Oh yes. Very very possible it is the stress/feelings that come first and the IBS after. In fact it seems likely based on what you say. Though there is no way for me to know for sure.
For a period of about 2-3 weeks a few years ago, during a very stressful time at work, I developed a repetitive stress injury. I simply couldn’t type for more than a few minutes at a time, or my hands and forearms would hurt tremendously.
It was very alarming as I make a lot of my living from my technical skills.
I also read very disheartening things, that I had been causing this injury for many years before, it had built up over time, that each time I type I re-injure it, that gotta take it slow… …
However then I came across the book The Mindbody Prescription. I highly recommend you read it as it conveys the gist of the idea extremely well of what is known as “psychosomatic pain”.
To the contrary of what is commonly believed, psychosomatic pain is not “made up”. It is actual pain that you feel (or actual gastrointestinal distress, etc…). However, in these cases, the source or cause of the pain, is psychic, not physical, in nature.
Reading the first part of the book made a compelling enough case for me to consider that my pain was in fact caused by essentially a deep refusal to look at my emotions. I considered that it might be indeed that my psyche was essentially finding a way to manifest (actual) physical pain as a distraction from having to feel the uncomfortable emotions that I was super stressed at work.
I saw signs right away that it didn’t make sense per se to think it’s only physical. For example I could never quite exactly localize it – when I thought I could it would shift slightly. And the pain only happened while doing work-related things on the computer, for example. I didn’t experience hand or forearm pain in other circumstances, and I was even able to rock climb. I put it down to well maybe the motion is so different that it doesn’t trigger the same pain … …
However one day I decided to test it. If it is true, then I should be able to type just fine and not experience pain. So I booted up an online typing competition game, started going… the first second or two was fine, then I started to feel the pain coming on, and then… ! ! … the pain completely vanished! I was able to finish the race completely fine without any finger issues, and this was me going at my full typing speed.
So it was obvious then to me it’s physically caused… and all it really took to ‘cure’ myself, was simply to consider that it might be psychically caused.
With the benefit of hindsight, what clearly happened is that I spent two nights working on a powerpoint presentation, doing a lot of CTRL+C and CTRL+V, which developed an actual injury in my hand. The actual injury must have healed in a day or two, but it triggered the psychosomatic symptoms and turned it from a normal easily-healed acute physical injury into a chronic impossible-to-heal physical injury. This is a common way that it happens, apparently.
Another is that some people will say experience back pain… then they find a willing back surgeon and get a back surgery (!), at which point the back pain is cured, and then … … they get shoulder pain! Turns out then it’s a bad rotator cuff, they get the shoulder surgery and then … … pain appears somewhere else! This is what happens when people don’t treat the issue – the psyche finds a plausible way to continue the pain symptom, given what happened (i.e. if back surgery happened that must cure back pain so now ‘I’ must find another excuse…)
All that being said, your IBS could be physically caused… but… I highly recommend you read the book and give it a try 
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Also, welcome back! 
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Cheers,
Claudiu