The U-turn: Have you tried to retrain?

[Kaliborio]

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."

[justforfun]

I made myself a sleep wetter over 20 years ago.  I had full control when I started, and it took maybe a little over a year before I would wet while sleeping more often than that.

About 12 years later I tried to stop.  I worked hard at it for a close to a year, using all the 'normal' steps one would use with a child and bedwetting, and never really got anywhere.  I still have a good chance of wetting anytime I sleep, wherever I sleep.

I never tried for daytime incontinence, and never had any unintentional issues with that, so maybe not exactly the question you're asking, but might be a useful datapoint.

[Kaliborio]

2 hours ago, justforfun said:

I made myself a sleep wetter over 20 years ago.  I had full control when I started, and it took maybe a little over a year before I would wet while sleeping more often than that.

About 12 years later I tried to stop.  I worked hard at it for a close to a year, using all the 'normal' steps one would use with a child and bedwetting, and never really got anywhere.  I still have a good chance of wetting anytime I sleep, wherever I sleep.

I never tried for daytime incontinence, and never had any unintentional issues with that, so maybe not exactly the question you're asking, but might be a useful datapoint.

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

[Kaliborio]

Hey @Eido! A few notes on your post, because I feel like I saw myself in it a bit, lol.

On 12/19/2021 at 5:33 PM, Eido said:

Full recovery was the idea. Going back to diapers as a part-time fetish/sexual indulgence, with underwear otherwise being the default. Ha...

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.

On 12/19/2021 at 5:33 PM, Eido said:

Messing myself in an enclosed space around my parents was the tipping point that drained me of any will to continue trying.

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.

On 12/19/2021 at 5:33 PM, Eido said:

I'd managed to convince myself that I was doing okay because I was frequently able to make it to a toilet when it was immediately available, but failing in that situation pretty much shattered any confidence I had in my ability to recover what I'd lost

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.

On 12/19/2021 at 5:33 PM, Eido said:

At that point, the thought process went, why even bother with trying to retain control at all?

That's fair enough! I'd be interested to know how your control is at the moment.

[Enthusi]

Hey @Kaliborio!  I’m delighted to see you posting here. You’re like a mini celebrity in the untraining world, and I love your questions!   This particular question doesn’t really apply to me, though I do have some supporting data that might be useful.

Prior to untraining I had decent night and day control. Though to be more precise I would say I had decent control between stints or 24/7 wearing.   During my first stint of 24/7 (back in high school)  I had noticeably weaker daytime control and I even had night time accidents.  Though it went back to normal almost immediately after  stopping 24/7.   Throughout the next few decades, I would be able to wear 24/7 for a few months at a time, and after a week or two my bladder control worsened, but then immediately improved upon stopping.   Without realizing it, I had “diaper trained” myself.  At first this was fine, even preferable as my lifestyle was not conducive to 24/7 at the time.   About 5 years ago I went 24/7 and about 2-3 years ago I started rigorously untraining.
 

Since officially untraining I have not had a desire to retrain.  My bladder control has plummeted and I wanted permanent results.  I came to hate being “diaper trained” In fact I was worried to the point of near obsession that if I stopped wearing diapers my bladder control would return to its previous state.  This caused me much distress considering how much time and effort (and money) I had invested in untraining.

 But being the good little scientist that I am, I had to investigate.  So I started “testing” myself by going without a diaper and trying to stay dry.   For others reading this who are also worried their results aren’t permanent and are considering testing their control by going without a diaper… be careful, it’s a rabbit hole.    Nearly every time I tested myself, I would end up peeing my pants. However, even when I had accidents,  it felt like I could’ve made it to the bathroom if I tried a little bit harder.  I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I wanted to fail the test to prove I’m incontinent.  My only solution was to raise the ante so high that I wouldn’t dare intentionally pee my pants without a diaper on. Again I kept having accidents, though it still felt like I could’ve passed if I tried a little harder.  Finally, in a moment of desperation, I went out in public without a diaper on.   I ended up soaking my pants and running away before I was spotted.  Since then I have concluded that even if I am intentionally peeing my pants to prove I’m incontinent, the fact that I’m willing to do that in public is reason enough to be in diapers full time.  Though in hindsight I don’t think I intentionally peed my pants each and every time.  That feeling of “giving up” and peeing myself is precisely what incontinence is. Since then I haven’t really tested myself.  
 

