Well… I just cannot pooh when somebody else could hear or smell it (somebody using the bathroom right after I finished would be a nightmare). So I cannot pooh when someone else is in the same house (family member, friend, partner… it doesn’t matter!). Usually I go in the morning (I live alone) and when I am alone, I don’t have any problems having a pooh (unless I have time pressure, when I have to get up early and leave the house, then I can’t go either), but I could never leave the breakfast table and have a pooh when other people are sitting next to me. I just can’t relax when some else is around! I absolutely cannot pooh in public bathrooms. I cannot pooh on holidays (this is the worst!) – I hate shared hotel rooms with these thin walls and the bathroom right beneath the bedroom or public bathrooms on camping sites or hostels or staying over at a friend’s house.
I guess I really don’t want people to know that I pooh at all. Which is ridiculous, because people know that I eat, therefore I have to pooh and so does everybody else! This affects my life, because I have to be alone in order to pooh and if I cannot pooh, I start to feel really bad and bloated and I keep thinking about for how long I haven’t had a pooh. It is such a basic need and it makes me feel so bad when I just can’t go.
I do go on holidays with other people but I start worrying weeks or months ahead – but it would be worse to miss out completely, so I go even though I know I will feel ill after a couple of days not poohing. When I visit my boyfriend (we live in different cities) or when he visits my place over the weekend, I usually cannot pooh when he is around, not at my “safe” bathroom at home and definitely not at his place where the walls are paper thin. I can hear him pooh sometimes (“plopping”) though or smell it… I think he is a little shy about poohing, too (he used to spray deodorant in the bathroom on our holiday a lot but at least, he could go!). I am not really sure whether I am jealous that he can pooh when I am around or whether I am more glad that he never had to smell my pooh so far… (This might be something to think about!). On the weekends I’m trying to cope by eating as little as I can and eating as little as I can the days before the weekend. Usually I’m only having breakfast at a Friday and something “light” for lunch in order not to be bloated on Saturdays. Most times I can manage the rest of the weekend knowing I can pooh at Sunday night or Monday morning when I get home. But it is still really bugging me and I have to think about it constantly because normally, I need have a pooh every morning in order to feel good. Well, nobody feels good when he or she is constipated…
I remember having this problem since I am 10 years old or so. I never liked using the bathrooms at school so I waited till I got home. Peeing is ok, but I avoided it when I could. I remember the bathrooms where really gross… I don’t know whether I thought about people knowing that I pooh and I don’t remember having that problem ob holidays with my family when I was a kid. I remember always poohing when I got home from school though. The problem got worse when I got older, 13 or 14 or so. I couldn’t pooh when we went on trips with our sports teams. I couldn’t pooh when I stayed over at friends houses. I never really thought about it, though. It got really bad when I had my first boyfriend (I was 17). We went on a holiday together for a week, with a shared hotel room of course and spending all of the time together, never being alone. I ate really little the whole week (I have to add that I was somewhat anorexic at this time and never ate much anyways) – but at the end of the week I started to be really bloated and I had really bad stomach cramps because I couldn’t go the whole week. I had to lie down in bed because it hurt so much! I told him about my pain and he suggested that I went to the bathroom and sat there for a while. But I told him I already tried and I just couldn’t… I didn’t tell him to leave because at the time I didn’t think that I couldn’t go because he was around. Maybe it would have helped.
The next time it was really bad was when I spent a year abroad, staying with a host family. I had a really hard time adjusting to the different foods and had digestive problems anyways. At that time, I experienced a time of a large amounts of really smelly gas. That was soooo embarrassing! I felt so bad… and often, I could not pooh when I went on a trip. It was just the worst…
I’ve had a boyfriend for a couple of years and we’ve even moved in together. During the week, when he was at work, I didn’t have any problems going. But on the weekends it wasn’t easy. Whenever we had breakfast together, I could never just get up and “go”. I’ve never told him about my situation though. I tried to find excuses to be alone in the mornings or tried getting up before he did.
This year I will go on a holiday to Italy for a week and we are 7 people sharing a big apartment. I am already worrying about the toilet situation. Probably, I won’t be able to go all week long! I’ve started trying to cope with my problem using laxatives on holidays, but that is not really helping either because I will need a silent restroom where no one can hear me or otherwise I will still hold it in, which is really painful. On the last holiday with my new boyfriend I’ve tried to excuse myself up to our hotel room alone (e.g. having “forgotten” something), but this isn’t really effective either, because “time pressure” is a trigger for me, too.
Right now, I’m reading the book… I really hope I can find something that will make me able to “go Nr. 2” when people are around.
Well, this was really long, so thank you if you took the time to read!
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