Body
Your stomach hurts every time something difficult is coming and the gastro found nothing wrong.
You feel stomach pain reliably before difficult things. You’ve started planning around it. Your gastroenterologist found nothing structural and offered you a PPI or an antispasmodic. You’re still in pain.
You’re using your stomach to announce what the rest of you has been too busy to say.
The stomach kept announcing.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
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You very likely came out of childhood with a gut that learned to register stress directly. You may have grown up in a household where you couldn’t safely name what was bothering you, so your stomach learned to do the announcing for you. You may have absorbed your parents’ tension through your gut as a child and never built another way to process it. You may have lived through a period of high stress that retrained your gut to flag every difficult moment.
“It’s just stress” is correct and not actionable. You’re producing the pain through real biological pathways. Your gut and your brain are densely connected, and when stress hits, your gut registers it. The medication addresses what’s downstream and doesn’t reach what you’ve been signaling about.
For related body-stress patterns, see I have IBS and I have psychosomatic symptoms .
You’re using your stomach as the messenger. We work on the message.
First, strategic therapy names what your stomach has been announcing for you, alongside whatever your gastroenterologist has prescribed. Then it changes the conditions producing the announcement. We name the specific things you’ve been swallowing rather than saying, and we change what you do with them in the days before the deadlines arrive. The pain stops because the announcement stops being needed.
Sunday night becomes the night before Monday, not the night before the pain.
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