How to Untrain your Girlfriend Back to Diapers - A Realistic Guide
She secretly told you she wants to be treated like a baby, and wear diapers. Too late! No takebacks. Looks like we have to train you to be a helpless, accident-prone baby who's dependent on Daddy now. This is what you wanted, isn't it?
So many "unpotty training guides" online are pure fantasy. I want to offer a different perspective that focuses on realism, from my experience.
- The goal is less control: Can adults really, really ever lose all of their bladder control, after they've been potty trained? Does it even matter? Let's skip the debate over whether you can actually, fully, 100% untrain anyone. We're just trying to get your girlfriend to get worse at getting to the potty on time, have a harder time holding it, leak more in the day, wet the bed at night. Just like when she was a little girl. And that, my friends, is 100% possible for any girl.
As adults, we usually are trained to have rock solid bladder control. But as hard-earned as that control is, once it starts slipping, it generally keeps going in that direction. You just need to slowly, slowly erode her control, until wearing her protection seems like a more and more sensible option.
- The Tipping Point: Here's the secret of diapering someone. You don't need to get them to fully, completely be helplessly wetting themselves all the time. You just need her to start having enough accidents, enough leaks, enough rushes to the potty, that pull-ups and diapers start to make more sense.
Once she wears pull-ups, she'll just start subconsciously relying on them a teeny, tiny bit more. Why? Conditioning. If she wets them, even a few times, she'll realize that she's a little more safe, it was no big deal, it helped her not have to rush to the potty. The scales are slowly, slowly tipping. Will she rush to the potty as fast next time? Not if she knows, subconsciously, that she's protected. That means more accidents, more wet pull-ups, more leaks, and bam: more reasons to put her back in diapers.
- The Spiral: It goes like this: your girlfriend starts wetting the bed occasionally. So, you put her in pull-ups, to keep the bed dry. Then, almost like magic, over the next few months, her bedwetting becomes more and more frequent, until she's wet practically every night. Her pull-ups are soaked whenever she wakes up, and she's not getting out of them any time soon.
What happened? The Spiral. The pull-ups helped her subconsciously relax at night, not having to worry whether she would wet her bed or not. They also keep her from getting up to use the bathroom at night, since she's cozy and secure from accidents anyway. So, she subconsciously starts letting go, and her bedwetting gets more frequent. Soon, you have a total baby on your hands!
This is the First Law of Diapering: the longer you're put in diapers by someone, the more likely you are to regress to needing them. Just the dynamics of diapers themselves make it likely you start to rely on them. It can take months, or years, or longer... but it happens!
This is especially true for tape-on diapers. Now, she can't take them off as easily. If she's in them at night, she's going to use them, whether she wets in her sleep or while awake, so she's always waking up wet. In the daytime, because they hold multiple accidents, she slowly becomes less and less aware of how many accidents she's having. Because she's always at least a little leaky and wet down there, she subconsciously relaxes, and she feels like she has to pee more often. When she's in public, she'll be a little embarrassed and won't want to draw attention to them, so she's less likely to want to take them off in the public restrooms and use the toilet. It's easier if she just uses her diapers and hope nobody notices that she's peeing. What's more, by putting her back in diapers, the unspoken understanding is that she's not expected to make it to the potty anymore. That would do a number on any babygirl's control...
- Excuses to diaper her: Once her bladder control is in question, there can be a lot of opportunities to put her in diapers. Long car rides, shows, vacations (with infrequent access to bathrooms), etc. Get creative! Maybe it gets harder and harder for her to make it on a trip without using the bathroom. So, you suggest she be diapered for a particularly long car ride. Sure, it's embarrassing for her, but she makes it through the trip, and she doesn't have to worry about stopping anymore. Isn't that great? Now, it's just a few more times before it becomes normalized. A few more trips like that, and she'll start asking for diapers herself. She can't go on any trip in the car without at least some protection, of course. As her bladder conditions itself to get more active in the car, she'll feel anxious if she's *not* diapered on car rides. Mission accomplished! She's getting closer and closer to conditioning herself to wear diapers.
