Kaliborio

I'm incontinent and 24/7. I feel positively about it but I don't know that "enjoy" is an applicable term here; I don't mean that it's not enjoyable, I mean that it's simply a passive state of being which is preferable to the other passive state of being (the non-diapered one). Whether I was born with it or acquired it is a complex question. I have had continence issues my whole life; I didn't get out of diapers until very late (early primary school) and with specialist assistance, and I had to go back into them for a period in late primary school and early high school. My current stay in diapers was initially voluntary, but my choice to do it was influenced by having spent significant time using diapers to manage continence issues before. It stopped being voluntary around mid-2013 when I realised I had little to no practical wetting control. As an AB/DL I was certainly aware of the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program (2004) when I started voluntarily wearing diapers again, and I think it may have influenced some of my decisions, such as choosing to throw out my underwear in late 2013. Whether I actually followed it is a complex question; I didn't exactly intend to, but I think that being in diapers and being aware of what was in the Program meant that I ended up letting my continence erode in a way which I might not have if either of those things hadn't been true. Whether the way I chose would have eroded my continence if I hadn't already had organic problems maintaining continence is a question of its own.

Yeah, I experienced this. It was on a shorter timescale — there were about nine months between me having urinary control too bad to leave diapers and starting to have messing accidents. That took a bit less than another year — maybe another nine months? — to develop to pretty much complete lack of bowel control. Like you, I had continence issues growing up that I think may have had something to do with it.

With, definitely. I'm an AB/DL, but I'm also wearing full-time for severe need, so I can't afford to stink any worse than absolutely necessary.

I had slightly shaky but functionally full continence when I started. I was conscious that my bladder control was significantly shakier by about 4 months in. I started wetting the bed around 9 months in. I became aware that I didn't have meaningful daytime wetting control around 11 to 12 months in; I wasn't checking before then. I was voluntarily messing my diapers regularly starting around 9 months in. The first time I was absolutely sure that an instance of messing my diapers wasn't to some degree deliberate was about 15 months in. The point where my messing control was poor enough that it had become difficult to use the toilet was about 20–22 months in. The point where I basically could no longer use the toilet was about 30 months (2 and a half years) in.

Good question with multiple answers. I'm gonna assume by "in your pants," you mean "anywhere but the toilet". I didn't manage to get out of diapers until after I turned 7, so I hadn't stopped messing them by the time many people here had restarted. I had a major recurrence of control issues between 10–12yo, including problems with bowel control. Even after I recovered, I never got back quite as good control as I had before. I went back into diapers pretty close to 24/7 by choice when I was 17. I started voluntarily messing my diapers a couple of months after I turned 18. I started having problems not messing my diapers just before I turned 19.

