Disgust, Desire, and the Revolting Self
Addressing Internalized Oppression in Psychotherapy with Gay Men
Framing Disgust as a Therapeutic Entry Point
Disgust is more than a reflex. In psychotherapy, it can reveal where social judgments about bodies, identities, desires, and ways of being have become judgments about the self.
For many gay men, whose bodies and desires have long been objects of fascination, regulation, and rejection, disgust can become a particularly powerful form of internalized oppression. It may appear as aversion to one’s softness, weight, accent, disability, neediness, culture, or sexual desires. Sometimes it is obvious. More often, it appears indirectly through perfectionism, compulsive self-monitoring, erotic withdrawal, numbness, or the conviction that some part of oneself should remain hidden.
Shame says, “Something is wrong with me.” Disgust goes further: “Get this away from me.” When directed inward, that impulse can produce a profound estrangement from the body and self.
Clients may not describe this experience as disgust. They may say, “I’m just not into that,” “I don’t like my body,” “I don’t feel sexual anymore,” or “I don’t want anyone to see me like this.” Yet beneath these statements can be a more visceral logic: my body is unacceptable; my needs are excessive; my culture is embarrassing; my desire is contaminating.
This makes disgust clinically important. Rather than treating it simply as a symptom to eliminate, therapists can ask what it protects, what taught it, and what parts of the self it has learned to reject.
This essay approaches that work through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Gestalt Therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). CBT helps identify the beliefs that organize disgust. Gestalt brings attention to how disgust is experienced and enacted in the body. EFT helps clinicians work with the vulnerability, longing, and relational injuries that disgust often protects.
Together, these approaches offer ways of working with clients who do not simply dislike parts of themselves, but have learned to recoil from them.
Disgust and Internalized Oppression
From Protection to Social Judgment
Disgust has a protective biological function. Rotten food, bodily waste, contamination, and other potential threats evoke a rapid impulse to move away. The message is simple: do not touch this; do not let this in.
But disgust does not remain confined to physical threats. Cultures teach people what else should be considered dirty, excessive, improper, or contaminating. Bodies, behaviors, social groups, sexualities, disabilities, and class markers can all become targets.
Disgust therefore operates not only as a sensory response but also as a social and moral one. Menninghaus (2003), Kelly (2011), and Strohminger (2018) describe different ways disgust becomes entangled with moral judgment. What begins as “I do not like this” can become “This should not be here.”
That distinction matters politically. Disgust has repeatedly been used to distinguish clean from dirty, respectable from improper, desirable from undesirable, and those who belong from those who supposedly threaten the social order.
These judgments can eventually turn inward.
A person repeatedly exposed to disgust toward their body, sexuality, race, disability, class background, gender expression, or other characteristics may begin to experience themselves through the same evaluative lens. Social exclusion becomes self-surveillance.
For gay men, this process can occur within heterosexual culture and within gay communities themselves. Narrow ideals of masculinity, muscularity, thinness, youth, whiteness, ability, and economic status can acquire enormous erotic power. Someone outside these ideals may come to experience himself not simply as less conventionally attractive, but as someone who should hide.
This is one pathway from social disgust to self-disgust.
The Revolting Self
Powell, Overton, and Simpson (2015) use the concept of the “revolting self” to describe experiences in which a person encounters aspects of themselves as disgusting or contaminating.
This differs from ordinary dissatisfaction. Someone might wish they were thinner, wealthier, younger, or more confident without experiencing themselves as revolting. Self-disgust involves an impulse toward separation. The unwanted part of the self must be concealed, controlled, corrected, or expelled.
That division can develop through seemingly small but cumulative experiences: a parent’s grimace, a lover recoiling, ridicule at school, racist sexual stereotypes, rejection on dating apps, inaccessible environments, jokes about fatness, or repeated exposure to images of who supposedly deserves desire.
Eventually, external reactions become anticipatory.
The person learns to flinch before anyone else does.
That flinch may appear as chronic self-monitoring, difficulty receiving compliments, avoiding photographs, keeping a shirt on during sex, policing one’s accent, apologizing for physical needs, controlling a partner’s behavior, or withdrawing from intimacy altogether. Some people remain sexually active while feeling absent from their own bodies. Others stop approaching situations in which desire might arise.
Reeve (2015), writing from disability studies, helps locate this process beyond individual psychology. Self-disgust can function as social discipline. Bodies that violate dominant expectations of independence, symmetry, restraint, productivity, or ease are taught that their ordinary needs are excessive.
The therapeutic question therefore cannot be only, “Why do you dislike yourself?”
We also need to ask: What taught you to recoil?
Recognizing Disgust in Therapy
Self-disgust rarely arrives as a clear declaration. Clients are more likely to show it through avoidance, humor, bodily contraction, intellectualization, contempt, numbness, or control.
