#how someone would end up thinking that efnisien had anything other than

[not-poignant]

Hi. Why is Efnicien worried that people might think his surgery scar looks like an omega scar? Omegas have a bite scar, not a surgery, and the bite scar is a different shape. And omega's scar is probably in a different place?

Hi anon,

TL;DR: The answers to all of these are in the story.

It sounds like in bringing your own assumptions into the story, you might have missed the repeated times Efnisien's surgical scar has been described as ugly, or described as being in the exact place omegas get bitten because it involved the removal of the Kaeper glands.

I've found five different places and quotes in the story that all talk about this but instead of listing them out one by one, I'm just going to say that it does literally say in the story that a very ugly scar with bumps, divots and textured patches, (so ugly that Temsen's new surgery looks like a neat little line over a much worse scar) is directly over the Kaeper glands. It is also described multiple times in the story that it is the Kaeper glands that need to be bitten to ensure a Claim, and for an omega to develop a proper omega scent. Crielle removing them means they're not there to bite, but also leaves a scar where an alpha would bite - so no, an omega's scar would never be in a different place, it literally has to be exactly where the surgical scar is, that was the whole point of the surgery.

This sounds circuitous because it is, and it feels like you may have skimmed a lot of sections of the story to miss this. That's fine! But it also means when you have questions, most of the time the answers will actually be in the story and you can just go check.

I don't know why you've assumed that all omega scars just look like a normal bite? They haven't been described this way in this series, but I don't know if you've read any of the other stories to know this. You can trust Efnisien when he says that it's bad enough that anyone who saw it would think he was a claimed omega. There's a reason no one says 'omg no they wouldn't! the scar wouldn't even be in that place! it doesn't even look like a bite!' - They agree with him. You can trust the story, anon.

Sometimes it can be best not to assume what's happening if it means you're missing parts of the story that would answer all of your questions. Esp if those details have been repeated across many chapters.

It's not unusual for omegaverse stories to show that abused omegas often have very ugly scars on the back of their neck due to being bitten multiple times, bitten violently, having the skin torn off the back of the neck, being mauled etc. That's not unique to the Underline universe. Efnisien's not wrong to be worried that the scarring could be mistaken - especially at a distance - as a bite scar. Even up close, it would look like a neat surgical scar potentially over a very messy bite scar.

I don't know or think you've read any of the other stories, but Underline the Gold also mentions an extremely ugly claiming/bite scar on the back of the neck for Flitmouse too.

No character in the Underline universe has ever been described as having a neat bite scar on the back of their neck when they've been Claimed!

[not-poignant]

HELLO i have been LOVING utb and its companion stories and like. i have been. Especially struck by the small glimpses you have given us of garys mother - shes clearly such an important influence on this garys life, would you be at all willing to tell us more about her? she seems to have gone ahead and raised an objectively good man in a bad system and i am looking with rapt attention!! ty <3

Hi hi!

I don't know a great deal about Gary's family, he's very secretive and doesn't really let me know much about his background until it's relevant and he's always been that way.

So anything I'm about to say could change in the canon at a moment's notice, because if something else fits him better in the story, or suits him better, that's where I'll go.

Generally, I think Gary's parents were alphas, and his mother in particular was very grounded, stable and caring. It's not that uncommon for many alphas to have good parents, because we sort of see that with Anton, Kadek, Caleb, and many of the other alpha characters in the story. It's just Efnisien's experience has been with some of the worst ones. But a lot of the alphas that end up at Hillview have been raised with love but also structure.

I think Gary's family was academic, and very much 'you are going to university and you are getting a higher education' and I think in an ideal world they wanted him to be a professional academic basically, and not end up managing a facility like Hillview. They fully expected him to be a lecturer or professor, and I think Gary's other parent may have been.

Gary was raised around a lot of books, and a lot of fine objects, he definitely came from affluence, and his family were quite open-minded in the way they view omegas and alphas in general. They wouldn't be the kind of people who would do business with someone like Crielle.

