma grief can be, for example, feeling that you’re not living true to yourself or up to the potential. You know, you can perform and or it may be being passed over for a promotion or it may be trauma regardless of the source of that grief. In the Chinese traditional Chinese medical model, the large intestine has to release it. So this has been so informing to me as a naturopathic doctor and how I can see the integration of our mind and body in the medicine that I practice. And when I look at digestive issues, with the lens of the grief connection, they resolve so much quicker for my patients.

So I hope this has been informing for you. And if you have any questions whatsoever or would like to jump into this conversation with me and I’d be happy to hear from you. So all you do is pop over to the website and book a discovery call with me and we can have a quick little chat and discuss what’s going on for you. And hopefully that will help. Take care.