I have devised a crackpot theory and am attempting to gauge whether it has any merit. Please humour me by answering these questions. I am looking for people who consider themselves continent, or who may not consider themselves fully continent, but don't consider themselves exactly incontinent, as such, or who are incontinent by choice but remember being continent. Incontinent by choice means "subjectively genuinely cannot control your bladder and/or bowels, but as a result of deliberately pursuing a 'process' or other avenue to lose that control, rather than a disease." I am not currently looking for people who are clinically diagnosed or confidently self-diagnosed as incontinent primarily due to a specific disease- or injury-related cause which has been identified. I am looking for people who think they may be so diagnosed in the future even if they don't do anything and nothing happens to them. I am also looking for people who do have a clinical diagnosis of a continence condition, but who do not currently experience continence issues that they believe are linked to that condition, or who experience continence issues, but altogether primarily by choice and not primarily due to their clinical diagnosis. A few notes: Some of the questions below obviously describe symptoms of incontinence. Please answer them based on your actual experience and according to the literal wording of the question; don't, e.g., look at them and go, "Well, that's a symptom of [type of incontinence], and I don't have that, so I'll answer no." If you are currently incontinent by choice, please answer the questions according to your experience when you had the maximum degree of continence you remember having. --- Questions As a child, did you have problems with staying dry or avoiding messing yourself during the day at any point after the age of about 4? As a child, did you have problems with staying dry or avoiding messing yourself during the night at any point after the age of about 6? Do you currently experience, or have you previously experienced, the need to urinate eight (8) or more times per day? Do you currently experience, or have you previously experienced, faecal staining on your underwear despite conscientiously and carefully wiping and cleaning yourself? Do you currently experience, or have you previously experienced, the need to urinate during the night, such that you consistently wake up two (2) or more times per night? Have you ever had to rush to the toilet because you were afraid you might otherwise wet or mess yourself, whether or not you feel like there was any reason to believe that in hindsight? Have you ever refused to do, or been reluctant to do, any activity or task because you're worried you might have an accident, whether or not you feel like there was any reason to believe that in hindsight? Regardless of whether you actually have any trouble staying dry and clean in practice, do you feel like you have to put in any conscious effort to maintain your continence? Regardless of whether you have any reason to believe your continence is compromised, do you find yourself feeling worried that it might not hold up? Regardless of whether you actually have any trouble staying dry and clean in practice, do you feel like it's harder work to maintain your continence, or like your continence is more likely to fail, than it was some time ago, e.g. a few years ago? Do you currently experience, or have you previously experienced, incidents where you coughed, laughed, sneezed, engaged in exercise, did manual work, etc., and then became aware you had wet or messed yourself to any degree as a result? Do you currently experience, or have you previously experienced, a sudden, compelling physiological need to urinate or defecate which is difficult to defer? As a result of the "sudden, compelling physiological need" described above, have you ever actually wet or messed yourself? Do you consider yourself completely continent, more-or-less continent, or something else? Please provide details. Do you have a clinical diagnosis or confident self-diagnosis of any of the following conditions? ADHD predominantly inattentive, a/k/a ADD ADHD predominantly hyperactive autism dysautonomia, autonomic dysfunction, or autonomic dysregulation Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS), any type EDS, hypermobile type (hEDS) specifically fibromyalgia mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) orthostatic intolerance (OI) polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), any type POTS, central hyperadrenergic type (hyperPOTS) specifically sensory processing disorder (SPD) Do you experience the recurring or ongoing desire to lose control of your bladder and/or your bowels? Have you ever tried to? Do you have any plans to? --- The reason I'm asking is because I'm theorising, from my observations, that for some people, the desire to wear diapers, to wear them 24/7, and/or to lose bladder and bowel control, may be partly fuelled by greater-than-usual subjective difficulty maintaining continence which hasn't caused enough functional disruption to be clinically identified.

I'm an Australian English speaker, but I use "diapers". I think this is probably because for the majority of the time I was talking about them, I was talking to Americans, so I wanted to fit in.