Beyond that, I think his parents have both passed away (though I'm not sure!) and I don't think he has much other family, at least none that he keeps in touch with. I feel like, by the time James died, both of Gary's parents had passed away, but I'm not sure how, and I'm not sure under what circumstances. So Gary really couldn't go to his parents to talk to them about it, which is what he wanted to do more than anything.

Gary loved his parents and was extremely loyal to them, which isn't uncommon in peak alphas (see: Gwyn). So they gave him a really good grounding in life, particularly his mum, who helped him understand how much power he had in the world!

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! I'm a huge fan of your work and deeply enjoying FFS rn, it really shows the love and care you've put into this world and characters and it's an amazing read 🥰🧡

Idk if you've actually answered this question before or if it's a bit too much? So feel free to skip it. Do you have any advice on how to write a therapist and sessions with them? And to go along with that, a therapist&patient relationship that doesn't feel inauthentic but that's a healthy one?

I've had to visit both psychiatrists and psychologists a couple of times along my life, which has almost always been a positive experience to me, but when I get down to business and want to write a character going to therapy, I fall into a bunch of the psychoanalytic clichés US films have hammered us down with, even if I'm not from an Anglophile country!

Thanks a bunch in advance!! Ilu, have a nice start of the year🧡✨

Hiya anon!

I have a few thoughts about writing therapy sessions so I’m just going to put them down in no particular order.

Firstly, I don’t actually think it’s always a good idea to write therapy in stories, and a lot of the time I avoid writing it even when a character is actively seeing a therapist. This is particularly true in The Wind that Cuts the Night where all we see of Alex and his therapist are snippets, and nothing more than that, because therapy sessions would slow down the pacing, focus and value of the story.

Where possible, characters don’t see therapists, but talk to people in a way that is therapeutic, usually with love interests or members of the ensemble cast (Augus and Fenwrel in The Court of Five Thrones, Jack and Eva in The Golden Age that Never Was, Jack and North in From the Darkness We Rise/Into Shadows We Fall, Cullen and Cassandra, Cullen and Bull in Stuck on the Puzzle). All of those characters need therapy, but writing therapy sessions tends to slow down the pace of a fic pretty dramatically, and even I had misgivings about writing Efnisien’s sessions with Dr Gary at first because I’m acutely aware of the fact that:

1. Therapy sessions can be draggy and boring 2. They often take away important emotional realisations from other characters, ruining potential hurt/comfort and character relationship development moments with your actual cast / love interests 3. Fiction is meant to be fiction, not reality. 4. A lot of therapy sessions are actually not that interesting to sit in or write or observe, which is why writers do often find themselves falling into certain cliches while writing them to make them more interesting. Even I cut out huge chunks of sessions to get to the more interesting parts, lol. 5. You can write a character going to therapy without writing the therapy. You can just choose to have the character remember bits and pieces of the session later as it’s relevant to their life. 6. Therapy is different for everyone, and some readers (myself included) don’t enjoy reading it when the therapy is a kind that doesn’t resonate or feel right.

So you really need to ask yourself why you want to write therapy specifically, because a lot of the time it gets boring or - as you point out - falls into cliched territory. Writing a character going to a doctor a lot in detail for regular injections is boring. Writing them thinking about how they have to do this in brief while their love interest is sympathetic to them getting those injections is more interesting. Writing a character suffering from an illness that they need regular injections for, with their love interest comforting them? Interesting.

Falling Falling Stars is a unique fic in that Efnisien has no one before he meets Arden, except for Dr Gary and Gwyn. If you’re writing an FFS style fic, writing therapy sessions might be appropriate. It might be worth really thinking about the kind of fics you want to write, why you want to write therapy, how that will affect your pacing, etc.

If you’re still dead set on writing therapy sessions, then I have some suggestions re: writing more realistic/healthy therapy and how to find that knowledge yourself, and I don’t really know how to shorthand some of it:

1. Get books on therapy that are designed for the therapist. These are often expensive, but sometimes libraries stock them - and university libraries in particular will often have photocopy abilities (or you can just photograph the pages you need) because these books look at how sessions should be structured. Books with case studies are ideal, since they often show dialogue chains between the client and therapist. Books that obviously deal with the mental illnesses you’re planning on writing about are the most ideal.

