Severely anxious teen with agonising anxiety triggered abdominal pains

[BlueMoanday]

My DD(17) with ADHD traits and likely on spectrum (but undiagnosed as yet) has severe anxiety.
She curls up on the floor with agonising abdominal pain, 8/10 scale, for hours. Starts when she wakes up and comes in waves. Absolutely nothing helps.
(It isn't medical - we have spent a FORTUNE on ALL the physical tests)
College is being understanding but she has missed SO MUCH.
Fluoxetine didn't work (2 months) nor propanolol added to it.
Now she is on Sertraline (50mg) .... Been on it for a week.

What has worked for your child?
How long until she might feel better on this?
If it is abdominal migraine triggered by anxiety is there anything else we can do?
It is breaking all of us.

This sounds like it might be functional pain (not structural), which means the brain is misreading signals. Have a look at pain reprocessing therapy (eg. "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon). To me, the theory makes a lot of sense.

Rachel Zofness' pain workbook for teens is good too, but based on CBT (so a different approach to The Way Out). Personally, I find the PRT approach more convincing, but the workbook is still good and explains things well to teenagers.

This might be helpful:

https://www.zoffness.com/resources

I had this when I had ME and fibromyalgia. Massive, crippling panic attacks with clawing abdominal pain. My doctor said it was vagus nerve pain and was psychological. Breathing exercises were the only thing that took the edge off it for me, along with massaging the area of pain.

@sprigatito her counsellor talked about vagus pain. We agree with that theory. It's how to stop the brain sending these damn signals

It seems that you need to find ways to calm down the brain and you probably need to do lots of different things to achieve that. I am still on that journey with my daughter too.

I thought you meant me. I'm a dope. The stress is making me not function properly. Sorry if upset anyone.

@onlytherain deep sympathies if you are going through this too. It's awful watching helplessly

@Nttttt I seem to have missed your message. Thank you.... Will look into that tiktok.
So glad you have managed to get through this! What do you think was the turning point?

And great congratulations on a happy pregnancy

Have a look at Dan Buglio on YouTube - Pain Free You. He works on mind body connection same as Claire Weekes/John Sarno. Loads of success stories of people with multiple health issues caused by stress/tension/anxiety completely recovering. It's such an awful vicious circle of the brain perceiving danger so switching on pain signals or causing physical symptoms, which then increases your perception of danger, stress, anxiety, which causes the brain to turn on more or different signals.

I wish that this was more in the mainstream. There are so many people suffering with these things and modern traditional medicine can't and won't help because doctors don't look at the mind/body connection.