Kaliborio

Because I have complete FI, I don't usually move to a specific position in order to mess. However, because I'm AB/DL and enjoy improving and refining my life in diapers, I've changed the postures and positions in which I do normal things in order to make messing easier. Instead of sitting, these days I usually rest in ways that take pressure off my butt, such as lying on my stomach or kneeling on a cushion. If I'm at home, already standing and moving around, and realise I'm about to fill my diapers, it's not unusual for me to crouch down to do so. If I want to mess but it's not okay for me to drop into an obvious diaper squat, I might "sit in an invisible chair" against a wall; alternatively, if there's a waist-height surface in front of me, I find that I finish messing faster if I put both my hands on it and my feet slightly apart. I don't necessarily stop moving while I mess, especially if I've got somewhere to go. Something about the leg and hip movement of using staircases and ladders means that, for me, they reliably turn "imminent accidents" into actual ones. For some reason, reaching up to do something also has this effect.

I'm incontinent, so all of the above. In the year or so prior to starting my current episode of severe incontinence, I was wearing diapers primarily at university, then they gradually expanded into my home life.

Up to about mid-2013 I stood up, but I started developing FI in mid-2013 and switched to lying down.

Layered diapering (Tena Slip Maxi inner, Rearz Omutsu outer), pink GaryWear Active Brief waterproof PUL pants, a Onesies Down Under onesie from a couple of years back, and socks. I've been in diapers continuously for about eight years and will generally try to wear as few clothes as is reasonably possible at any given time (typically at home), simply because in case of a leak it means I leak on less or no clothes, and therefore don't have to do extra laundry.

In my experience, no. As a completely incontinent person with previous experience of near-complete continence, the actual process feels like going #2 fairly normally from a continent person's point of view, but with much less effort; it's just that I have no control over when it starts, when it stops, or how fast it goes. I have generalised lower GI symptoms (basically IBS-like, but I don't have a formal diagnosis), so I do still experience diarrhoea, which, equally, is not under my control. As @rusty pins correctly mentioned, I do go to a fair degree of effort to make sure I'm not constipated because it's not something I can do anything about and it is unpleasant and possibly dangerous.

I've used both separately, but now use both, either in alternation or at the same time. I pretty reliably use disposables for day-to-day wear, but will usually have a layer of cloth diapering over the top of the disposable to insulate it from leaks. In situations where I need to use diapering with a lot of absorbency and few opportunities to change, I will switch to an all-cloth diaper to take advantage of its extensibility.

When I had control, diaper "user." Now I am definitely using them for their intended purpose, in that I'm incontinent and that's what they're designed for.

Yes, which was incredibly confusing, because I had major continence issues in childhood and wasn't meaningfully out of diapers until I was 7. As you can probably imagine, it took me a while to be able to contextualise what I was experiencing.

This is a good thread. I was 24/7 by the start of 2013, but I was still wearing basically the same clothes and acting in the same way that I had been when I was out of diapers. I had to start dealing with FI in late 2013, but I didn't actually properly deal with it in until early-to-mid-2014. Part of the reason I didn't deal with it was that, even though I had had IC issues before I went 24/7, by the time I went 24/7 I was very strongly and consciously aware that I was also AB/DL. At the time, I was (and still am, to an extent) really, really conservative about diaper-related ethics and consent. I was able to deal with UI and feel like basically nobody knew, but to deal with FI and still live a lifestyle that I was comfortable with, I had to massively upgrade my diapers, to handle both existing absorbency demands from UI and containment demands from FI. Basically, I had to be able to move confidently, including putting pressure on my butt, for up to arbitrarily about 2 hours after filling a diaper, because that was roughly how long my commute took assuming I caught all of my connections. I had to move from relatively normal diapers to an amount of protection that I had never worn even for fun before 24/7. I also wasn't comfortable with dressing in a way that either emphasised it or made full diapers apparent, so I had to revise my wardrobe much more thoroughly than I had had to when I went 24/7 originally, and I was worried about whether playing down the alteration in my body shape was actually kind of playing it up "in the negative space," etc. Obviously I eventually had to come to terms with it because it was that or leak everywhere or become a recluse. Relative to what you said: I did have to move from strict "nobody must ever know" discretion to "my diapers do not affect anybody's life," simply because at that point, alteration of baseline body shape, gait and wardrobe mean that no matter how well you play it down or how discreetly you dress, the number of strangers who will be able to accurately figure it out with one glance will be non-0. There's still no excuse to drag other people in, but aiming for it to be impossible to know you're in diapers at that point is unachievable. In terms of visibility, over the 6 years or so this has been my diapering status quo, I've had multiple friends know before I tell them, but that's it. No obvious second glances, no public comments. I think I can continue to be okay with that.

