Description
What does disgust have to do with boundaries and power?
Many of us have been taught that it is impolite and rude to know what disgusts us and what doesn’t. We are told that we are being good children if no one knows what kinds of vegetables or touch or questions are too much or wrong for us (or that we don’t like). When we tell children that they should be seen and not heard, we’re asking them to repress their inner voice of truth and for many people that prohibition is never lifted. When we reclaim our body’s deep knowing about what it wants and doesn’t want, we discover an entirely natural and effortless relationship with boundaries. In its healthiest manifestation, disgust is the shoreline of our body’s authentic and alive experience of what it loves and desires–it tells us who we want to be with and what we want to do, it tells us what we want to eat, it tells us how we want to work, it tells us what we want to create. It lets us discover what kind of privacy works for us, and what kinds of public expression nourishes us and our relationship with the world. The discovery of our healthy disgust is a discovery of our healthy and authentic joy. And this particular work takes us directly into what we really want, when it comes to sexual expression and non-expression.
In family constellations, we learn that many of us have been taken into our parents’ bedrooms and that the door between ourselves and our parents’ private explorations needs to be closed, and our parents need to take responsibility for their own lives. We’ve been made our parents’ spouses, friends, therapists, parents, or exes, when what we really need is to first be our parents’ children, and then to grow into being adults who have their own separate lives. Our passions, interests, and desires do not belong to our parents, and the creative expression that’s a natural outgrowth of authentic emergence is ours and ours alone. Healthy disgust can help us find the boundary between what is ours and what belongs to others. As we claim this space in which we get to exist, we also discover our strength and power and relationality: our full range of movement to live lives that are fully our own, and to join with others and create the families and friend groups where we get to both be authentic and belong.