A client might cancel after crying in session. Another might speak fluently about sex while becoming visibly tense when asked about pleasure. Someone may meticulously groom before every date but avoid being touched once there. Another may judge a partner for behaving in ways that remind him of a background he has worked hard to escape.
These moments deserve curiosity rather than immediate correction.
Disgust may have developed as protection. If being visible repeatedly led to humiliation, hiding made sense. If desire led to rejection, numbness offered safety. If markers of race or class were punished, editing them could make social environments easier to navigate.
The problem is not that these strategies were foolish. It is that strategies developed for survival can eventually constrain intimacy, pleasure, and belonging.
Clinical work can therefore proceed along three connected paths.
CBT can identify the beliefs that sustain disgust. Statements such as “No one could want this,” “I cannot let people see that part of me,” or “People like us do not belong here” can be examined as learned conclusions rather than unquestionable facts.
Gestalt Therapy can bring attention to how those conclusions are embodied. Where does the person tighten, withdraw, become numb, look away, or lose contact with sensation? Experiential work can make an avoided part of the self available for contact rather than immediate rejection.
EFT can explore the relational vulnerability underneath the withdrawal. Disgust often protects against a frightening possibility: I will let you see me, and you will recoil. Therapy can help clients identify this cycle and experience forms of contact that do not require self-erasure.
The therapist’s role is not to insist that the client love every part of themselves. It is to create enough curiosity and safety that rejection is no longer the only possible response.
Vignette Analyses and Clinical Applications
Gay Men, Body Image, and Sexual Shame
Jonas, a 33-year-old gay man, comes to therapy frustrated with his dating life. He is socially engaged, witty, and politically informed, but avoids situations that might lead to touch, undressing, or sex. At gay bars, he stays close to the wall. At home, he scrolls through images of lean, muscular men.
“They look how gay is supposed to look,” he says. Looking down at his torso, he asks, “Why would anyone want this?”
When sex does happen, Jonas keeps his shirt on and turns his face away. Afterward, he feels numb. His jokes about his body briefly interrupt the discomfort, but underneath them is a fear of being seen.
Jonas does not simply believe that his body falls outside a beauty standard. He has learned to experience visibility itself as dangerous. The narrow erotic ideal he encounters in gay culture has become a standard against which he monitors his own body.
CBT can help Jonas identify beliefs such as “No one wants me unless I look like that” and trace how bullying, media, dating experiences, and comparison have reinforced them. Rather than asking him to replace the belief with generic body-positive statements, therapy can test its authority. What evidence has Jonas learned to notice? What does he dismiss? How does anticipating rejection change how he behaves around people who might actually desire him?
Behavioral experiments can gradually interrupt avoidance. Jonas might begin by spending time shirtless at home, wearing clothing that exposes more of his body, or entering social spaces without continually monitoring how he appears. The purpose is not to force confidence. It is to observe what happens when avoidance loosens.
Gestalt work can deepen this inquiry by locating the experience in his body. When Jonas imagines being undressed with someone, his stomach twists and his chest contracts. Staying with those sensations helps him recognize the moment when anticipated rejection becomes bodily withdrawal.
An empty-chair dialogue with the “ideal gay man” he imagines he should become may reveal something else: Jonas does not necessarily want that body or life. He wants to believe he can be wanted without disappearing.
EFT can then bring the relational injury into focus. Jonas recalls a sexual partner laughing when he undressed. The memory helps explain the cycle:
desire → anticipated exposure → shame → withdrawal → loneliness
Therapy offers an opportunity to experience vulnerability without another person recoiling.
The goal is not compulsory body positivity. It is body re-inhabitation.
Jonas does not have to arrive at “I love how I look.” A meaningful shift might be: “I do not have to disappear in order to be loved.”
Numbness, Shame, and the Fat Erotic Self
Marcus, a 38-year-old gay man in a larger body, reports having no sexual desire. He has not dated in more than two years and avoids flirting, touch, and even eye contact with men he finds attractive.
On dating apps, he scrolls through profiles he considers “off limits.”
Past rejection has left a clear imprint. One partner recoiled when Marcus removed his shirt. Another suggested that he “try keto.” Marcus recounts these experiences with striking calm.
“They weren’t cruel,” he says. “They were just being honest.”
“Nobody wants to fuck someone who looks like me. And I don’t want to make them try.”
What appears initially as low desire may also be understood as protection. Marcus has learned that wanting someone creates the possibility of humiliation. Numbness reduces that risk.
CBT can help distinguish absence of desire from beliefs that prohibit desire. A sexual self-concept inventory might reveal that Marcus still experiences attraction, fantasy, curiosity, and longing, but quickly shuts them down. The belief “I am not desirable unless I am thin” can then be examined in relation to personal experiences and broader cultural messages about fatness.
