wowzers

i think i have ibs. my mother has ibs, and i have stomach problems that are not associated with the type of ibs she has. i am 22, and for the last 6 years i've dealt with something that i've only convinced myself to believe was IBS, although i've never had a professional opinion or read about cases anything like mine.

i'm not sure how it started - probably a bad situation with a girl - but i basically started having what felt like incomplete bowel movements. the more of them i had, the more i began to fear having them, thinking they were detrimental and harmful to me. being a paranoid and pessimistic person, i assured myself i MUST force myself to not have these "incomplete" cycles of movements.

of course, bowel movements only became stiffer, more incomplete the more i worried about this, and my life really, really became difficult to live. i went through the suicidal/depressive lifestyle that some people do for a while, and no one ever knew about it, but me. i felt my problem sounded so ludacris that it could be a severe mental disorder that i'd rather not comprehend.

eventually i began to control my ibs, i started eating bran cereal every day, and over the last 4 years or so i've introduced myself to a habit that keeps this disorder of mine to a minimum. like i said, i don't know what i have - it could be totally unrelated to ibs, but everytime i need to have a movement, if i think about fearing not having a complete bowel movement, the muscles in my stomach will cut off the bowel movement and that will be the end of it. if i relax, i can have a relatively normal movement.

now, a "relatively normal" bowel movement never feels like it used to before this problem was introduced in my life. but, when i worry about it, my muscles in my stomach or intestines seem to react to my mentality, and therefore my muscles seize up and contract, pinching off my bowel movements.

sometimes this pinch happens in such a way where i can be thinking to myself, "concentrate on something else, concentrate on something else," and sometimes i can avoid the sensation of my stomach muscles incompleting the movement, and other times (usually when i'm under high loads of stress), the "pinching off" and seizing of my muscle's normal movements happens so fast that i never had a chance to let my mentality and emotions reason the situation out.

when i do feel incomplete, i walk around for the rest of the day and the end of my anus hurts, just feeling like i couldn't complete the "duty." after a night's sleep, i'm up the next morning and i feel fine usually. i don't know if this is ibs, or if this is even normal. my bran fiber eating routine has deteriorated into eating about a teaspoon of the cereal a day, and although i can usually have relatively normal bowel movements, i wonder if they can be better? i don't know...even talking about this bothers me because i like to get things in a comfort zone and move on in my life. but having an incompeted feeling of a bowel movement is in no one's comfort zone, no matter who you are.

am i the only person out there with this TYPE of bowel problem? all ibs problems i hear usually have constipation or diahreha, but i've never heard of someone whose mind has more control over their bowel movements than their own muscles...i just wish i could have that normalcy back.