2. With a view to this, learn about different therapeutic modalities (for example are you trying to write psychology or psychoanalysis or both? Are you writing social work? Are you writing cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, expressive therapies, narrative therapy, transcendental therapy?) Be aware that different modalities have different session structures and learn what they are. Wikipedia is your friend, but your closest friend will be actually acquiring textbooks on the subject. This is a pretty significant financial barrier at times, I’ve been collecting books like this on psychology since like 1997.

3. Learn about your character’s mental instabilities that require them to go to a therapist and then look up the most recommended forms of therapy for your character’s specific issues. Will they suit your character? Why/why not? Will they have a therapist who realises and switches modality if it doesn’t suit? Or will they be lucky and find someone who helps them straight away?

4. All therapy sessions have a structure to them. And therapy often has a narrative arc through the course of therapy over many sessions. They should generally have the attempt at a beginning (greeting / setting up the problem to be discussed), middle (highlighting the source of conflict or inner conflict) and end (helping the client to focus on less stressful things, possible homework assigned, and potentially talking about future work/sessions). Learn this structure. Even if you’re not writing the whole session, you need to know where in the session you’re writing, beginning/middle/end will be different tonally. Structures will be different per therapeutic modality, and a therapist that knows many different modalities (like Dr Gary) will often be using slightly different structures each time depending on the character’s mood/issue.

5. In a healthy therapist/client relationship there will be the ability to discuss boundaries, grievances and the therapist won’t be revealing much about their personal life at all (unless anecdotally it’s super relevant and even then it will be deliberately vague). This is one of those things that will - in many cases - make for more boring sessions on the page, depending on the ‘client.’ For example, if you’re writing someone seeing a therapist for the first time, it might realistically take months or years before they start showing progress or trust. That’s not interesting (there’s a reason ‘therapy fiction’ isn’t a genre), so of course it’s tempting to shortcut into more dramatic moments.

*

I would say if you’re finding yourself leaning towards more cliched or dramatic forms of writing re: therapy, your writing brain may sense that the entire scene/s may not be suited to the story, and is trying to find a way to make them more interesting to yourself and the reader. If that’s not the case, then a lot more research is needed! It’s time to sink many hours into actually understanding what you’re trying to write. This doesn’t matter as much if you’re writing unrealistic or unhealthy therapy, but it’s 100% necessary when you’re trying to write healthier therapy depictions.***

Also a couple of sessions of experience is a start, but you might want to watch or find a way to watch more therapy sessions, because you’ve missed out on experiencing longer arcs, different modalities etc. (This is where my hands on experience with 19 therapists since 1995 is actually really helpful, lmao - I’ve had close to like 800~ sessions by now, with good and bad therapists; I cannot pretend that hasn’t given me a knowledge base that most people don’t share). You can still learn that stuff via research, MedCircle on Youtube is a good place to start, since it offers 30 minute snapshots on what CBT and DBT sessions will look like etc. and has some great playlists.

Most fics I’ve read don’t do a great job of depicting therapy, but the Babes!verse series by @rynfinity has probably some of the most realistic and still really interesting sessions I’ve read as an ongoing arc. The series is long, because it needs to be re: what it’s dealing with, but it’s great, and I definitely recommend looking at another example of how an author tackles these sorts of scenes. Out of the Mouths of Babes / The March of the Damned are the two intertwined series.

I apologise if this sounds discouraging overall, or daunting, but I just want to stress there’s a reason that I’m often not writing therapy in my writing, as anything more than the occasional scene with a non-therapist, or snapshots that are reflected on and that’s it. Falling Falling Stars is the exception to the rule, and unless you’re writing an exception to the rule as well, it’s really worth reflecting on the first six points I wrote - it’ll save you a fuckton of time and research. And if you go ahead with it, I wish you well! :D

*** Also disclaimer: But I still am writing very indulgent therapy that is not beholden to being either a 100% healthy or 100% realistic depiction. The fact is, real therapy sessions are pretty boring for observers except for maybe ten or twenty minutes in the middle at times.