- Bedwetters are just different: Babygirls who wet the bed, or used to wet the bed when they were younger, are much easier to regress. That's the the Second Law of Diapering: bedwetters usually regress in their potty training faster. I don't know why! It's just true. Something about your night-time control being worse has some effect on your daytime control. Maybe it's all the memories of soaked sheets and embarrassing mornings. Whatever it is, it's a fact.
Once she wets the bed for the first time, you're suddenly a *lot* closer. Now, it's sensible to put the bedwetter back in pull-ups, right? Of course. The beginning of the spiral.
- Diapers are a relief: At some point, your girlfriend is going to be having enough accidents that the pull-ups start to get... questionable. When was the last time she kept one dry, anyway? Maybe she had an embarrassing leak while out in public, and they're just not cutting it.
This is where diapers seem more and more attractive. They promise to hold all her accidents. She's less likely to be stressed that she'll leak. She is going to need your help changing them, but at least she doesn't have to be responsible anymore. What a relief!
You can usually tell she's at this point when you detect a change in mood in her, after she's diapered after a long day of leaks. She's just more relaxed now, when she's protected. She's more confident, bubbly, talkative, and oh so cute. Other than an embarrassing diaper change or two on her bed, what's not to love about her new, more babyish life?
Now, the rest is just sensible. Obviously, she's to be diapered around the house and in public from now on, with maybe a few exceptions for pull-ups around family, or while exercising, or with certain clothing choices. She's diapered every night, too. It's a Christmas miracle! The rest takes care of itself.
I hope this guide leads to more leaks, more embarrassing mornings, more questionable control, more "having the talk" about putting her in diapers again, and more helpless, dependent little babygirls.
I had been training you to potty in your diapers whenever you felt the need for the past two months, and as much as you didn’t want to admit it, it turned you on. We were standing in the kitchen in the early morning when I hear you grunt. I look over and see you in a quarter squat, one hand on the island, your face with that look of unmistakable concentration.
“Honey, are you pooping?”
You grunted again, not in response, but in doing your business. I could already tell this was going to be a doozy, but then you went down into a full squat, and I could tell that you had some real work to do. I continued my work while you were busy pushing, which continued for a few more minutes, including pushes on all fours and grunts on your knees while holding up onto the counter. When you were sure you were finished you stood up gingerly and delicately cupped the mess from the seat of your diaper.
“You get it all out?” I asked, coming over to inspect. You nodded and I grabbed the seat of your diaper and pushed up, spreading the mess into your bottom, getting up on your tippy-toes as I did so. Then I pulled back the waistband of your diaper and checked. Sure enough, you filled that thing. I let go and gave your bottom a few more thuddy smacks.
“Finish your chores, then come over to me, I want to degrade you some more. If you’re good enough I’ll let you choose between a diaper change or an orgasm.”
Are there any differences between just wearing diapers full-time and actively untraining?
A follower sent me this question in an ask recently. I didn't feel like I could answer it comprehensively without derailing the ask. I'm answering it here instead.
The answer is: Yes, but actually no (but ...)
In humans, and in many other species, the body system which controls the voiding of bodily waste is adapted such that it is under voluntary control. However, the means by which that control is maintained require it to be maintained through use. If it isn't used, it erodes.
Untrainers actively target this, by actively refusing to use their control and by adopting strategies which will allow their body to void with minimal physiological effort. People who want to wear and use their diapers 24/7 (henceforth "24/7ers") obviously don't actively seek to lose their control. However, using diapers 24/7 means they will increasingly generally be in a situation where not using their control is a convincingly better choice and/or using it is convincingly worse.
Here's a hypothetical. It's based heavily on my experience but is not a direct factual account; it's also heavily simplified because I'd have to either do anonymisation or worldbuilding otherwise and I'm not going to do either of those things.
Say you're a college student. You have a very predictable college administration, and because of that, four days a week, you have:
a 9–11 AM lecture
an 11 AM–12 PM interval
a 12–2 PM tutorial, with no break in the middle
You have a chance to snack, hydrate, and get a coffee in the interval. As a result, you consistently have the problem of realising, about 30 minutes into your 12 PM tute, that you need to pee.
This is a problem. See, in most places, excusing yourself to pee is a neutral act, but in college, there is an expectation that you'll stay in the room unless you absolutely have to leave. Not usually an overwhelming one, but present in the same way that getting up constantly to pee at a movie theatre is somewhat more frowned upon than doing so while watching the same movie at home.