Reconnection need not begin with dating or sex. Marcus might experiment with sensual experiences that have no performance requirement: warmth, texture, food, movement, touch, or rest. These practices allow the body to become a source of sensation rather than an object awaiting evaluation.
Gestalt work can make the internal conflict more explicit. In a two-chair dialogue, Marcus’s ashamed self says, “I should be invisible.” His erotic self responds, “I remember feeling wanted.”
Holding both experiences at once creates room for grief, anger, and desire.
EFT can help Marcus recognize his recurring cycle:
desire → shame → withdrawal → loneliness → numbness
Naming the cycle changes the meaning of his numbness. It is not evidence that he lacks an erotic self. It has helped protect that self from further injury.
Therapy does not need to push Marcus toward sex. It can help him recover permission to want.
Chasing Whiteness and Desexualizing the Self
Ravi, a 29-year-old South Asian gay man, is discouraged by his romantic life. He dates primarily white men and initially describes this as simple preference.
“That’s just who I’m into.”
Over time, another pattern becomes visible. Ravi avoids speaking his native language around partners, downplays cultural references, jokes dismissively about his family, and rarely brings partners home. During sex, he sometimes feels as though he is playing a role.
Eventually he says, “Sometimes I wonder if my culture is a turn-off. The more ‘normal’ I am, the better the date goes.”
He pauses.
“And by normal, I guess I mean white.”
Ravi’s experience invites a more complicated conversation than whether interracial attraction is problematic. The clinical issue is what he believes he must remove from himself in order to remain desirable.
Whiteness has become associated with erotic normality, while visible expressions of his own culture carry the risk of embarrassment, fetishization, or rejection. Attraction and assimilation have become difficult to separate.
CBT can help Ravi map the beliefs organizing this pattern: “Whiteness is desirable,” “My culture is embarrassing,” and “If I show too much of myself, people will leave.” Therapy can explore where those beliefs developed and how they influence the situations, partners, and evidence he notices.
Behavioral experiments might involve bringing culturally meaningful parts of himself into ordinary relational situations and observing both his own anxiety and the actual response. The goal is not to dictate whom Ravi should date. It is to expand his freedom to enter relationships without automatically editing himself.
Gestalt work can explore the split between an assimilated self that carefully manages presentation and a silenced self that wants fuller expression. Giving both parts a voice may surface grief and anger alongside the desire to belong.
EFT can help identify the relational cycle:
desire → fear of rejection → concealment → disconnection → shame
The work is not simply to increase Ravi’s confidence. It is to help him notice when intimacy requires him to disappear and to develop relationships in which cultural visibility does not automatically signal danger.
Class Shame and the Policed Self
Luis, a 41-year-old gay man and successful arts administrator, describes feeling embarrassed by his partner, Jonah.
“He’s too loud in public,” Luis says. “He laughs like my cousins used to.”
Luis grew up in a working-class immigrant household and has experienced considerable upward mobility. At dinner parties, he becomes tense when Jonah mispronounces a wine label or speaks openly about money. He notices similar reactions to accents, clothing, table manners, and public expressiveness.
“It’s not that I think I’m better,” he says. “I just don’t want to go back.”
The therapist asks, “Go back to what?”
Luis eventually answers: “To being a punchline. To being disgusting.”
His reaction to Jonah reveals something about his relationship to his own history. Behaviors associated with home have become linked to the possibility of losing status. Disgust functions as a form of class surveillance, helping Luis maintain distance from characteristics he once learned could expose him to ridicule.
Kelly (2011) and Miller (2004) help illuminate how disgust can enforce social hierarchies by distinguishing the supposedly refined from the crude. For Luis, the distinction has become personal.
CBT can help him identify beliefs such as “To be respected, I cannot look like where I came from” and “Loudness means lack of control.” Rather than simply replacing them with affirmations, therapy can investigate what these rules have protected him from and what they now cost.
Gestalt work can reconnect Luis with experiences that complicate his shame. Remembering dancing barefoot at a cousin’s birthday party, he notices lightness and belonging before quickly shutting the memory down. Attending to that shift allows him to experience what class assimilation may have required him to mute alongside what it gave him access to.
EFT can help Luis name the grief and fear underneath his criticism of Jonah. Instead of saying, “You’re embarrassing,” he begins to recognize another truth: “I’m afraid people will see in you the parts of me I’ve tried to outrun.”
That recognition creates a different possibility for intimacy.
Luis does not need to reject the life he has built. He needs greater freedom from the belief that belonging in one world requires contempt for another.
The Erotic Life of the Disabled Body
Andrés, a 35-year-old gay man living with fibromyalgia, feels disconnected from his erotic life.