(ETA: It’s just occurred to me that therapy fiction does exist, esp. in the mass media, but that it is - afaik - all unrealistic, dramatised or unhealthy. But if you want to watch a great show - I highly recommend In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne, just by aware that it is depicting, for the most part, unhealthy dynamics which are more character studies than anything).

[not-poignant]

(this might be a bit personal, and by all means please don't feel pressured to answer) but considering how dark some of your stuff can get, have you ever been troubled by some of the characters/their actions in your stories (and semi-related) had to take some time to cope with writing a difficult scene?

This is a tough one so I’m going to put a lot of it under a read more (sorry phone browsers).

I’ve had the occasional moment of struggling with content because of being troubled by it.

But by contrast it’s funny because, I think some of the most difficult scenes for others, are actually some of the easiest for me to write. For example, the chapter where Connor is basically kidnapped by Gabriel and given the highball, was so easy to write it was like swimming (which is the only sports-like skill I’m good at). If everything could be like that, oh my goodness, I can’t even imagine. It was an intense, emotionally fraught, joyful experience of the likes I don’t know how to explain to other people who don’t experience that.

So there’s not always any rhyme or reason to it either. I struggled with significant chunks of Strange Sights. I couldn’t finish The Drawn Bead because it just felt like we were heading towards torture porn but I also knew I couldn’t do justice to the horror of Gwyn’s memory AND it has a tragic ending and I struggle to write those for longer pieces. I tend to struggle with characters being separated from each other. So the beginning of Into Shadows We Fall, when Jack and Pitch are completely separated from each other, that was so difficult for me personally, that I actually ended up massively shortening how long they were meant to be separated for. Even though Pitch and Jack have a really thorny relationship when Pitch is returned, I still preferred that to their being absent from each other.

But I didn’t have as much of a problem with it, when it was Gwyn and Augus.

It’s not predictable, sometimes I enjoy writing the troubling content on a very visceral level. Either because I feel like I’m in my element as a writer. Or I know it’s going to be so satisfying (for me) for the character to recover from it later. Or I know that it’s going to lead to something I’ve been craving writing. I mean I wouldn’t write so much of that kind of content if I didn’t get something really tangible out of it.

There are still things that surprise me, still scenes that become more difficult as I write them, not because of ‘technical writing reasons’ but because of the thematic content. Often, for me, it highlights things I probably won’t enjoy writing again. Strange Sights for me worked as a series of oneshots, but as a long-term abusive and rape-filled relationship, it didn’t actually become comfortable for me until Augus began to be allowed to have boundaries. So I probably won’t write a couple that toxic ever again outside of novellas and PWPs. With the beginning of Into Shadows We Fall, I learned I had to be really careful with character separation, and that three chapters was about my limit (from memory, I think I stuck to this - or just about - in COFT).

But...maybe it would make people feel better if I said I really struggled with writing Gavril taunting Jack. Or Jack being whipped by Bunnymund. Or Augus torturing him in chapter 4 of ISWF. Or Gwyn being tormented by his mother. Or Mosk having flashbacks of Davix and Olphix. I find them intense, sure, but I don’t dislike doing it. Even though I often really feel for the character who is experiencing the torment. Gwyn goes through a fairly graphic description an MRI the next chapter in SOTS, and though I myself actually had an MRI phobia for a few years (it was the reason I developed claustrophobia), I found the scene itself disturbing, but deeply satisfying enough that I wouldn’t call it something where I needed to take time out to cope.

As for me being troubled by how the characters are actually behaving... This is tricky. I mean of course a lot of them are doing stupid, terrible, harmful, cruel, illegal things. I don’t condone it in reality. But thinking of these things happening in fiction is different to thinking about them happening in reality. The fact is, ‘dubcon’ in reality is just rape, and if I applied real world standards to non-real scenarios filled with tropes and the Id, yeah sure, I would be troubled, but I’d also not be writing any of this content.