So, what do you do? Well, if you're continent, or at least wearing underwear, the answer you're pressured toward under those circumstances is just holding it for the remaining 90 minutes. Sure, it might be annoying, but if you have normal continence it's not likely to be so distracting that you can't willpower through it. If you're wearing diapers and have decided to use them, however, none of this logic applies. Short of any other intervening factors too complex and individual to be listed here, if you feel the need to pee 30 minutes in, there's no reason not to pee 30 minutes in.
The effect of this is obvious: that's 90 minutes you're not exercising your control when you otherwise would have. That's not much, but you can never have just one potato chip, as the saying goes. For instance, you also realise that you've been feeling the need to pee about 30 minutes into your morning lecture. You haven't really been thinking about it because that one does have a break at 55 minutes and it's a lot easier to wait until then. But why wait?
And so this continues. This hypothetical person is based on me so it would probably be pretty reasonable to nominally divide their day into 3 blocks of 8 hours each:
college and related things (studying on-site, commuting, etc.)
home and related things (work, study at home, free time, etc.)
sleep
(No, I did not get anywhere near that much sleep; yes, the non-college-time block was a lot bigger than that for me.)
Out of your college and related things block, when you level out you're probably holding it for maybe 50% of the time you were before, on average. So you're effectively holding for at least 4 hours fewer out of 24 per day, 4 days a week: –16 hours out of 168 per week, total.
Still not a lot, but it builds up. For instance, I think at this point we can safely assume you're still dry at night and your continence behaviour during sleep is the same as it was before you started wearing full-time. But most people at least initially find it easier to start using their diapers at home and in other familiar places, where nobody has any reason to watch them. So at home the amount of time you were holding it had already been maybe half what it would have been before. Another 4 hours' worth of non-use of control, 4 days a week, making –16/168 h/w, for a total of –32/168 h/w.
On the 3 days a week you're not at college, we can safely move the 8 hours a week that would have gone to "college and related things" into "home and related things", the block during which you're only holding for about half as long as you were anyway. So that's 16 hours total, so that's 8 hours fewer of control on each of those 3 days; 8 × 3 = 24, making a total of –(32 + 24)/168 = –56/168 h/w.
But wait! All that practice you're getting wetting your diapers at college, where you're nervous about it, is helping tremendously with wetting your diapers at home and other places where you're more comfortable. So suddenly instead of holding for 50% of the original length of time at home you're holding for 25%. Then 10%. So now that 8 hours of control not being used is 14 hours 24 minutes (× 3 days a week) and now it's –75.2/168 h/w. And it continues to add up.
And of course you can respond to this by saying, well, I want to wear diapers 24/7 but I know I don't want to lose my bladder control, so I'll simply pee at the same time I normally would have. Which makes perfect sense, but also, that's an abstract long-term commitment, and it's now competing with things like the visceral discomfort of needing to pee increasingly for 90 minutes, when you know you don't have to be experiencing that discomfort. You have to really care about the thing you're committed to for it to serve as the bulwark of your self-discipline in that kind of situation. And even then, there are probably going to be days when you're going to give in, because the machine didn't have mocha iced coffee today, it only had double espresso, and now your eyeballs are swimming.
And you can say, well, I'm not going to need to avoid peeing for 90 minutes, because I will simply do other things, like not have water and coffee directly before my two hour tutorial with no break. To which my answer is, sure. Water is necessary for brain function, caffeine is addictive. Yes, it's plausible that you'll give up one of those, but the path of least resistance is the one where you wet your diapers because it's the one where you get everything you want (staying in the lectures, wearing diapers, using diapers, drinking coffee, drinking water).
And all this discussion of self-discipline and paths-of-least-resistance is ignoring the positive disincentives against using your control. For example: When we pee in a toilet, we tend to release it all at once and as quickly as possible. In most diapers, that's not advisable. The superabsorbent polymer can't absorb that much liquid that fast; the inside of the diaper will flood and leak.