Hello! I respectfully submit that the term I would use for this process is "lock-in," ultimately derived from vendor lock-in. To me, the verb "spiral," ultimately from graveyard spiral, refers to a loss of continence which is unusually rapid and resistant to being regulated, either objectively or subjectively. I am definitely not a prescriptivist. If the word "spiral" now corresponds to the concept I called "lock-in," I'll absolutely go with the flow. However, it seems as if your questions about spiralling are concerned with what I would call spiralling, and people certainly seem to be answering them under the impression that that is the case. I am quoting this in a tangential way, totally unrelated to the topic of the thread, but in terms of susceptibility to hypnosis, the strongest predictor, in my experience, is the subject's average level of dissociation. I have noted, for example, that hormonal gender transition, which is thought with high confidence to decrease dissociative symptoms in a subject, also seems to increase susceptibility to hypnosis. I first noticed this when it happened to me, but after looking around a bit, it seems like I'm not the only one. I am also generally an empiricist. I don't think hypnosis is magic; I do think it works in some cases — not that you claimed otherwise. As a musician with an academic background, I strongly suspect that hypnosis is mechanically simply something like instrument practice or effective academic study, but in a very concentrated form. This is 100% the kind of thing I would describe as a spiral. I'm getting this feeling. The untraining methodology in which I am most interested is based on the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program (I feel like the equivalent of a street preacher for the damn thing). The Program provides and/or my experience indicates that, in that context, day wetting comes before bedwetting; both are generated by the same processes; well-established bedwetting is largely irreversible and severely undermines day wetting control; and both day wetting and bedwetting undermine messing control. However, pretty much everyone in the world who had a different experience seems to be in this forum. At least two people here have mentioned to me that their bedwetting control was pretty malleable. One person has mentioned being able to recover significant bladder control, but no bowel control at all. I would love to incorporate these folks' results into my understanding of the world, but I don't yet understand how they got there. I very strongly believe spiralling is heavily psychological. The psychological variable to which I personally intuitively attribute the strongest influence on continence is one's belief concerning whether one has control, which could definitely be heavily influenced by what one wants to be true, although isn't ultimately entirely a branch of it. I think I've mentioned in this forum before that I had a pretty checkered continence history through childhood and adolescence, but was functionally continent at the time I chose to go back into diapers full-time. My progression was more or less complete incontinence and constant bedwetting —> very good continence —> light to moderate urinary incontinence, severe faecal incontinence, relatively limited bedwetting —> decent but shaky continence —> 24/7, untraining, and complete incontinence. Five months into wearing, I was aware that my wetting control was worse, but not by a huge amount. I started voluntarily messing about 6 or 7 months in. I started involuntarily wetting the bed about nine months in. Sometime between 7 and 12 months in, my wetting control took an absolute dive without my being consciously aware; I know because 12 months in I got cold feet and tried to leave diapers but couldn't stay dry long enough, which is definitely a dramatic change relative to the 5-month mark. My bedwetting got rapidly worse after the 12-month mark. At about 1 year 3 months, I had the first messing accident I am actually sure of (there were a few occasions before that where I thought I was voluntarily messing but wasn't sure). By comparison to my wetting control, my messing control fell apart really fast; by 1 year 9 months, more often than not I simply could not make it. I think that psychology may have played a part. I observed that my control in general seemed to collapse at a rate that was a little on the speedy side when compared to others' experiences, and I strongly suspect that might just have been because I didn't have the same confidence in my control that I might have had if I had been continent my whole life. I think that because I hadn't been a regular bedwetter since childhood, developing regular bedwetting as an adult made a significant further dent in my confidence of control. I started thinking about this while I was losing my messing control, because at the time, while it appealed to me as an AB/DL, it absolutely scared the shit out of me on a conscious level (no pun intended). My first messing accident inaugurated a state of constant anxiety that took months and months to dissipate, and further messing accidents exacerbated it to the point of full-on hyperventilating, sweating bullets. I was desperately trying to avoid losing my messing control that whole time, but was not ultimately able to. I know at the time I didn't consciously want to lose it, so I assumed it had to be something unconscious. After several years of thinking, "confidence in one's own control" is the best guess I can come up with.