I agree with what you said about the best way to become double IC, and about why you shouldn't harm yourself with toys. However, unfortunately, I have to disagree with the general idea that using toys, and generally doing stuff down there, won't make you IC. Mechanisms causing FI include (Baeten & Kuijpers, 2007): Traumatic sphincter injury from insertion of foreign objects in the rectum. Postoperative damage because the IAS is incredibly fragile and easy to damage with specific surgical implements. Stretch-induced pudendal neuropathy, i.e., irreversible damage to the pudendal nerve, which controls the nerves required to maintain faecal continence. Damage can be done by a stretch of about 12%, and can therefore be caused by labour or even long-term constipation (UK National Collaborating Centre for Acute Care, 2007). I realise there's a chance that at least 1 or 2 people reading this at some point before the heat death of the universe are going to go, "Therefore, I should induce FI by irresponsibly putting things up my butt," and I don't agree with them, I agree with you. Let me be completely clear to those people: One of my secondary motivations for untraining was because I had residual continence issues that weren't considered severe enough to justify management with diapers, and it absolutely sucked. The kind of FI you get from physically damaging your lower GI tract, deliberately or not, is absolutely not the kind anyone wants. Even among us continence-haters, continence is preferable to that. References Baeten, C.G., & Kuijpers, H.C. (2007). Incontinence. In B.G. Wolff, J.W. Fleshman, D.E. Beck, J.H. Pemberton, S.D. Wexner, ... & M.J. Stamos (Eds.), The ASCRS textbook of colon and rectal surgery. Springer Science+Business Media. UK National Collaborating Centre for Acute Care (2007). NICE clinical guidelines, No. 49 — faecal incontinence: The management of faecal incontinence in adults. US National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Hi folks, I’ve been in ABU Simples for a while now but would like to reduce costs a bit — shipping in particular is killing me. I switched to Tena Maxis this month but haven’t been impressed. Are there any plastic-backed medical diaper brands available in Australia that aren’t useless for one reason or another? Failing that, are there any cloth-backed medical diaper brands that can actually hold their fit?

I'm sorry for what you went through, cathdiap. I hate when our needs tear us apart. To answer your question — I'm certain my diapers and incontinence are affecting my current relationship prospects. I'm equally certain I don't care. I went into diapers and let my control disintegrate quite early (wasn't quite 20 by the time my IC diagnoses were entered). I did this partly because the relationships and sex I had before that point made it abundantly, painfully clear to me that any relationship or sexual connection which wasn't accepting to the point of enthusiasm about my diapers and my use of them was not a relationship I could cope with. That wasn't something I chose; I thought I could handle doing things the normal way, but all it made me was emotionally distant, resentful, restricted and detached, and sexually frigid and passionless. I felt overwhelming heartache and shame about not being able to be normal. The irony is, it turns out I am romantically and sexually pretty normal — but until I dealt with my diapers and my continence, they were standing in front of the entire rest of my sexuality, screaming obscenities at me. When I satisfied them and they subsided, that was when I was finally able to review the whole vista beyond them that I'd never been able to see before. I don't feel I've been sexless since going into diapers — there are a surprising number of people on FetLife who are okay with or actively interested in a diapered partner. Venues where the member base would be less accepting, such as Tinder, also tend to be venues I just don't find interesting for more than about a day a year. I also don't feel I've been especially loveless. I've grown increasingly bored with the idea of seeking out romantic or sexual love in an organised way, as something I should have; it's more of a roll of the die. If it happens, it happens, but I'm not going to exhaust my allowance of Tinder matches every day just to say I did. There is a lot of agápe, philía, philautía, and storgé circulating in my life right now; my ability to give and receive non-erotic love has really deepened. I love the person who is essentially my adoptive sister both entirely platonically and much more deeply than I could have imagined loving anyone before all this. I'm content with my choices. If I don't find my one true love, that's fine; I have many more than one love, and they're all true.

