A close friend told me that whenever he is in the middle of a bowel movement, an overwhelming feeling of shame comes over them.
He said it only happens during the actual process of pushing it out, not before and not after. The guy told me he literally puts a towel over his head and torso while pooping because he is so shamed.
He also said that if someone comes near the door, he gets goosebumps all over his body and yells at them to “go away” really loud and can’t stand the thought of anyone being near him when he is defecating.
I asked him if he got punished for pooping as a child and he said, “not that I can remember, no.”
That’s a possibility I guess. Maybe he was beaten when he was a toddler or something. Who knows. Just wondering if this has ever been reported in the medical world.
Sure. There are tons of hangups associated with normal bodily functions that are documented in the psychiatric literature. Google psychiatry, defecation, and shame for a lot of links.
One wild guess is based on a theory of emotion identification that I read a very long time ago. Maybe a recent Psych student can help me out here.
Sometimes we label our emotions based on physiological body sensations that we are experiencing. Sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong. A classic example is that a young woman is at the Grand Canyon at a scenic overlook that juts out over the Canyon. Right when she gets to the edge, a young man walks up and stands beside her. Her heart beats a little fast, she feels a little dizzy and disoriented, and she has problems putting her words together. She looks over to the guy and tells herself she has feelings of giddyness and attraction. She attributes these feelings to the guy being there. The next day she stands at the same overlook and gets the same physiological response and she thinks to herself “Heights make me nervous.”
Maybe with “your friend” , he is wrongly associating the physical feeling of pushing out feces (overall tension, tightness in midsection, clenching his jaw, change in breathing, etc.) with shame. Maybe when he feels shame, his body responds in a similar way. Once he identifies his feeling as shame, it may just feed itself until he truly feels shame.
The persistence of “colon cleansing” among certain alt med advocates may not exactly stem from the “shame” of defecation. But if you read their literature, it’s clear that bodily wastes are viewed as something toxic and dangerous that has to be flushed artificially to prevent horrible consequences.
This fascination with colorectal contents is not grounded in science but in the peculiar attitudes people have had for centuries about a very natural process (the nineteenth century was a big time for enemas and spas/sanatoriums where you could get all those Big Bad Toxins washed out of your system).
“Colon cleansing” is useless and a waste of money, apart from the occasional cases where it spreads infection or actually damages the bowel.
, he is wrongly associating the physical feeling of pushing out feces (overall tension, tightness in midsection, clenching his jaw, change in breathing, etc.) with shame. Maybe when he feels shame, his body responds in a similar way. Once he identifies his feeling as shame, it may just feed itself until he truly feels shame.
