Puking our guts out

Incest survivors and the practice of disgust

Many incest survivors find ourselves caught up in a practice of ritualized vomiting. Alcoholism and bulimia are two common practices in the incest survivor playbook. These both include a lot of vomiting, but the vomiting is seen as secondary, not the point of the behaviour. We might ask ourselves — why am I drinking? Or — what is causing my eating disorder? We are less likely to ask — does all this vomiting serve a purpose of some kind?

When I was drinking I spent countless hours on the bathroom floor, shaking and sweating and retching. What I considered a normal hangover was definitely alcohol poisoning. Drinking always came with its suffering, a price to be paid. Part of that was the hard work of my body trying to get the poison up. My body rejecting and expelling, saying no. I went through that ritual over and over again, countless times. The visceral and somatic expression of disgust, revulsion, rejection of the poison. These hangovers were a ritualized enactment of the repressed emotional experience of incest.

Incest is disgusting. Sexual invasion by a family member is the most disgusting thing imaginable. On top of this, my grandfather was particularly disgusting. Not only was he mindbreakingly terrifying, he was physically repulsive. He was always almost naked, wearing a tiny pair of underwear and nothing else. He never washed his face and his face was therefore always covered in food and slick with grease which I would feel when he forcibly rubbed our faces together. And then there was his mouth, the centre of disgust, the site of the invasion. His dentures were always full of food, his tongue like a worm, all over my face, licking, probing, searching, entering, his wet mouth and dirty filthy face. His arms impossibly strong.

I was trained to override my natural disgust, my natural revulsion and rejection. I was forced to repress it if I wanted access to love. Over and over again I was punished and shamed by my father for showing disgust and fear towards my grandfather. Over and over I learned that if I wanted to be loved, I had to swallow my disgust and learn to take it. My father trained me in other ways: I was forced to eat bread green with mold. I was trained to accept dog shit all over the floor in the basement in varying degrees of aging, as if it were normal. My natural disgust response was literally trained out of me. In my alcoholic rituals, I viscerally lived that revulsion by puking my guts out over and over again.

Before taking ayahuasca, I did a vomitivo ritual with lemongrass. Me and twenty other people took turns chugging lemongrass until we puked. Here again was my vomiting ritual but in a much more controlled and intentional container. Then again, in the ayahuasca, there is so much vomiting. My sacred puke bucket cradled between my legs as I literally vomit the incest out of my body. I feel it. The deepest disgust. The complete and total rejection. My body expelling the poison, all the energetic imprints of my incestuous family and their dissociative worldview. In the medicine, for the first time, I finally see things clearly, for what they are. I am, in a ritual of vomiting, severing myself from my family line. I am not healing all of them inside my body. No. I am rejecting them from my body entirely, expelling them, giving them up. The air crackles green and blue and yellow with song as my body, the living animal, says no, and rejects it.

There is a turn happening right now within somatic trauma healing world, suggesting that there has been too big a focus on big releases and that big releases can be retraumatizing. This turn is suggesting that, especially for women, a more gentle approach is preferable. I’m sure this critique is an important counterbalance to too much reliance on the idea of big releases, and that it is bringing something necessary about the slow and long pace of recovery. But I want to add a disclaimer that for me and for many survivors — incest is a trauma that needs a big release. And one part of the big release that needs to happen is a visceral expression of disgust. This is part of why I think ayahuasca is very powerful medicine for incest survivors. We get to puke our guts out, not compulsively and unconsciously, but in a truly intentional, ritualized way, in which we can connect directly to the poison we are trying to expel and expel it through the act of vomiting.

Disgust is such an important emotion. If disgust has been trained out of you, your defences are not functioning properly. Intentionally connecting to disgust and expressing the stored disgust in your body can be good for you. Vomiting isn’t the only way to do this work. But I think it’s time we approach the ritiualized vomiting practices of incest survivors with more compassion and curiosity, finding ways to work with these intelligent responses in the body, rather than try to repress them.

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