I'm glad I could be some help as a referent! That's fair! I was wondering if it might be an internalised thing. Guilt and shame, for instance, are both emotions which are innate to the person, but both are determined by the person's view of their position with respect to their context. Guilt happens when you feel you've violated a universal moral standard; shame happens when you feel you've done something wrong that you have to deny before, or hide from, a certain audience. I figured that social lock-in is possible even when you have no evidence that any other member of society is involved. I think it more-or-less is. I don't want to discourage people from retraining and I don't want them to feel that it's impossible. However, my general impression of retraining is that if your goal is to regain 100% continence, to be absolutely certain of it, you would need to begin retraining sufficiently early that it would be difficult to verify you'd actually lost any continence in the first place. I've also had two other impressions — for which the base of evidence is less substantial than for the first impression, and I have seen more counterexamples, but I think they're worth voicing nonetheless. The first, and stronger, is that any real "milestone" loss of control, such as bedwetting after having been dry, or losing your bowel control after having had it, seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be reversed, and in most cases subjectively irreversible. Your story is a partial counterexample here, in that you were able to stop bedwetting, but you also weren't able to significantly recover your bowel control. The second, and weaker, is that "milestone" loss of control seems to erode control and impose a cap on control recovery. It seems like what happened to you might line up with this impression, in that you mentioned that even after spending considerable time retraining, your bladder control was a lot weaker — or at least had a lot less endurance — than it was before you untrained, and also that you're not focusing on untraining but your bladder control is regressing anyway. The "erosion of control" hypothesis is inspired by, although not solely based on, my own experience of losing messing control, which completely changed how I saw control in general in a way that I have never really been able to shift back from. In short, while continence is a spectrum, there is a border on one side of which one considers oneself "continent" or "mostly continent," and on the other side of which one considers oneself "mostly incontinent" or "incontinent." When I started untraining, I felt the border as lying between "dry and clean" and "wet and/or messy," so that, e.g., pantswetting and bedwetting with no messing issues was in the "incontinent" category. Losing my messing control dramatically changed that feeling. While I fully believe people who are pantswetters or bedwetters as a result of untraining are genuinely incontinent, I felt like having no messing control was what defined "incontinence" for me, and I felt like when I was "only" a pantswetter/bedwetter I was closer to continence than incontinence. This had a real foreshortening effect on my view of retraining, because I sort of lost the ability to internalise "being not only clean, but dry and perhaps even out of diapers' as a thing I could aim for. I could think it, I could perhaps even verbalise it, but when I was retraining I was still ultimately in a frame of mind where I would have felt that I was basically there, "mostly continent," if I had just gotten back into wet diapers, as opposed to messy ones. This happened to me after my big retraining attempt stopped! I don't know what the mechanism is. I'm absolutely sure it's more embedded than just "I convinced myself I couldn't feel it," because I made two more reasonably incentivised untraining attempts and they didn't seem to change anything at all. I really, really get where you're coming from here. It's a long process to go through even when it's absolutely right for you and what you want. I wouldn't want to throw myself headfirst into something I thought might hurt me. Here's my opinion. I know you didn't ask for it, so I hope you won't mind it. My opinion is that, yes, you probably are delaying the inevitable, and in this case "the inevitable" is something you can absolutely afford to be shame-free about. There are a couple of reasons. The first reason is that you mentioned even though you're not trying to lose your bladder control, you're losing it slowly anyway. This suggests you're in a framework where "the inevitable" is, indeed, loss of bladder control. Unless you plan to change something, I imagine it will eventually happen regardless. The second reason is that, while both people with no bladder control and people who also have no bowel control can accurately describe themselves as incontinent, my experience managing the logistics as both a first and third party is that managing no bowel control "includes" no bladder control in a way that doesn't apply in the converse. Namely, virtually all ways of managing no bowel control both make it very easy to accommodate no bladder control, and an absolute pain in the ass to do anything active to try to preserve it. To put it another way, my experience has been that managing having no bowel control so thoroughly blocks off all possible avenues by which the presence or absence of bladder control could have any material effect that the question of whether you have it is irrelevant to the point of being nonsensical. There are times one might need to know about the bowel control of someone with minimal bladder control, but never vice versa. Completely losing your bladder control might, at most, mean you need to buy heavier diapers. The only way I can see it becoming significantly relevant again is if you regain your bowel control, but based on the total lack of progress you experienced the first time around, and the subsequent "numbing," I would personally be planning around the probability of that being zero. I'm not asserting you have to lose your bladder control! Please don't feel harangued or obliged. What I am saying is that it's extraordinarily unlikely you will have it in ten years either way, the probability that it will matter is nonexistent, and if the alternative is that you live in prolonged fear of losing it, then that fear may be worth averting. You have! Thank you so much for taking the time. You're very kind, @Enthusi! I'm delighted to be posting here. Oh no, the untraining world deserves better than that. (I'm very flattered that you'd say this, though.) Thank you! I try. It is! Thank you. I also had brief periods of de facto testing myself — either by attempting to retrain cold turkey, or by explicitly testing myself, in the fashion you describe here — and this is exactly what it felt like. Even now, when I haven't for years had even rudimentary control I could use to "try," there are a small subset of voiding incident types, invariably types I don't encounter regularly, where I feel like I could have made it to the bathroom. In my case, in terms of prevalence by type, virtually all of these incidents are unexpected messing (after activity, in response to a sudden strong stimulus, etc.) but I think the principle is the same. Absolutely. I suspect that you aren't intentionally doing it, but even if you were, the fact that you subjectively can't intentionally not do it warrants diapers; it is, at minimum, a form of functional incontinence. It sounds like it, and you know what? Congratulations on that.