As an addendum to that, for me their behaviour always makes sense to me from their perspective. Whether it’s Mosk being emotionally abusive with no concept of it. Gwyn raping Augus. Augus killing Efnisien. Pitch in TGATNW being heartless and constantly pushing Jack away with very cruel behaviour. Even Davix and Olphix. Whatever their behaviour is, if I can understand their motives behind it, I tend to struggle with it a lot less.

I don’t like to squick myself with my own writing, as a general rule. So no, I’m not looking to write things where I need to take breaks from my own writing to cope. But I think to be blunt, my life is filled with things more challenging than what I put a lot of my characters through, and my emotional ability to handle disturbing behaviour is broader than I think it would be for some other people. It doesn’t mean I lack empathy or compassion, if anything I hope that through my writing, people can see that I have great compassion for the characters that often suffer the most, through my need to build up a chosen/found family around them, and pour love onto them, even if they don’t know what to do with it.

Those that are here in the pit of ‘enjoying Pia’s writing’ are probably here because the comfort when it comes is - I hope - tangible and visceral, the loneliness when it’s comforted away reaches past the screen and means something. And holding onto that thread myself is why I enjoy the hurt part of the hurt/comfort as much as the comfort part, but also why I don’t like to write one without the other.

And finally, most of my POV characters, by the time we get to them, have been through their darkest moments in their pasts. The only way we often access their worst moments is through flashbacks, memories, dialogue or their aversions. That might feel very extreme to some, but for me, it means by the time we get to them, they’re already starting to recover something for themselves. The worst has happened.

Even if they go through something during the story, say - Connor in Eversion with Gabriel - I just think ‘it’s okay, they’re already in the story, their support is there, they’re going to be okay.’ It’s...extremely rare for me to write stories where the character goes through their worst trauma within the story. Science of Fear is an exception to that, but as most people know if they’ve read it - Nathan blacks out early on, and then once more, we only find out the details of his worst trauma in the form of nightmares, flashbacks and dialogue.

That’s partly because I feel personally that I write trauma recovery stories, and not trauma stories (it doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but to me it’s a huge difference). And then secondly because there is a buffer through the trauma itself being in the form of a memory. That...makes it a lot easier for me to cope with. I’ve spent my entire life learning how to cope with flashbacks, after all. But also, even if the character is clearly destroyed by a flashback, the fact is, they survived it. The flashback is living proof they survived it.

But anyway, I’d say me taking breaks from my own writing because of disturbing content specifically doesn’t really happen anymore and I can’t remember the last time it did. I take breaks because I’m struggling with a chapter - i.e. how to write it mechanically, or because I feel like it doesn’t have the emotional strength I want it to have yet. I am actually very comfortable with many of the themes I write, I’d have a far squickier, grosser, harder time writing pregnancy, or a story filled with only fluff, which is y’know, why...I don’t really write those things, lol. I’m too much of a hedonist to want to write content that scared me away from my own content? Like, you do you, folks, but I’m going to be over here actually enjoying what I write, disturbing matter and all.

That doesn’t mean other people can’t have a hard time with it. It’s totally okay for people to take breaks from whatever they read, for whatever reason. And since a lot of the characters I write do engage in troubling behaviour, it wouldn’t be great if people said ‘that behaviour is okay to do in real life’ because it isn’t. But if someone said ‘god I love that villain because he’s awful’ then yeah, I’m right there with pom poms, because that’s my jam too. And if someone else said ‘I can’t stand that villain because he’s awful’ then yeah, that’s awesome as well.

And if people need to take breaks while reading what I’m writing because they’re engaging in self-care, then good! I’ve needed to do the same with other people’s writing. Because the journey of the reader is different to the journey of the writer (this is for me, truest when writing porn, lmao, I’m not turning myself on when I write those scenes, but I sure as hell hope I’m turning on at least some readers --> so if I’m not walking away from the disturbing content in my own writing, that doesn’t mean I’m not hoping people won’t be disturbed when reading it).

[not-poignant]

Speaking of the stomach symptoms that Ef has to go through, how do you cope with your own symptoms and do you have any protips for dealing with the pain?