No worries! I figure if it stops being voluntary, it becomes involuntary Sure! The point at which I actually thought, "I have to manage my IC, regardless of what, as an AB/DL, I am allowed to do," was when my FI started developing. I had subclinical stress FI before diapers, but the presentation of FI that I developed in diapers was much more dramatic and severe. The reason that I had to have that come-to-Jesus moment was because effectively handling my FI while also retaining core competencies that were important to me, like the ability to move through the world freely, meant revising the way I lived the rest of my life much more radically than I had done either to go 24/7 or upon realising I had developed UI. It kind of developed outward from diapering. I went 24/7 with the impression essentially that I was going to swan through the world in Abena M3s and boot cut jeans. I had been voluntarily messing for months before I identified loss of control, but specifically because it was voluntary and I hadn't been doing it 100% of the time, I hadn't bothered to seriously adapt my life to it. When it can happen just anywhere, on the other hand, Abena M3s + jeans just make you feel like you have a landmine attached to your ass. There was really simple ordinary stuff that suddenly became necessary to do in a tentative and doubtful way, like sitting down in my car. It became ridiculous. For me, freedom of movement and action in that context required much heavier protection. I functionally needed more absorbency because... to be blunt, poop contains water; I needed to use diapering with much more body coverage so I wasn't risking a "containment breach" every time I moved too energetically; I needed to use multiple layers of diapering so that I had a margin of safety if worst came to worst, and I wasn't going to move to a disposable/disposable arrangement because I couldn't afford to throw out half the diapers I bought, unused, so I had to switch to using cloth diapers as either part or all of my diapering. Basically it meant I had to switch from a "moderate, responsible" amount of diapering (which was based on a consumer choice I had made as a mostly continent AB/DL with entirely different needs) to a really just outrageously super-heavy amount of diapering. That took a lot of reconciling because if there's one AB/DL tendency I absolutely hate, it's maladaptive exhibitionism — "Look how massive and obvious my diaper is! Look at all these people who have to see it!" ADISC and DailyDiapers both seem to take a fairly hard line on that kind of shit, but it is everywhere fucking else. So at that point I ran into a psychological wall of "No! Properly managing your continence would turn you into one of those assholes!" But in the end it was accept the bulk, or keep tiptoeing everywhere and have a heart attack at 20 from stress, or stop tiptoeing everywhere and become a biohazard. So I accepted the bulk. Which itself led to complications because I obviously needed clothes that would comfortably fit over it without emphasising it, and my baseline proportions are already weird in the same ways that diapers tend to accentuate, so like, any pants that comfortably fit over my diaper came down over my foot, and I hate altering clothing and it hates me. So then I went into 18 months of weird awkward sartorial holding action to avoid confronting the fact that an off-the-shelf wardrobe which is properly mechanically adapted to that level of diapering, and to the mechanisms underlying the functional necessity thereof, tends to inevitably make you look like you're trying to look like you're 2, and that also felt like exhibitionism. How many non-AB/DL adults do you know who wear bib-and-brace overalls on the reg.? — The weird thing is, overalls weren't even a solution I adopted from other AB/DLs or from babywear. I got that idea through the ISC Primer ("Chapter 11: What to wear," 2005) which is very good, but unashamedly AB/DL-neutral-to-unfriendly ("Chapter 2: Diapers get a bum rap," 2005). The fact that I then became more aware of their status as traditionally babyish clothes is what contextualised them to me as unacceptable. Anyway I had to come to terms with the fact that, as an IC AB/DL, it was functionally necessary for me to do things that, as a continent AB/DL, I would have felt it ethically necessary not to do. I don't think one should ever be lax in monitoring oneself, but it was eventually a choice between going mad and leaning slightly in. It wasn't a conscious "I am doing this because I am an AB/DL" decision, just a decision that I am fairly sure I wouldn't have made if I wasn't an AB/DL. Basically, I had an incident at university at the end in mid-2012 where, as a result of the institution being disorganised, I had to not take a toilet break and ended up almost wetting myself, about five years after the last time I had done that involuntarily. I resolved to start wearing diapers specifically to deal with circumstances like that, and then I was like, "Well, actually, there are plenty of other circumstances in which this would also be useful," such that I was 24/7 by the end of the next semester. Choosing to let my control fall apart also wasn't initially a conscious decision; I just think that if I had been deciding entirely as an IC person, I might not have decided to use my diapers completely instead of the toilet, which was really the foundation of everything else. Yep. I think the theory that untraining-focused AB/DL is a presentation of body integrity dysphoria (Brugger & Lenggenhager, 2014) has merit. I will admit to being a sellout bitch because I think I still have too many hangouts to be an advocate for AB/DLs with BID, despite quite probably being one; if I got shirtfronted and asked to confirm my stance in front of a hostile audience, it would be difficult not to go all John 18:15-27 about it. Hopefully I improve with time. I can relate to the kind of events you're describing — I'm not gonna divert this thread to talk about my own experiences, but I'm really sorry that what happened to you, happened to you. You deserved to be treated better. I was definitely getting small nudges to quit diapers during refractory periods, which I write down to PCD. Ultimately, however, PCD is itself an altered mental state; it prevents impulsive libidinal behaviour, but it's useless as a means of evaluating the long-term appropriateness of that behaviour. During the period between realising I was trans and starting HRT, I had periods where under particular stress I would mentally "flip" and accept my immediate family's paper-thin and obviously bullshit argument that I shouldn't transition. That's typical of complex PTSD (Pelcovitz et al., 2006) — "acceptance of a perpetrator's belief system." Shame is "a perpetrator's belief system" on a large scale; it's the result of internalising the prevailing societal morality (Gilbert, 2003). I think PCD induces diaper-related shame because orgasmic release of oxytocin puts you in a receptive headspace (Carmichael et al., 1987; Hurlemann et al., 2010; Lane et al., 2012) and that "voice of society" suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. One of the reasons I particularly believe that last part is because oxytocin promotes both (1) trust and (2) dishonesty favouring your in-group (Shalvi & De Dreu, 2014); with oxytocin flooding your system, it could be that you'd be more likely to repressively lie to yourself, and more likely to believe it. Society is wrong about a bunch of shit, even right down in its marrow, on things the truth of which has been decisively proven. PCD just makes you more likely to believe society is right, regardless of whether it actually is. CW: partisanship! "Does letting go and accepting IC life make them go away, or at least soften them [...]?" I can't tell you what it does as a rule; I don't know what it does as a rule. Here's what it did for me. With regard to positive feelings about diapers, they stopped being a weakness. Before I achieved complete and unconditional acceptance, even well into diapers and continence loss, I was still stuck in the binge-purge cycle (BitterGrey, 2015), but because I couldn't be out of diapers it was externalised onto diaper-related content. Extreme stress would trigger days-long binges where I just ignored everything else. As well, even though diapers were one of the few things that broke through my total lack of happiness, they did so in a very intense way which could feel anxious, extreme, frenzied. After accepting whatever happened, giving myself permission, that evened out. The binges stopped, diminishing to what I guess is probably an ordinary level of ebb and flow; the happiness stopped making me tremble and stopped being laced with terror. With regard to negative feelings about diapers, they stopped being incomprehensible and inaccessible, and became legible and solvable. Before full-time diapers, when I had PCD after diaper-related content, and I wanted to know why I felt so bad, my brain told me, "Because you're a fucked-up, malodorous little pervert, and you'll never know why, and I don't want to find out what other worms are wiggling under that rock." After full-time diapers and continence loss, I didn't have PCD as often, but when I did, my brain told me, "Because you're a self-mutilating freak, and this is you imploding from your own decadence." After full-time diapers, continence loss, and acceptance, I might feel transiently bad, and my brain would be like, sort of lamely, "Ewww, you're in a messy diaper" (full acceptance came after pretty well-advanced loss of #2 control, so my brain just skipped bullying me for the wet diapers altogether). And I'd be like... "Why is that bad?" And my brain would be like, "... Uh. Because you need to change it before you go to bed." And I'd be like, "Thanks for the tip." And that would be that. "is the only option to alleviate PCD to dive into those desires, societal pressures be damned?" That's a good question. The summary of my answer is: Probably, but if this is the good one, who gives a shit? I want to expand on that answer. I'm not aware that there are any ways to get free of the desire to wear 24/7 and untrain other than to do those things. I'm not aware that there are any such ways in the pipe. I'm not aware that any are possible in principle. Part of my decision to go ahead with all this, both originally (before accepting myself) and at the point of acceptance, was essentially I didn't feel I was obliged to wait for medical science to sign off on me being happy. I had a need to untrain, and there was no effective anti-need-to-untrain drug or therapy, so there was one solution for it, because I wasn't going to sit there with my thumb through the back of my boxers and this bug in my head. But also, if there were, I don't know that I would take it. A funny story is that one of the best-known things about trans HRT is that one of the key components, estradiol, kills your libido — it was temporary for me and my understanding is it usually is (Defreyne et al., 2020). Given there absolutely is libidinal involvement in my relationship to diapers, I lost a big part of my active enjoyment of them. I didn't start hating them, they just stopped feeling so cool and interesting and started being mostly just... there, irrelevant to me. I was worried sick, because I started HRT well after my IC was formalised as absolutely permanently definitely forever, so I thought, "If I suddenly don't have a relationship with diapers any more, I'm done for." I was worried it was the beginning of a long fatal downhill. But my libido came back, and was better-integrated with the rest of my brain because it was no longer so physically disgusting to experience. What I noticed while it was gone was... a hole. Like an unexpectedly missing tooth. I tried to do worldly things with that time but just... nothing came. That space was unnerving; it wasn't supposed to be there. I don't think I'd welcome another absence like that. People are entitled to have expectations of me with regard to my diapers. People are entitled to modify their behaviour toward me as a result, or request that I modify mine. But I have always fundamentally disagreed with the idea that I should have voluntarily committed to leaving that hole in my heart just because others found my means unsettling or others were worried about my future. I researched my alternatives, I liked my means, and it is my future. Yeah. There were definitely times when I found myself missing aspects of continence, but it wasn't a stab-in-the-heart, lifelong pain; I generally found I could "get out by going through," making some change to my life that I hadn't previously thought of or hadn't previously seen the need to make, so that I could capture the positive facets of what was now absent within the context of not being continent. Diaper changes can suck. But they always suck less than being stuck in briefs and staring longingly through the open door of a vacant toilet with a change table in it. No worries! I hope it comes out to be the best possible thing. References BitterGrey (2015, July 23). The ABDL binge and purge cycle. Understanding Infantilism. BitterGrey (2019, July 20). Why want diapers?. Understanding Infantilism. Brugger, P., & Lenggenhager, B. (2014, December). The bodily self and its disorders: Neurological, psychological and social aspects. Current Opinion in Neurology, 27(6), 644-652. doi:10.1097/WCO.0000000000000151. Carmichael, M.S., Humbert, R., Dixen, J., Palmisano, G., Greenleaf, W., & Davidson, J.M. (1987, January). Plasma oxytocin increases in the human sexual response. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 64(1), 27-31. doi:10.1210/jcem-64-1-27. Chapter 2: Diapers get a bum rap (2005). In Incontinence Support Center (Eds.), The new diaper primer. Your Incontinence Support Center: A caring community. Chapter 11: What to wear (2005). In Incontinence Support Center (Eds.), The new diaper primer. Your Incontinence Support Center: A caring community. Defreyne, J., Elaut, E., Kreukels, B., Fisher, A.D., Castellini, G., ... & T'Sjoen, G. (2020, January 31). Sexual desire changes in transgender individuals upon initiation of hormone treatment: Results from the Longitudinal European Network for the Investigation of Gender Incongruence. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 17(4), 812-825. doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2019.12.020. Gilbert, P. (2003, Winter). Evolution, social roles, and the differences in shame and guilt. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 70(4), 1205-1230. Hurleman, R., Patin, A., Onur, O.A., Cohen, M.X., Baumgartner, T., ... & Kendrick, K.M. (2010, April 7). Oxytocin enhances amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(14), 4999-5007. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5538-09.2010. Lane, A., Luminet, O., Rimé, B., Gross, J.J., de Timary, P., & Mikolajczak, M. (2012, May 3). Oxytocin increases willingness to socially share one's emotions. International Journal of Psychology, 48(4), 676-681. doi:10.1080/00207594.2012.677540. Pelcovitz, D., van der Kolk, B., Roth, S., Mandel, F., Kaplan, S., & Resick, P. (2006, February 19). Development of a criteria set and a structured interview for disorders of extreme stress (SIDES). Journal of Traumatic Stress, 10(1), 3-16. doi:10.1002/jts.2490100103. Shalvi, S., & De Dreu, C.K.W. (2014, April 15). Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(15), 5503-5507. doi:10.1073/pnas.1400724111.