Diapers obviously can absorb a lot of liquid given enough time, so the first thing to address is flow rate. Flow rate is determined by volume (that is, if there's more pee you need to void, you will pee faster). Therefore, the way to pee at a lower flow rate is to pee when there's less pee in your bladder. The kidneys produce urine at a rate which is strongly predicted by your diet and medical conditions, so if those are relatively stable then your urine output will be too. In that case, the most effective way to pee when there's less pee in your bladder is to pee frequently. In short, diapers literally discourage you from holding your pee and encourage you to pee as close as possible to when you feel the urge.
And then, of course, there's the fact that the map is not the territory, and the view from the top of a mountain differs from the view from the bottom of the adjoining valley. Decisions about maintaining continence and responding to continence failures that are made prior to going into diapers 24/7 are made in one context. Decisions about the same matter that are made well into the process, when the things in question are or might be actually happening, are made in another context entirely. And there are obviously factors other than immediate short-term discomfort or utility that dictate what choices someone makes.
Wearing full-time isn't the same as untraining. But it makes not untraining a lot harder than it was before wearing full-time.
Diaper inertia is a thing: once you’ve modelled your life around diapers, it’s almost as inconvenient to try to start (or keep) using the toilet as it was to get into diapers in the first place. A big example of this is that clothes that are good for diapers make it increasingly hard to use the toilet.
Here’s an example:
When I was toilet trained, if I wanted to use the toilet, I would just go in, undo my belt, pull my pants and underwear down, and use the toilet.
Now that I’m not toilet trained, if I want to use the toilet, I
take off my sweater
unbutton and take off my overshirt
undo my belt
carefully push my pants down to my ankles
undo my onesie
wriggle my plastic pants down to my ankles carefully so they don’t tear
try to wriggle out of my diapers, which are tightly taped on
This has become increasingly apparent lately. For some background, I know if I need to mess about two to five minutes before it happens. I’ve been trying to use the toilet to mess lately, so that I don’t lose my messing control completely.
The upshot of this is that … well, if I walk in and I see that all the toilet cubicles are taken, I know at that point that I’m going to end up with full diapers instead, so I don’t bother staying.
However, I have my share of occasions where I’ll get into a toilet cubicle, and I’ll get halfway through undressing, then just as I’m reaching for the waistband of my plastic pants, my body just gives up and I fill my diapers instead. Congrats, me. Literally standing next to a toilet and couldn’t make it. My potty training game is weaker than it was when I was 3, and it was hella weak then.
(P.S.: It doesn’t help that the “going to the toilet while diapered” sequence involves moving through a bend-over/squat position a lot, which can trigger your messing if your control is as fragile as mine.)
The funny thing about continence is it's not about how much of it is present, but how much of it is absent.
When untrainers talk about being incontinent, we talk about having no control. When people say they want to lose bowel control, they mean they want to fill their diapers, not that they want to pass a lot of gas. When they say they want to lose bladder control, they mean they want to not feel themselves pee at all, not that they want to lose a few drops on the occasional sneeze. When they say they want to be bedwetters, they want to be wet every night, not one night a month. We take no control quite literally.
But there's another meaning of no control which is equally important to the untraining process: the state of having practically no control, which is quite different.
The thing about control is that it's a matter of consensus, not majority vote. Here's an example. There are two forms of nocturnal enuresis (NE), or bedwetting: episodic and chronic. Episodic NE is relatively rare and not much present in the public consciousness; it's what you see in people who have drunk too much and wet themselves as a result. Chronic NE is what we more usually mean when we say "bedwetting".
Chronic NE obviously requires bedwetting to happen at a certain frequency. You and I are connoisseurs and intellectuals and therefore we know that someone who makes it to the toilet 51% of the time is closer to making it 100% of the time (complete continence) than they are to making it 0% of the time (complete incontinence). If that was the only thing we knew we might therefore reasonably infer that someone didn't qualify as having chronic NE (true bedwetting) unless they were having 4+ wet nights per week. The reality, however, is that the threshold is actually 2+ wet nights per week, even though 2 is clearly fewer than 50%. Because we do know facts other than the one I mentioned above, this does not (I assume) surprise us. [note 1]
For the sake of argument, though, why 2? There's nothing about a condition being chronic that means it has to happen twice or more per week. All that's required for a condition to be chronic is that it's persistent and long-lasting. By that token, being wet an average of 1 night out of every 365.2425 should also qualify. This would include people who have alcohol-related acute NE and drink once a year, but there's no reason that should be a problem. Why 2 nights a week?
