Max Littman, LCSW
October 22, 2025
There’s a moment every parent, caregiver, or even pet owner knows: the strange pride and relief when their child learns to control their excretions. Beneath that moment lies a complex interplay of biology, culture, and emotion—an initiation into one of the earliest and most consequential negotiations between instinct, control, and belonging.
Biology
From a biological standpoint, potty training marks the maturing of the nervous system. The body begins to coordinate signals between the brainstem and the pelvic floor, between sensation and decision. The body learns to hold and release. It is an achievement of regulation: the body mastering itself enough to live in society. But as with all thresholds of development, it doesn’t unfold in isolation. Around the toilet or potty seat gather caregivers, expectations, and implicit messages about cleanliness, control, and worth.
Parts
In an Internal Family Systems lens, this early phase can be seen as one of the first encounters with internal polarization. A part may want to please the caregiver, to be seen as good, capable, and clean. Another part may want to hold onto the freedom of instinct—what feels good, natural, or simply unencumbered. Between them often develops an early relationship with shame: a felt signal from a parent or caregiver that something about me or what I do is unacceptable. Shame arrives not as an idea but as a bodily contraction, a tightening in the gut, a freeze around release. For some, this becomes the origin of parts that monitor, withhold, or over-control—protectors trying to prevent the unbearable experience of being seen as “gross.”
Culture
Culture adds its own shaping forces. In many Western societies, cleanliness becomes a proxy for morality. “Good boy,” “big girl,” “don’t make a mess.” The biological act of excretion becomes moralized and fused with identity. Other cultures, less saturated with Puritanical residue, may approach the process more playfully, less freighted with shame. But most of us carry traces of that early message: control equals goodness; mess equals failure.
Therapy
In therapy rooms, this early layering sometimes resurfaces in subtler ways. A client’s part might hold shame about needing or about being seen in their raw humanity. Another might clamp down on emotional expression, fearing it will be messy, embarrassing, or “too much.” The same neural networks that once learned to tighten and hold may now activate when tears, rage, or desire approach. The body remembers the equation: release equals risk.
And yet, the biological truth remains: all bodies excrete. All systems need release. Whether through crying, sweating, defecating, or speaking what’s been held inside, we are organisms designed for rhythmic letting go. In this light, healing often means re-establishing permission to be an organism—to allow the body its honest cycles, without shame.
Sewage Systems
Sewage systems are among humanity’s quietest triumphs. Long before the gleaming modern grid of underground pipes, ancient cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Rome built channels to carry waste away from communal life. Their early engineers understood something both practical and profound: civilization depends on the safe flow and containment of what the body expels. Where waste was left stagnant, disease spread; where flow was managed, health and dignity flourished. In this way, a sewage system mirrors an internal one. When our parts learn that release can happen safely—that what’s messy or shameful can move through without contaminating everything—our systems stay healthier.
Training
Potty training, in its ideal form, is the first construction of such a system: an agreement between the body, the psyche, and the environment about where and how release can occur. When shaming or control dominate this early process, it’s like a faulty pipe that clogs or leaks, creating pressure in the system. Healing later in life, then, is not about getting rid of the waste but about restoring flow: helping any protectors who shame or repress to trust that the exiles’ contents can be released, integrated, or composted without losing the integrity of the whole.
Developmentally, potty training is not just about where waste goes. It’s about how the needs for belonging and autonomy are met, or not. To be human is to be in a dance between holding and releasing, between what stays private and what’s shared, between the natural and the social.
Excretion of Burdens
So perhaps the toilet marks not just a developmental milestone but an existential one. It’s where biology meets culture, instinct meets self-consciousness, and the body begins to learn what it feels like to be seen. Potty training is an early moment when shame takes shape inside of us—but it can also be where, someday, the story of permission returns.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide consultation and therapy for therapists.
Purchase my new book IFS Therapy for Gay and Queer Men here.