“I still get crushes,” he says. “But I shut it down fast. Desire feels like a setup.”
He has not had sex in three years. His pain is unpredictable and often invisible. In a previous relationship, a once-supportive partner eventually told him, “It’s just too hard when you’re always hurting.”
Since then, Andrés has come to associate intimacy with burden.
“People want sex to be spontaneous,” he says. “I’m anything but.”
Reeve (2015) describes how disability can become entangled with disgust when bodies are measured against expectations of independence, predictability, symmetry, and ease. Sexual cultures add their own expectations about stamina, spontaneity, movement, and performance.
Andrés has absorbed the idea that his body interrupts desire.
CBT can help identify the leap from “My pain affects intimacy” to “My pain makes me unlovable.” The first statement describes a real constraint. The second turns that constraint into a verdict about the self.
A pleasure log can also broaden Andrés’s relationship with his body. Warm blankets, sunlight, aromatic tea, touch, or other small sensory experiences remind him that pain is not the only sensation his body can hold.
Gestalt work can explore the split between what Andrés calls his “Pain Self” and his “Desiring Self.” One fears being too much. The other still wants touch, sex, affection, and recognition. Therapy does not require one to defeat the other. It helps Andrés hold both.
EFT can make the protective cycle visible:
desire → anticipated rejection → withdrawal → shame → isolation
His withdrawal makes sense in the context of previous hurt. But protection has gradually become disconnection.
Therapy can help Andrés practice naming needs he has learned to suppress: “I want closeness even when I’m in pain.” Being able to express that desire without apology creates room for forms of intimacy that do not depend on bodily predictability.
The erotic and the wounded are not opposites. A body can carry pain and remain capable of pleasure, longing, and connection.
Questions for Clinical Reflection
What parts of your client’s story might communicate disgust without naming it?
What does the client hide, control, apologize for, or distance themselves from?
What happens in your own body when a client describes themselves or someone else with revulsion?
Which aesthetic, racial, classed, gendered, sexual, or ableist assumptions shape your own ideas about desirability?
When might a client’s avoidance be protecting them from an anticipated experience of disgust or rejection?
How can therapy create greater freedom without requiring the client to adopt compulsory self-love?
Transforming the Revolting Self
Disgust can point toward places where social judgment has become self-judgment.
It appears in the pause before undressing, the disappearance of sexual desire, the embarrassment at a partner’s laugh, the effort to suppress an accent, or the belief that one’s physical needs make intimacy impossible. These experiences may look different, but they share a question:
What have I learned must be removed from me before I can safely be seen?
Disgust is useful clinically because it helps locate the boundary between what a person permits themselves to be and what they have learned to cast out. Miller (2004) describes disgust as a gatekeeper emotion. In self-directed disgust, that gate can run directly through the self.
Therapy can help make that division visible.
CBT asks whether inherited judgments must continue to function as facts. Gestalt helps clients encounter the bodily and emotional experiences they have learned to avoid. EFT brings attention to the relationships in which hiding became necessary and the possibility of contact without rejection.
None of these approaches requires the therapist to persuade a client that every part of themselves is beautiful, desirable, or lovable.
The work is more fundamental.
A client who once responded to a part of themselves with “Get this away from me” may gradually become able to ask, “What happened here?”
That shift from expulsion to curiosity matters.
Transforming the revolting self does not mean making the self more palatable. It means examining who taught the person that some part of them required rejection, understanding how that lesson became embodied, and creating greater choice about whether it still deserves authority.
Healing from disgust, then, is not necessarily the elimination of revulsion.
It is the possibility of remaining in contact with oneself when the impulse is to disappear.
References
Crosby, C. L., Buss, D. M., & Meston, C. M. (2019). Sexual disgust: Evolutionary perspectives and relationship to female sexual function. Current Sexual Health Reports, 11(4), 300–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11930-019-00219-6
Kelly, D. R. (2011). Yuck! The nature and moral significance of disgust. MIT Press.
Menninghaus, W. (2003). Disgust: The theory and history of a strong sensation. State University of New York Press.
Miller, S. B. (2004). Disgust: The gatekeeper emotion. Analytic Press.
Powell, P. A., Overton, P. G., & Simpson, J. (Eds.). (2015). The revolting self: Psychological, social, and clinical implications of self-directed disgust. Karnac Books.
Reeve, D. (2015). Disability and the disgusted self. In P. A. Powell, P. G. Overton, & J. Simpson (Eds.), The revolting self: Psychological, social, and clinical implications of self-directed disgust (pp. 200–211). Karnac Books.
Strohminger, N. (Ed.). (2018). The moral psychology of disgust. Rowman & Littlefield.
Wolf-Meyer, M. J. (2024). American disgust: Racism, microbial medicine, and the colony within. University of Minnesota Press.