TL;DR: Though I haven’t officially tried to retrain, I’ve tested myself by going without a diaper on numerous times leading to numerous accidents.  I can’t say for certain how much of these accidents are due to my untraining, or subconscious bias, but regardless, I’m stuck in diapers for the foreseeable future. 

[Kaliborio]

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

The thoughts and feelings you described were eerily familiar, like looking into an emotional mirror lol.

I'm glad I could be some help as a referent!

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

my parents never mentioned anything or made any indication that they'd noticed. That said, they very well could've just been politely ignoring it.

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.

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

Y'know, it almost feels like retraining is often just a no-win venture.

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.

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

I know that I'm issuing the mental command to flex my bowel's sphincter muscles, the same process I've followed for my entire life to do so, but there's virtually no physical sensation in response. Like things have somehow been numbed down there.

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.

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

My husband and several ABDL friends often encourage me to train out those last bits of control, but...honestly I'm a bit reluctant lol. Losing control initially, followed by the emotional turmoil and trauma from all the self-doubt and self-loathing really did a number on me. I'm scared that if I do "finish the job" I'll have to go through those things all over again. That said, it's happening gradually anyways, so maybe I'm just delaying the inevitable and prolonging the sense of fear ?

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.

On 1/2/2022 at 6:34 PM, Eido said:

Regardless, I hope I've contributed some useful info!

You have! Thank you so much for taking the time.

23 hours ago, Enthusi said:

Hey @Kaliborio!  I’m delighted to see you posting here.

You're very kind, @Enthusi! I'm delighted to be posting here.

23 hours ago, Enthusi said:

You’re like a mini celebrity in the untraining world

Oh no, the untraining world deserves better than that. (I'm very flattered that you'd say this, though.)

23 hours ago, Enthusi said:

I love your questions!

Thank you! I try.

23 hours ago, Enthusi said:

I do have some supporting data that might be useful.

It is! Thank you.

23 hours ago, Enthusi said:

even when I had accidents,  it felt like I could’ve made it to the bathroom if I tried a little bit harder.

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.

On 1/6/2022 at 12:54 AM, Enthusi said:

I have concluded that even if I am intentionally peeing my pants to prove I’m incontinent, the fact that I’m willing to do that in public is reason enough to be in diapers full time.

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.

On 1/6/2022 at 12:54 AM, Enthusi said:

I’m stuck in diapers for the foreseeable future. 

It sounds like it, and you know what? Congratulations on that.

[Enthusi]

6 hours ago, Kaliborio said:

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.

It’s the strangest sensation, isn’t it ?  For instance, I’ll be brushing my teeth right after showering and I’ll feel the slightest urge to pee.  The toilet is maybe 5 steps away from where I’m standing.  And yet somehow by the time I’m done brushing my teeth 20-30 seconds later, the pee feels like it’s already past the sphincter and clenching the muscle doesn’t really help that much.  I’ll try to clench down hard but after a few seconds the muscles just start relaxing and the pee drains out and I either have to grab a towel quickly make my way to the toilet while pee is squirting out. It’s not like I was holding it all day and desperate and couldn’t hold it a second longer.  Instead was a mere 30 seconds and I didn’t have to go far, and didn’t feel a strong need to go until it was too late to stop it.   I think all I had to do was stop brushing my teeth a few seconds earlier. No wonder I feel like I gave up too easily! And yet the same pattern repeats itself over and over again with the same outcome each and every time.   Like I said it’s weird!

 I can only speak to bladder control but I imagine it’s similar for bowel control.