Hey! Nice to talk to you again. That's okay. I do think "artificial" IC counts for the purposes of this thread. As someone with a lot of neurodivergences and mood conditions, I can tell you that I think self-diagnosis is valid (Iverson et al., 2008). There are limits, but this seems pretty unambiguous. I do believe it's reasonable to suggest there is a conflict of interest there. The problem is that the conflict of interest is bilateral. As an AB/DL, it's important not to allow the heart to rule the head, so to speak, on continence-related issues. But when IC may have, or has, developed, it's also vitally important not to overcompensate for the fact that one is an AB/DL and therefore undermanage one's IC out of a feeling that one doesn't deserve it. Also, I think it's definitely fair to point out the libidinal component of AB/DL stuff, up to and including voluntary loss of continence. The problem is that being libidinal doesn't make it go away. If someone wants to be IC and diapered at all times except directly after post-nut drop ("Sex and depression," 2009), they ... still want it 23 hours a day. What are they meant to do, jack off every six hours? There's another user on this forum who is transfemme and who has explicitly compared wanting 24/7, and wanting to untrain, to gender dysphoria. While I'm also transfemme and I shy away from making that specific comparison, I don't think it's a dumb one. Both experiences are like having a fly buzzing around your ear every day for your entire life. It really doesn't help that there's some evidence (Maczkowiack & Schweitzer, 2019) that that "moment of clarity" is a sequela of earlier trauma — the same kind, in fact, that Fuss, Jais & BitterGrey et al. showed was prevalent in AB/DLs (Fuss et al., 2019). Is it the case that the reason we think we don't deserve it and can't handle it, and are open to being validated in that, is the same reason we want it in the first place? The implications of that are messy. I understand this. I genuinely think if at one point I hadn't had pretty much flawless 100% control, having 80-90% control might not have seemed like such a slog. I also understand this, and when I made serious attempts to leave diapers, I came to the conclusion that I would really rather be known as the person who wears diapers than the person who needs diapers and doesn't wear them. This was definitely something I explored because I had a few romantic non-sexual experiences in the years before I went into diapers, and I lost my virginity just after I went into diapers, at a point where I could still spend some time out of them. I contemplated leaving diapers, which at that point I likely could have done (my control had slipped a bit, but that was super early on) — and might have done had that relationship not exploded like a grenade for completely unrelated reasons. But as much as I was, at the time, maybe willing to leave diapers, I was also super, super aware that any relationship that required me to do that would be one that I would have extreme difficulty enjoying. I'm gonna keep my commentary selective because my approach also has drawbacks, I really don't want to be a partisan for my side, and I really do think that you should pursue the way that you genuinely feel is correct and sustainable. This has been a constant problem for me — not on retraining, which I always phoned in and ultimately gave up, but I knew I was doing that while I was doing it. I have had real difficulty knowing what I like and what I intend, I think probably partly as a byproduct of autistic alexithymia (Preece et al., 2017), but also as a direct symptom of complex PTSD (Cook et al., 2005) and possible gender-incongruence-related depersonalisation/derealisation disorder (Colizzi et al., 2015). I have constantly been in the position of, "Should I be trying harder, or am I actually finding it impossible to try harder because this is pointless?" From what you're saying, it seems like if you were to completely regain your continence, you would feel empowered and feel like your degree of agency is enhanced, which I absolutely think is a laudable thing to seek out. I think I said something like this in my reply to one of your tumblr asks, but at times like this — and especially when life has kicked you around a bit — it can often seem as if you must say, "Well, fuck me I guess, I have neither the power nor the standing to resist the dictates of circumstance; I didn't deserve the prize anyway and I deserve what I get." I think that's an illusion. If continence would make you feel better, you are entitled to keep fighting for it no matter how many roadblocks you encounter or how many times you stumble along the way. Having said that, I also think that the idea that being severely incontinent will ruin your life is a non sequitur in the strict sense; it could do so, but it is not guaranteed to. I think you're in a situation where both alternatives are compelling, which sucks because, despite the hype, 99.9% of all the decisions a person will ever make have a preponderance of evidence in one direction or the other, so hard decisions are genuinely hard and nobody actually has the strength of character to make them. I don't want to be all "Make your choice, adventurous Stranger," (Lewis, 1955) but in making decisions where I know both options are loaded with regret, I ask myself: will I be able to resolve that regret and move past it given time, so that it only hurts sometimes, or will it take on haunting me, as a kind of sport? I definitely tend to prefer the first kind. References Colizzi, M., Costa, R., & Todarello, O. (2015, January 23). Dissociative symptoms in individuals with gender dysphoria: Is the elevated prevalence real?. Psychiatry Research, 226(1), 173-180. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2014.12.045. Cook, A., Spinazzola, J., Ford, J., Lanktree, C., Blaustein, M., ... & van der Kolk, B. (2005, May 1). Complex trauma in children and adolescents. Psychiatric Annals, 35(5). doi:10.3928/00485713-20050501-05. 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. Iverson, S.A., Howard, K.B., & Penney, B.K. (2008, December). Impact of internet use on health-related behaviours and the patient-physician relationship: A survey-based study and review. Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, 108(12), 699-711. Lewis, C.S. (1955). The magician's nephew. The Bodley Head. Maczkowiack, J., & Schweitzer, R.D. (2019, February 7). Postcoital dysphoria: Prevalence and correlates among males. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 45(2), 128-140. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2018.1488326. Preece, D., Becerra, R., Allan, A., Robinson, K., & Dandy, J. (2017, December 1). Establishing the theoretical components of alexithymia via factor analysis: Introduction and validation of the attention-appraisal model of alexithymia. Personality and Individual Differences, 119, 341-352. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2017.08.003. Sex and depression: In the brain, if not the mind (2009, January 20). New York Times.