Yes. I'm incontinent, so it's pretty much a necessity for hygiene reasons.

I feel like my answer is "not in the sense you're asking, but technically yes." I'm saying that because I got the impression you wanted to know whether we wore them for AB/DL reasons. I am absolutely AB/DL and proud of it, but I wore them for need. One way or another, I have had to wear diapers for need for most of the time I've been in education. In particular: I was wearing diapers, strictly defined, for all of 1st, 2nd and 7th grade, about 50% of 6th grade, and about 75% of 8th, so about 4 years 3 months or so. Broadly defined — i.e. including training pants and various other forms of protection — I was also wearing them for all of 3rd grade, the remaining 25% of 8th, about half of 9th, and about half of 12th, so an additional 2 years 3 months or so. In total, that's 6 years 6 months, or a bit over half the time I spent in school. I was out of diapers when I started my first undergrad degree. I started wearing by choice in my second semester, and for need starting in my fourth, and ever since. "Ever since" includes the entirety of my second undergrad degree (2 years, until going on indefinite leave in 2018).

I was born in the early- to mid-1990s, so I was raised in disposable diapers. If you mean after toilet training, it is probably relevant that I had developmental issues which meant I toilet trained extremely late (started at 7). The first time I wore disposables after that would have been at about 10/11, when I had to go back into diapers due to recurring continence issues, but I went back into cloth diapers after a bit less than a year of that. First time voluntarily wearing disposables would have been at 17.

My answer has nuance. I'm in UTC+10, 15 hours ahead of NYC. By the time the ball dropped in Times Square, it was already 3pm New Year's Day my time. My New Year was at 9am 31 December NYC time. I saw it in at home. I did do so in a messy diaper, because I had an accident at about 11:30pm and I knew if I took the time to shower and change I'd miss midnight. Funnily enough, I do believe I was indeed in a messy diaper at 3pm 1 January, when NYC entered the New Year.

Given only those two options, in general, I would recommend jeans. As others have said, jeans constrain the diaper more and generally make it a bit quieter. In practice, I don't wear jeans, specifically because they do constrain the diaper; I'm severely incontinent and consequently I am a bit uncomfortable with having my diapers squashed. I wear either dresses or overalls. If I need to look like I'm wearing normal jeans, I put outerwear over the top half of the overalls, such as a hoodie (my ability to do this is obviously dependant on the weather).

Well, this seems appropriate... lol

Hey @Eido! A few notes on your post, because I feel like I saw myself in it a bit, lol. I'm honestly not surprised this happened the way you describe. In my limited firsthand and secondhand experience, people who have only pantswetting and bedwetting issues have some degree of success getting out of diapers, but it seems incredibly rare for people with poor bowel control to manage it; off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone I know who has, including me. So, this sounds like it might be a phenomenon which I've taken to calling social lock-in (but which I didn't invent; it's discussed at some length, not under that name, in the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program from 2004). Social lock-in is where, after a certain point, your incontinence is reinforced by the fact that people know you're incontinent and expect you to be, so there's not really anything to gain from trying to retrain. It can be quite influential; I've known one or two people who had accidents within the first couple of months of being 24/7 and have been kind of stuck 24/7 since because of it. Something similar happened to me! I was doing supervised retraining for a few months in late 2015 in lighter diapers and pull-ups. I was in a controlled environment and I was pretty consistently able to make it to the toilet. The issue was basically that there was a pretty hard de facto time limit when my supervised untraining needed to end. I convinced myself that I would be able to get back into underwear (or underwear and pull-ups) by the time I hit that limit. As it actually happened that was not the case and I ended up having to go back into diapers knowing it would be at least 6, probably 12 months before I got another chance. Even after having to go back into diapers I tried to keep making it to the toilet, but I got nowhere near it and that killed my confidence pretty fast. That's fair enough! I'd be interested to know how your control is at the moment.

This is in fact exactly the kind of data I'm looking for — thank you so much!

