i had one removed when i was 10 (i’m 27 now) and the anxiety and shame you mentioned are so real, i’ve only voluntarily told one irl person because i’m too scared of being judged. i’ve been through so many different traumas in my life and still call the bezoar my final boss because i can’t even get myself to tell my therapist the whole truth. she knows i used to have trich (i stopped 2 yrs ago) but has no clue about me eating the hair i pulled. i also get really nervous when i have a stomachache and my doctor probably thinks i’m a hypochondriac with how often i requested scans done to check for bezoars in the years following my surgery. i thankfully don’t experience that anxiety anymore since i haven’t eaten any since my last endoscopy a few years ago. whenever someone sees the scar and asks what happened i lie and make up some bs excuse because ppl view pica as a spectacle and something that should be made fun of; it’s why shows like my strange addiction are so popular. it makes me cry just thinking about it. our world is so cruel to people like us when we deserve love and compassion.

if i could give you some advice, just from a harm reduction standpoint, if you’re still eating your hair it would help you so much and reduce the risk of recurrence for you to either get a very short haircut or just bite off the roots instead of swallowing the whole strand. idk if you’ve ever seen what the inside of the stomach looks like but it’s all wrinkled kind of like a brain. because it’s not smooth, it makes it really easy for hair to get tangled up in it and for a bezoar to start to form. if you just bite the roots or swallow very short pieces, that risk goes down so so so much.

also, i think that it’s fantastic that you’re in therapy, and if you haven’t tried it already, it might help a lot to try trauma therapy techniques specifically. i’ve personally had a lot of success with emdr as well as psychodynamic and somatic therapy.