I'm sort of giving myself observer status in this thread — I definitely think my decision to abandon my continence and to consciously avoid continence-reinforcing habits played a significant part in why I have no continence now, and I originally saw it as "having untrained," but I don't think my part in it is the whole story. However, I also don't think it would be accurate to say that my incontinence just happened to me without my intervention, so I'm gonna err on the side of disclosure and respond. I didn't strictly follow the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program, but it was influential in a lot of decisions I made that I would never have thought to make based solely on living in diapers during previous episodes of severe IC. I mostly didn't tell anyone anything, but insofar as I did have to tell anyone, as I had a paediatric IC diagnosis, I just told them it was that. It obviously wasn't initially, but I definitely feel that my continence is what it is now partly as a result of interactions with my existing diagnosis. I developed bedwetting approximately 9 months in. That went from "fairly irregular and infrequent" to "constant" over the course of about 6 months after it started. I previously hadn't had bedwetting that heavy or consistent since prior to toilet training, so it was definitely interesting to deal with. It's still pretty much the same now. I started developing FI a little over a year in, and it took about a year after that to progress to the point of having no meaningful control. It wasn't part of the original plan and I was initially quite stressed about it, but I had dealt with it for pretty lengthy periods prior, and consequently it didn't have the terror of the unknown for me. It was just "But what if I don't want to do that" and then it turned out that I was going to be doing that either way, I guess. I think there's merit to what @Rob110 said about bowel issues being amplified by diapers.