Hey y'all. Hope you're doing well. Looking for some info and hoping you might be able to help me. I assume the fraction of people who will have done this is extremely small, but it's worth asking. This question is for people who went into diapers, deliberately or at least knowingly lost a measurable degree of continence ("untrained"), and then decided they wanted to regain the continence they lost and made an effort to do so ("retrained"). My questions include the following, but your replies do not have to be structured as answers to them. What was your continence like prior to untraining at all? What was your continence like at the point when you decided to retrain? What strategies did you pursue while attempting to retrain? If you consider yourself to have partially or completely successfully retrained, did you intend to recover full control in every aspect? If not, what did you intend? did you recover your continence in all the aspects and in the full degree which you intended (complete success)? if not (partial success), in what aspects and to what degree did you recover your continence, and how did that compare to what you intended? since ending retraining, have you been able to maintain the degree of continence you had at that time? If you consider yourself to have failed to retrain, in what aspects and to what degree did you intend to recover your continence? if you managed to achieve any recovery of continence, in what aspects and to what degree did you recover it? what caused you to stop retraining, rather than persisting with it? in your opinion, if you tried to retrain now, do you think that compared to your previous attempt(s) your outcome would be better, worse, or about the same? Regardless of whether you were successful or unsuccessful in retraining, can you think of anything in particular that you feel was crucial to that outcome, without which you feel things might have gone differently? I fully realise this might get basically no traction, but any help you can give me is appreciated. I'm asking in order to confirm or disprove a few things. I have a very small sample size. Over the years, I have gotten the impression that if you were previously dry at night and became wet at night as a result of untraining, you will probably remain wet at night regardless of what actions you take going forward. people who had started bedwetting by the time they decided to retrain tend to have notably poorer outcomes in terms of daytime control recovery than people who were still dry. some subset of the small fraction of people who retrain are not able to keep the continence they gain through retraining. Based primarily on my own experience, I suspect that previous failed retraining attempts may have the paradoxical effect of embedding incontinence more strongly than if the retraining attempt had never occurred. I had a retraining attempt in late 2015–early 2016 which I had to cut short ultimately due to time and circumstances, and I think "failing" retraining may have played a role in the change of my conscious experience of control through 2016 from "very weak, not practically usable, but still perceptible to some degree" to "literally absent, as if there were no muscles there."

This is absolutely 100% the case. I have a pretty sensitive digestive system, which was the case even when I was continent. During the period when I was wearing full-time but still had bowel control, it was especially nice to be in diapers on the days when I didn't quite have bowel control. Of course then I started having accidents increasingly regularly and I kind of had to just roll with it because I didn't have a lot of time to spend outside diapers trying to get my bowel control back, so I was in the weird position of being grateful for my diapers when I couldn't make it to the toilet, while also being aware that every time I didn't make it to the toilet it would be less likely that I'd make it to the toilet next time.

Messing in my sleep started happening to me after a couple of years without my consciously pursuing it. I see my sleep messing as an outcome of my prior bedwetting and lack of messing control, so I imagine it would happen to at least some subset of people who completely untrain, given enough time.

Big mood, dude. Hope you feel better soon.

We are not in touch. The reason I am not in touch with my dad is unrelated to AB/DL, and the reason I am not in touch with my mum is unrelated to either AB/DL or the reason I am not in touch with my dad.

