What's Behind Vegetarianism?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Have you already eaten? Then you can safely start reading this article.

This article is not about the vegetarianism that people adhere to for health reasons (for example, someone may be allergic to meat, someone does not eat it due to poor digestibility), and not about the vegetarianism of fanatics, which on everyone they shout in the corner that they are vegan, addicted to spiritual practices, join interest groups and troll on meat-eating forums.

We will talk about vegetarianism as a form of obsessive disorder (obsessions are obsessive thoughts).

For example, one acquaintance was an avid meat eater, but he hated eating vegetables. When we turned to the memories of his childhood, it turned out the following: once his grandmother was cutting a cabbage and cutting in half a thick, green caterpillar that was sitting inside. An acquaintance, who was also panicky afraid of insects, saw this and, most likely, he had some kind of mental connection between vegetables and insects, which caused a subsequent disgust for vegetables and a complete refusal to use them. In his words: "when I take an apple, it seems to me that there are worms in it, the same with the rest of the fruits, vegetables or berries."

"Peppers" to these obsessive thoughts were added by his grandmother in childhood, repeating every time he refused to eat vegetables for fear of worms and caterpillars: "Today we eat them, and tomorrow they will eat us."

One of my relatives has not touched meat for many years, because meat at some point became associated with decaying flesh for her. She says so: “when I look at the meat or I have to butcher it, it seems to me that I am dealing with a corpse (and in fact it is a corpse), and it also seems to me that I feel some kind of corpse from it the smell and I'm starting to feel sick. Therefore, she eats only vegan food.

In the biography of Salvador Dali, she found information that the artist, especially in his youth, was afraid of sex, because for him the female genitals were associated with something inanimate, with a piece of meat. Apparently, due to his obsessive thoughts and fears of the female body, from his youth he was carried away by representatives of his gender, until he met Gala. But Gala also complained that, no matter how hard she tried, she could not make a full-fledged lover out of Dali. It is also known that the artist was a voyeur - he often arranged orgies in his house and loved to watch them. Orgies often inspired him to write erotic paintings. Perhaps, in this way, portraying sex, he tried to somehow level his sexual fear in himself, to awaken sexuality and attraction to women in himself. However, he was still attracted to representatives of non-standard orientation, and his last romance was with a transvestite woman Amanda Lear.

By the way, the artist's sexual fears as a result of obsessive thoughts about inanimate flesh and infection appeared after the father, in order to prevent sexual debauchery of his son, showed him a book with photographs of female bodies with traces of venereal diseases.

This is also the nature of eating habits and disorders.

I will give you another case from the life of my client. She was full all the time, because she loved to lean on flour products and sweets, and could not lose weight in any way. But soon she lost weight beyond recognition, because she gave up sweets. Later, the reason for the sharp change in her eating behavior was found out - she got a job in a pastry shop not far from her home and, while working there, saw flies often fall into the dough. Since it was summer and the cooking door was open all the time, flies flew in it constantly, there were sticky tapes strewn with flies on the ceiling. In addition, she herself had to kill cockroaches more than once in this cooking. After which she categorically stopped eating sweets. She was haunted by the idea that there might be flies or cockroaches in buns and sweets.

And one of my acquaintances with OCD was extremely squeamish about food in general, so she always ate little by little and all the time gazed intently into the spoon, afraid to find hair or insect remains there. From the anamnesis: she spent her childhood with her grandmother, whose apartment was dusty all the time, not cleaned, there were cockroaches, which often got into food. My grandmother had a habit of storing cereals, sugar, flour for years, and bugs and mealworms often started up there.

As can be seen from the examples, past experience can strongly influence a person's eating behavior, and his thoughts can determine the taste of food.

Therefore, vegetarianism can also be the result of obsessive thoughts caused by the formed associative line between food and something unpleasant that can cause panic and nausea.

Author: Burkova Elena Viktorovna