Hi folks, I'm writing this thread to see whether my perspective on a couple of things is normal or extremely unusual. The context is that I went into diapers 24/7 in the second half of 2012 (not all at once but gradually — 24/7 by about November). I started from a position of continence but didn't care to stay there, and my continence did basically disintegrate (at the time, I saw it as me untraining, but I now feel that's an oversimplistic view). Evaluating that and my actions around it, I wanted to reach out and solicit a few opinions from other people who are or have been IC. First, I always got the impression that the "respectable, mainstream" AB/DL position was, effectively, that people who want to be IC don't know what they've got 'til it's gone, and that anybody who had actually been severely IC and stuck in diapers wouldn't want to go back to it. I had been severely IC and stuck in diapers for a significant fraction of my life prior to voluntarily returning to them, and while I definitely had negative experiences that were identifiably linked to having been IC and diapered, I guess I didn't ... develop that strong traumatic aversion that I was supposed to? On the contrary, I felt like if I hadn't gone through all of that, I might have been more averse to returning to it later. Having gone through it just made it seem like something I could actually choose to do. Second, at the time I voluntarily chose to go back into diapers, my continence wasn't 100%. Earlier in my life, it had been 100%, but I then had a prolonged episode of severe IC and after that it was never quite the same (though I don't know if the severe IC "caused" the issues after it). After that episode, I had some variety of stress UI and FI, plus what seemed like new and transient food sensitivities that would cause a few accidents then f*** off, plus (not constant, but regular and consistent) minor soiling. I have no real idea why any of this happened because they only did enough differential diagnostics to determine it probably wasn't anything progressive and life-limiting, and after that they just chucked it all under my paediatric IC diagnosis. Whatever it was, it was functionally: full continence BUT don't run OR go for long walks OR offer to help anybody move house OR eat strange foods OR eat normal foods that are traitors now OR wear anything except black jeans and extremely easily replaceable black underwear OR let anybody smell you in case you had an accident and haven't realised yet. It was just short of being severe enough for doctors to do anything about, but quite sufficiently severe to make others treat me like I was deliberately lazy, picky, and didn't wipe my ass. I definitely wanted to go back into diapers full-time as an AB/DL, and I think I ultimately did make the decision to start the path that led to 24/7 because I am an AB/DL. At the same time, I feel like certain actions I took which were stereotypically AB/DL (like allowing my continence to fall apart) were actually motivated heavily, perhaps primarily, by having been incontinent and having not been able to do well at being continent. Before going into diapers full-time, I was definitely consciously aware that if I had a choice between two scenarios: managing adequate continence, in underwear, with an unquantified but significant management failure rate, but tolerating it for the sake of staying in underwear managing minimal or no continence, in diapers, with near-100% management success I would pick the latter with no hesitation. Of course, the thing is that pretty much all of my reasonable issues with being mostly continent in underwear could have been solved by being mostly continent in diapers. Actually letting my continence disintegrate was not something I had to do. So why did I do it? Significantly because I was AB/DL, probably, but I feel like being IC was also a huge part of that. I feel like as a kid I was supposed to resent my body for betraying me by being incontinent, or resent my diapers for protecting me but being embarrassing. What actually happened was I came away resenting my continence for being a lot more work and still leaving me stressed and embarrassed, but being something I had to do regardless because it was "normal." Once I got into diapers, it was just useless information and useless work; I already knew I could function equally well if I didn't have it. So I let it go. tl;dr — I guess what I'm asking is: can anyone relate to this? Is there anyone else who's been severely IC, "recovered," and then voluntarily chose to return to being IC because the alternative actually sucked just as bad if not worse?

