Stomach disorders. What's "sitting" in your stomach…
September 19, 2020
"It sits in my stomach", "I can't digest it", "I have a strong stomach" "I can't digest him/her", "I have a knot in my stomach"... All these expressions show the role of the stomach in the process of dealing with various, mainly difficult, situations in our everyday life.
We don't suffer from stomach disorders only when a food is acidic, but when we also have to deal with "acidic" situations in our lives.
Through the stomach the material side of life is expressed and mainly a material insecurity (hypothetical or real). We express our difficulty in accepting and managing various situations of our daily life, as well as deeper anxieties that have to do with material goods, with the live in general, as well as fear and worry about future. When we are forced to endure a situation, but find it difficult to "digest", when we do not defend ourselves, but prefer to "sit" in our stomachs, to "digest" it, when we avoid a fight at all costs, when we suppress our ambitions or work in a job below our abilities and experience it as a professional failure, when the house we live in does not satisfy us and the general quality of our life is not that that we would like to have, we are more prone to stomach upsets.
The stomach through digestion manages the food. Food, however, is not only material but also emotional. Our stomach often expresses its feeling of fear, for example, when something scares us or we sense that something bad will happen, when we take exams or when we learn bad news, etc. The person suffering from his stomach has a tendency to compromise, to suffer a situation, to let it linger instead of facing it directly.
Sometimes the glass overflows and then we have them vomiting, which is essentially the excess of emotion that overwhelms us and is thereby expelled. In the same way and motion sickness originating from the stomach. It expresses something that disgusts us, disturbs us.
People with stomach problems are characterized by a passive aggressiveness. The very nature of the stomach is partly passive. It is a sac that breaks up food via of hydrochloric acid. It does not have e.g. the clearly energetic, aggressive nature of the teeth.
But the stomach is not only passive. We could also see it as centre of strength, from where we draw strength to cope with difficult situations in our lives ("I have a strong stomach, I can endure"). There is perhaps also a conflict between the desire to live dependently in a childlike state of care and love and our strong desire for self-sufficiency, independence, adulthood. In the feeling that conquer things for myself, that I can and the manage.
When you let situations "eat" you, stress you out for a very long time and at the same time you get angry with all of them but also with yourself for feeling powerless to deal with them, stomach problems can develop into ulcer. Also several of the people who have gotten sick from cancer of the stomach, they experienced for a long time before the diagnosis of the disease, very strongly this inability to deal with difficult situations, which, however, was so intense that the sadness was greater than the anger, with the result that life has lost its meaning.
So if you suffer from stomach disorders, ask yourself: what is "sitting" in your stomach in your life? What is it that makes you the most angry at a personal, professional or family level that you avoid facing? Against what things or situations do you feel passive and weak? Are you happy with your quality of life? When you see things from a different perspective and change your attitude towards life, your health inevitably improves.
by the psychologist - psychotherapist Efi Tamboura