Hi anon!

This one's tough, because the cause of the pain can be so multi-factorial. Digestive issues - for the best pain treatment and management - require:

1. A diagnosis 2. Understanding your allergies and intolerances*** (and they are not the same thing) 3. Understanding your triggers

The thing is, a diagnosis can be as good as a cure for some people who are lucky enough have treatable digestive conditions. A person with a finicky digestive system who learns they're gluten intolerant has a cure, even if it's not an easy one (avoid all gluten - symptoms and pain gone! Huzzah!)

Anyone who is having difficult digestive times should, imho, never just leave that as something to self-diagnose and just accept. I get diagnosis is a matter of privilege in some cases, but where it's not, this is one area where you don't want to fuck around and find out. There are literally hundreds of different things it could be, all with different treatments, medications, options, and supports out there. And I do know people who've ended up with severe autoimmune conditions and losing like, feet of their intestinal tracts, or cancer-like conditions, because of chronic diarrhea in particular, because they just 'waited' on the pain they were experiencing in their digestive tract.

And then the rest of this post is mostly like, 'I can't help you because bodies are diverse and 'stomach symptoms like Ef' means hundreds to thousands of different illnesses and hell, I've suggested pain management techniques in that story that you can try right now, and also I can't tolerate any pain treatments so good luck anon but I got nothing.' But like, the long scenic route version.

I can't speak to your issues, anon, because I don't know what your diagnoses are. There's not really many 'idiopathic digestive issue' diseases, but there are a lot of chronic illnesses that can be diagnosed through exclusion that can't be cured. But again, of those - and there are many - I don't know what yours are. And what I have, may not apply to you. It may not even apply to someone with exactly the same symptoms I do.

A person having Efnisien's symptoms could just have some intolerances that could be easily cured by avoiding those foods. Another person might have cancer. Like...you'd be amazed how many diseases cause non-specific and painful cramps and diarrhea. Sometimes it seems like all of them can.

For example, one of my many digestive illnesses is severe medication resistant gastro-esophageal reflux disease. Everyone in my family on my mother's side has it to varying degrees.

My grandma has needed to have two Nissen fundoplication surgeries to survive it, and has taken a proton-pump inhibitor since they were invented to manage it (since the 1980s), and because she's been taking a PPI for 40+ years, her stomach is now also riddled with hundreds of (so far) benign polyps and cysts as a result of the medication that she must take.

She avoids certain foods that I don't have to avoid, but I also need to take more medications than her, my food triggers are different to her food triggers, my brother's food triggers are different to my food triggers and he has the same disease and presumably, with a very similar genetic make up because it comes through the family line. His is very severe like mine, and nearly caused esophageal cancer for going so long untreated (the medication to treat has side effects, but leaving medication-resistant GERD alone can cause cancer of the throat and esophagitis, which my brother has been diagnosed with). My sister also has it. My Mum's is very mild, and she just has to avoid certain foods but needs no medications. And so on and so forth.

So how I manage the pain of just that one digestive disease - for I have more than one - (PPI and H2 receptor antagonist, certain food avoidance, no NSAIDs at all) is different to how my grandmother manages the pain (two surgeries, food avoidance that I don't have to avoid, PPI only), is different to how my mother manages the pain (food avoidance only, and different foods to me), is different to how my sister manages the pain (heat packs). Even the specialists we see are different, and our doctors suggest different management protocols. In that sense, I'm lucky, because my GERD can be medicated and I can generally enjoy eating and not choking on my own stomach every single night. Though I still have 'breakthrough days' where I do wake up choking on my own stomach acid, and have a sore throat / cough for the rest of the day.

So like, I can't take anti-inflammatories for the pain because that affects the stomach lining and mine's already fucked from GERD, but you might be able to. I can't take Buscopan for the pain, but you might be able to. I can't take Immodium on bad days, but you might be able to! Don't get me started on opioids or tramadol, it is very much like my body wants to suffer sometimes, the way I can't tolerate meds that are specifically for pain management. :/ I highly recommend looking up some support groups for the diagnosis/es you have, and seeing what people are recommending.