Larger pants sizes are good. I think the rule of thumb is generally two sizes up. Onesies cover the top edge of your diaper. Heavily wet and messy diapers will also sag and become more visible under some clothes; onesies prevent that from happening. Waterproof pants are good. If you are going to wear disposables, I suggest lined waterproof pants; they actually catch leaks, whereas unlined waterproof pants over disposables run the risk of simply pooling. Lined waterproof pants also slow down the percolation of smell-bearing volatiles; they won't completely prevent pee smell, but they will control it. I also agree with the general consensus that plastic-backed diapers provide much better odour control than cloth-backed diapers. Cloth-backed diapers can't even reliably control fluids; when you can press on the front and have a droplet come directly through the cover, that should not be a thing that happens. I'm not a huge fan of tight pants or underwear; concealing the diaper by compressing it doesn't consistently work, but it does consistently reduce the functionality of the diaper. Oddly enough, I'm also not a huge fan of loose pants. The reason is that many varieties of very loose pants which can be bought off store shelves are relatively light and flexible fabric, which is prone to blow or fall over your diaper and outline it anyway. Loose baggy jeans are generally fine, but everything else is case-by-case. I think I'm probably in a small minority of all AB/DL people saying this, but it's worth considering wearing bib-and-brace overalls. It's not because they're cute, although I do think they are cute; however, part of the reason I'm suggesting them is because you can conceal them with a pullover and make them look like somewhat baggy ordinary jeans or slacks. The reason I'm suggesting them, though, is that you have pretty extensive control of how they shape around your legs and butt, to an extent that you don't necessarily have with ordinary jeans. You can also use them to effectively support diapers which might not easily fit under a onesie in your size. The one piece of general advice I can give is that if you were to seek to hide your diapers, i.e. actually prevent their existence and your wearing them from being known about by anyone you don't explicitly disclose it to — that is probably not sustainable. 24/7 provides enough opportunities for someone to notice your diapers that eventually they will, regardless of what you do. While it's vitally important not to be obtrusive or exhibitionistic about them, it's equally important to get to a point where, if you realise someone has noticed them, it impairs your peace of mind not at all.

