Disgust - a source of fascination!
Over the course of last few years, as I deepened my inner work of integration and becoming whole by embracing neglected parts of self, I began to feel distant from my close friends and colleagues. In a few instances when I tried to set healthy boundaries - which really means that I refused to go along like I used to and felt upset and expressed my disapproval, I was met with - “you’re disgusting, come back when you know how to behave yourself! Who behaves like this?!
I wasn’t expecting such a response. Doing so was very hard for me to begin with. Nevertheless, feeling hurt and humiliated, my attention turned to the little place for certain behaviors and ways of being that represented the life within me. Sure, I could have acted with more composure and ‘compromised’ - it’s not as if I hadn’t tried. However, when one has spent a lifetime pleasing other people and constantly accommodating and making room for their needs, wishes and desires, breaking out of the mold cannot be expected to come easily. The journey to set boundaries, and choose to explore new relationships and professional opportunities that supported personal well being had to be made - staying in the old mold was not an option. And the reason quite simple - staying stuck meant death of parts of self, or exiling them and dealing with their unexpected and uninvited arrival in strange and twisted ways. I knew this viscerally through numerous accidents, injuries, illnesses, misfortune and getting sick with COVID thrice. Walking this journey meant getting underneath this label of “you’re disgusting!"
Disgust is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious or something considered offensive, distasteful, or unpleasant. And my stand seemed to trigger this. Experts say it is an emotion that is believed to have evolved to serve a specific function in protecting us from dangerous and harmful substances. While this uncomfortable emotion is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), it is secondarily experienced with anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell, touch, or vision. For example, mMusically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds.
The only person – probably – ever to give a speech at the United Nations featuring a plastic poo, Valerie Curtis, was one of the world’s first “disgustologists” and was dubbed by her fans the “Queen of Hygiene”. A behavioural scientist, she devoted her career to researching and championing hygiene, sanitation and behaviour change. She wrote a new synthesis about disgust as a system that evolved to motivate infectious disease avoidance. While she advocated for vital practical and intellectual reasons to understand disgust betters so we could combat the behavioural causes of infectious and chronic disease, her work revealed a whole another reason for its existence - disgust as a source of much human suffering; it plays an underappreciated role in anxieties and phobias such as obsessive compulsive disorder, social phobia and post-traumatic stress syndromes; it is a hidden cost of many occupations such as caring for the sick and dealing with wastes, and self-directed disgust afflicts the lives of many, such as the obese and fistula patients. Disgust is used and abused in society, being both a force for social cohesion and a cause of prejudice and stigmatization of out-groups. And this hit home - change and living in ways that I perceived to be healthy were unacceptable to those around me.
Continuing my search for the revulsion and stigmatization that parts of me were triggering, I found myself reach for the work of Salman Akhtar, a poet and an Indian-American psychoanalyst. Similar to Valerie Curtis, he endorsed the idea that all triggers for disgust - ingestion, smell, sight, skin-contact - had to do with something revolting, coming close to or getting into one’s body. However, he noted that disgust could be evoked by psychologically and ethically noxious stimuli as well. For example, learning that our parents were having sexual intercourse, when we were children, describing - in some detail - oral sex to young girl who is culturally repressed and sexually un-informed from a small town, discovering that your sibling demanded to be paid rent when your son asked for a place to stay in their house for a week for a job interview, etc. These examples shone a light on the fact that disgust goes beyond ‘ingesting’ something repulsive, and includes purely psychological and moral triggers. And furthermore, he revealed the relationship disgust had with fascination even though the two might appear to be complete opposites of each other. Disgust, he opines can serve as a powerful shield against fascination, especially if the latter involves objects, acts, and attitudes that are strictly forbidden by one’s conscience. Is it not possible that the young girl’s disgust with oral sex masks an erotic interest and even sexual arousal, that a sibling’s disgust at being asked to pay rent reveals an interest in how to further one’s financial interests while being related? And if this doesn’t seem convincing, Dr. Akhtar asked us to think about the way a two-year old who wants to play with his feces: after all, it is his, and on top of that, it is soft, warm and pliable…sort of like plasticine. Somehow, in the course of development, this very child learnt to treat the thought of touching feces with disgust. And this learning is the outcome of the educational process held by the sharp and revolting response of the child’s parents - ‘chhi chhi'. Gradually, the newly acquired recoil from feces spreads to all dirty objects and, still later, to psychological and moral depravity.
To come to some understanding of this journey to becoming a source for disgust and learning to live with it, I became clear that who I was becoming evoked displeasure and harm to others. That our personalities do form under the ‘cultural’ influence of families, communities, state, countries and continents, disgust at the sight of all bodily excretions: urine, feces, snot, vomit, sputum, menstrual blood, and so on. And, still later, they enlarge the orbit of revulsion to include despicable actions and morally repugnant character-traits. And that’s what I, in my desire to be me, had begun to stand for. And who knows there could even be fascination for who I am have become or becoming.
I end this note with a poem - The Black Riders, by Cesar Vallejo, in the hope that disgust will act as reminder that hanging on to erstwhile meaningful allegiances to individual, communal, organizational, national or political causes can become an act of cheating ourselves. We cannot get away from the reality of the living flame that provokes us to change, to attend to what we must. Disgust calls us to not lose our sense of individual purpose and direction and be willing to suffer losses and bear the blow.
THE BLACK RIDERS
There are blows in life so heavy... I don't know!
Blows as if from the hatred of God; as if before them
the backwash of everything suffered
has welled up in the soul... I don't know!
They are few, but they exist... they open dark gashes
in the most ferocious countenance and in the strongest back.
It may be they are the colts of savage Attilas,
or the black riders sent to us by Death.
They are the deep backslidings of the Christs of the soul,
away from some precious faith blasphemed by Destiny.
Those bloody blows are the cracklings
of a loaf that burns up before us at the oven door.
And man... poor thing... poor thing! He rolls his eyes,
as when we're summoned by a clap on the shoulder.
He rolls his crazy eyes, and everything he's lived through
wells up, like a pool of guilt, in that gaze.
There are blows in life so heavy... I don't know!
César Vallejo, 1918
Gratitude to Dr. Salman Akhtar for his Book of Emotions.
The artwork is mine from my series on Hridaya Granthi in 2020