I figured I should answer my own questionnaire in the interest of procedural fairness. Under what circumstances did you decide to go into diapers 24/7? I decided to go into diapers 24/7 in early 2013, after going into them part-time in mid-2012 due to a mix of legitimate concerns about my continence and AB/DL feelings about which I was in denial. How long have you been in diapers? Continuously, about 8 years. Overall, about 17. I am 27. Do you still own any underwear? If not, how long has it been since you owned underwear? No. I haven't owned any underwear since mid-2013. Do you use your diapers and the toilet, or do you use your diapers exclusively? I use my diapers exclusively. Since starting 24/7, have you had to make changes or improvements in response to practical pressures you didn't foresee? e.g., switching diaper brands, changing up your wardrobe, etc.? Yes. The diapering I actually need to wear as a completely incontinent person is considerably higher-performance and bulkier than the diapering I originally wore as a primarily-AB/DL, mostly continent lifestylist. This is a change that I did not foresee and originally was not entirely onboard with. I have had to extensively redesign my wardrobe to accommodate it. Are there any circumstances under which you would definitely leave diapers? Not that I can foresee. I am completely and likely intractably incontinent. Even in the event of a cataclysmic breakdown of the supply chain I can't imagine any circumstances under which it would be preferable to have no protection compared to at least some protection. Do you think you could easily leave diapers immediately, assuming for some reason you had to? Not a chance. For people who aren't untraining, have you had to deal with unexpected continence loss regardless? I was acting in a way that allowed untraining to happen, but wasn't fully aware of that. I didn't come face-to-face with the knowledge until the deterioration of my continence was quite advanced. How long have you been untraining? Since mid-2012. My bladder control had identifiably weakened by the end of October 2012, so I count the beginning of my untraining to the beginning of that stay in diapers, c. July 2012. How is your control right now? Nonexistent. I have no control of my bladder or bowels at any time. I have no meaningful awareness of my bladder and relatively limited awareness of my bowels. My most recent attempt at retraining was completely unproductive. If you haven't yet reached your untraining goals, what are they? I had no specific goals, but I am completely and permanently incontinent, so whatever they were, I have reached them. Did you have any continence issues before you started untraining? If so, do you think they were a factor in your decision? Yes and yes. I spent many more years in diapers as a kid than average; I didn't begin to leave them until I was 7. I had to go back into them at 10/11 and didn't start to get out of them until 12 (depending on how you count). I initially went back into diapers partly as a result of a quite genuine incident where I had to hold my bladder longer than I felt confident doing. If your control now is definitely worse than it was when you started untraining, how does that feel? For example, if you never had bedwetting or fear wetting or messing accidents before and you have them now, how do you feel, or how have you felt, about it? The primary thing I had not previously experienced was bedwetting. While I was regularly wet at night as a young child, I was not a regular bedwetter during my early-adolescent incontinent episode. Realising I was a bedwetter in approximately mid-2013 was an impactful and rather intimidating event; I understood on some level that I would probably never be dry or completely out of diapers again. Do you want to regain lost continence? Have you tried to regain lost continence? How did it go? Not anymore. I did try in late 2015 and made some progress, but unfortunately had to stop. Later attempts in 2016, which were my latest attempts so far, were fruitless. Is your incontinence in your medical records? If you're comfortable sharing, how is it described? Yes. It is documented as stress UI, secondary nocturnal enuresis, and urge FI, with little transferable detail or data concerning any given etiology. Do you think that if you tried, you would be able to leave diapers over any timescale? Extremely unlikely. Realistically, I think it is most probably impossible.

Yes, I think my incontinence and AB/DL may have interacted with each other. I had extremely delayed toilet training; I didn't start until 7 and didn't finish until 8. I consider that an episode of incontinence. I also had a separate episode, for unclear reasons, from when I was 10 to just before I turned 12, which I didn't completely recover from until I was nearly 13. It was definitely difficult to go through. I know Fuss et al. (2019) found that AB/DLs have a higher than average rate of adverse childhood experiences; I'm wondering if the trauma of being in diapers for an unusually long time overall, and of leaving them repeatedly, was an influence on my identity as a DL. I went back into diapers voluntarily and gradually, from a few months before I turned 18 to a few months after. I consciously did it because I didn't feel secure in being able to maintain my functional urinary continence in the context of my new routine of first-year undergraduate studies. In hindsight, however, I definitely think that my identity as a DL might have affected my decision to go back into diapers, my commitment to staying in them, and my decision not to try harder to leave them when my general continence started showing visible signs of strain. References Fuss, J., Jais, L., Grey, B.T., Guczka, S.R., Briken, P., & Biedermann, S.V. (2019, June 22). Self-reported childhood maltreatment and erotic target identity inversions among men with paraphilic infantilism. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 45(8), 781-795. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2019.1623355.

Hey folks. I'm sorry I took so long to get back to this — I have been dealing with aphasia lately, which has made it unusually hard to write. You're very kind; thank you for saying so! The feeling is mutual. My pleasure! I appreciate you taking the time. I didn't mean the questions to be mandatory, I'm sorry ?! I am very glad they were interesting, though. No worries!