I dunno. My libido is more active in diapers than out, but I honestly think that might just be that I'm incontinent and don't feel safe out of diapers.

The second time I was in diapers as a kid (ca. 2005-2008). I'm pretty neutral about the first time but the second time I copped a lot of shit for it that I didn't deserve. I don't like that my incapacity to control my bodily functions was treated as something I maliciously did at someone else.

I'm in kind of a weird position in that I am both an AB/DL and someone who had recurrent UI and FI issues for most of her life and had to be in diapers for them whether I wanted to or not (I hadn't been in diapers all my childhood and adolescence, but like... a fairly significant fraction of it). I figured AB/DL and severe IC usually don't seem co-occur; I'm guessing that they did in my case because AB/DL seems to usually be linked to trauma (Fuss et al., 2019), and I had a really entertaining amount of non-diaper-related trauma, but I'm not really satisfied with it as an explanation. I guess we'll see. I went back into diapers full-time in a gradual sort of way from mid-2012 up to about early 2013; the proximate cause was that I was worried about my continence, but the fact that I decided to deal with it via diapers (analogous to swatting a mosquito with an ICBM) may, in retrospect, have been because I am AB/DL. I tried to leave them in mid-2013 and couldn't. Originally I thought that was my doing, via the diapers. These days, I'm more on the fence; I hypothesise that the diapers may have exacerbated it, but it may also have been going to have happened anyway (what elaboration of the conditional perfect progressive is this?). I made another brief attempt to leave them in late 2015 and was also unsuccessful. However, I know how to live in diapers and don't mind, so I'm sticking with it. 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 and Marital Therapy, 45(8), 781-795. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2019.1623355.

ABU Simple, under a Rearz cloth diaper, under waterproof pants.

I originally bought my current diaper bag as a laptop bag, but I haven't needed to go anywhere since I bought my laptop. Under normal circumstances, it contains: diapers; I ordinarily use double diapering with a disposable inner, a cloth outer, and waterproof pants, so it's usually as many disposable diapers as I think I'll need, then extras up to 50-100% of the original total 1-2 × spare cloth diaper 2 × spare pairs of waterproof pants diapering supplies, including 1 × travel pack of cornstarch baby powder 1 × small jar of Sudocrem a lunchbox, containing additional diapering supplies that are usually in fragile packages 1 × 100-pack of kitchen-grade disposable gloves 1 × travel pack of baby wipes spare clothes, including 1-2 × spare onesie 1 × spare pair of pants a changing pad a roll of small size kitchen trash bags, for disposal

A lot of AB/DLs are interested in hypnosis for loss of bladder and bowel control. I blog about that general topic a lot, and I've worked on it both with others and — back when I had continence to lose — myself. My general feeling is hypnosis is not a very reliable way to lose bladder and bowel control. I think it can augment the effectiveness of other strategies, but I think whether it works on its own depends entirely on the person. On the other hand, I've found that hypnosis is absolutely brilliant for bringing on, or allowing the bringing-on of, certain states of mind. My lack of continence has nothing to do with hypnosis, but because of hypnosis, I feel that I have a much better time.

Basically the same as your routine.

So, my experience might be different because I'm both AB/DL and IC (FI & UI). When I decided to go back into diapers full-time, my IC was subclinical; I went back into diapers full-time from about July 2012 through the end of 2012, and my IC intensified to the point of pretty much complete double incontinence and has been stable there since early 2016 with no signs of change. I originally thought the diapers must have caused my IC to intensify, but I'm not as sure now. I do think they probably interacted with each other and diaper usage might be why, unlike previous times, my IC symptoms now appear to be permanent. However, I'm comfy in diapers so I don't mind. To answer your actual question, I had pretty much directly opposite experiences with wetting and messing. With wetting, it returned to being pretty effortless and instinctive within the first couple of months I was doing it, and it felt exactly like I was consciously choosing to do it until I tried to quit diapers in June/July 2013 and realised I had pretty severe day wetting going on. Up until then, I was so sure that I was consciously choosing to wet that when I started bedwetting again in March I thought it was unrelated. With messing, however, while it did get easier, it was still definitely conscious and voluntary right up to and through the point where it started happening by accident. In that instance, it developed in such a way that any voluntary messing I waited too long to do became an accident instead, and that process continued until I had basically no voluntary control over when I messed my diaper.