Because I don't tolerate almost all painkillers, I can't take any pain relief for my digestive illness/es (of which there are like...four, not including doctors thinking that my genetic cancer is causing some of it too, which is just a whole lot of oh well) that isn't just paracetamol (acetaminophen) which doesn't work.

There are no medications that help my chronic diarrhea at the moment, because it doesn't seem to be an autoimmune disease (at least so far, despite flagging for mild autoimmune stuff in every bloodtest I've ever had since I was 18 years old, but that's another story), but if yours is autoimmune in nature, there will be options that aren't pain-medication that may help you, and anything that helps with symptoms also, by default, helps with pain.

Some of my symptoms/pain is stress-triggered (my PTSD and my tumours can cause massive and unusual amounts of adrenaline to dump through my system, and one of the side effects of adrenaline entering the system is diarrhea - it's part of the flight/fight response: digestive disturbance). Therefore, less stress would certainly help me. But one of my specialists just laughed at me gently when I asked him how people stress less. You have to be awfully privileged financially to even try, even without a diagnosis of PTSD. And my tumours will still likely do this to me for the rest of my life, whenever they just feel like manufacturing hormones. They're neuroendocrine tumours, they want to fuck up my hormonal system, lmao.

Basically, anon, your question is kind of too vague to suggest much more than what's in Falling Falling Stars - perhaps some pain killers, perhaps some food avoidance, perhaps some heat or cold packs. Who knows? I have no idea what your diagnoses are, what you can tolerate, and I know what other people use for support, I can't, so I can't speak to how good those things are.

I'm going to level with you, anon. I have no protips for dealing with the pain aside from sucking it up and dealing with it, because I have almost no other options myself except to develop a high pain tolerance (which I have, which is terrible, because it means I wait too long to see doctors for very serious issues, and this has fucked me over more than once - one of my specialists literally yelled at me for it only last year: 'WHY DIDN'T YOU COME IN SOONER, DO YOU NOT TRUST US' which was great).

I'm really hoping you are not in my situation, because my 'dealing with the pain' is a version of 'I am in moderate to significant and sometimes severe pain 24/7 and no one can do anything to help me.' I wish it was only my digestive issues causing that, but the Fibromyalgia is certainly part of that. Sometimes the only way to deal with pain is to see a psychologist, and learn how to live with pain.

Find the support groups for your illness/es anon, they will have big personal lists that everyone is doing, they will be highly diverse and everyone will be doing something different for pain management, from ketamine infusions, to low-dose naltrexone, to ultrasound therapy, to heat packs, to a billion different medications, some for pain, some for your diagnosis. Having a diagnosis will help, because there are medications for specific diseases and disorders, someone with Crohn's will be on a very different cocktail of drugs compared to someone with IBS-D type compared to someone with IBS-mixed type, compared to someone with food intolerances.

And if you're lucky, your issues will be caused by intolerances, in which case you have a cure, even if it's an inconvenient one. But that cure (avoiding the food) can permanently remove the pain in some cases.

I'm sorry I can't be more help. There's just...thousands of things that can cause diarrhea and stomach cramps, and thousands of ways to manage those things. It's too nonspecific, beyond what I've already suggested in Falling Falling Stars. And anything more than that comes with side effects, and it's not good to already strain a digestive system that's strained, when you can potentially avoid it.

*** Please remember that there is almost no way to know your intolerances except through a food elimination diet, and anyone trying to sell you a blood test that tells you otherwise (i.e. naturopaths) is a fucking charlatan. There are, I believe, only 2-3 intolerances that can be read through blood test, one of them is lactose. There is no such thing as an accurate 'intolerance blood panel.' And only an allergist can diagnose allergies (with the exception of coeliac and again probably lactose issues lol), and finally, allergy =/= intolerance. Elimination diets should be overseen with the help of a doctor or specialist or dietician, because they are difficult to do and can cause or exacerbate eating disorders and disordered eating. I am not a doctor, always talk to your doctor about this stuff first, if you're concerned.