The answer is obvious: practicality. If someone wets themself only when they drink alcohol to excess, then the path of least resistance is, in most cases, going to be for them to drink less alcohol; modelling it as a continence issue is unhelpful. If someone wets themself at random, an average of 1 night per year, they're probably going to find it annoying and distressing, but wearing diapers to bed every night would be massive overkill.
On the other hand, there clearly would be a point where you did need to wear diapers to bed 7 nights per week. It would also clearly be before the point where you were actually wetting 7 nights per week. It would be at a point where the probability of you wetting was high enough on every night that it was worthwhile to wear diapers. "2 nights/week" is one group of diagnosticians' attempt to find that point for a particular patient group.
For chronic NE, that point is the point of practically no control. How does that work, you might think, they're still dry at night close to seventy percent of the time. Quite true! But that point is the point of practically no control because it is the point at which the continence interventions they need to use are the same as the interventions which would be used by someone with no control whatsoever. If you have to wear diapers seven nights a week then the fact that you only wet them two nights a week is no longer practically relevant. There's no ranking scale; someone who's consistently wet two nights a week is exactly as much of a bedwetter as someone who hasn't had a single dry night in ten years.
Of course, the flipside is that someone who hits practically no control can descend to no control even in theory quite fast, because the incentive to maintain control evaporates. If you're going to have to wear diapers seven nights a week regardless then it makes fuck-all difference whether they're wet two or seven nights a week, and consequently it makes fuck-all difference whether you can avoid wetting them.
Notes
This is actually for paediatric nocturnal enuresis. Because bedwetting is less frequent and normative in adults the threshold could arguably be set lower, say 1 night per fortnight to 1 night per month.
Diaper training programs are a teaching tool — a self-teaching tool — but they don't often linger on the process of learning.
This makes sense; they're texts compiled by volunteers on a taboo subject considered psychopathological and deviant, they're not guides on general pedagogy. Because of this, however, they often convey the impression that the fundamental learning content of the program is the series of conscious actions the guide is telling you to take — the "drill-and-practice," as the Twelve Month Diaper-Training Program puts it.
The thing about reading it that way is that control isn't mediated only by the conscious, but also by the unconscious: the system of mental processes and reflex actions that are still happening even when you're not thinking about them. This is annoying because you can only directly modify the conscious mind, but the unconscious supersedes it and limits what it can do. For instance, you might be consciously aware that "no control" means "no control around judgemental authority figures who make you nervous". You might resolve to make sure you void more freely around those authority figures. But though you can take other actions to indirectly reduce your anxiety, you can't simply make a direct conscious choice to stop feeling nervous, or to at least feel relaxed enough to void. Hell, you might get hit with a bad case of inverse latchkey phenomenon, your brain actively suppressing your urge to void because it feels so strongly that the situation is not an appropriate one in which to do so — in that case, the point is moot; you never even get the chance.
Because of that, it becomes obvious that the learning content of untraining isn't just consciously learning the actions that you need to take and then learning them as habits through practice, but also subconsciously learning that those are actions that can be taken, and learning to make them accessible as options to your conscious mind. The drill-and-practice isn't the content; it's the alphabet in which the content has been written. It's not the learning; it's what allows the real learning to begin.
The point of untraining is to void unconsciously and without control. The impression one often gets is that the initial acquisition phase, during which you become fluent in the drill-and-practice, is where you learn how to do this. But that can't be the case. Why? Because the acquisition phase is, by definition, conscious. Sure, when you're very fluent, you may not be consciously choosing when and where to void any more, but that's only because you're consciously choosing to void when- and wherever. It's still a conscious choice.
That doesn't mean that no change is happening. On the contrary, it absolutely is — your unconscious habits and maybe the physiological state of your muscles are certainly changing. But the cruel irony is that the more deftly and quickly you master the routines, the less clear you are likely to be that you have done so. Why? Because the system you're trying to sabotage is its own monitor. To know your control is weakening, you have to be using it. If you are constantly using 0% of your control then you have no way of knowing with any confidence whether you could use 100%, or 50%, or 20%; it will all feel exactly the same.
What this means is that while the initial acquisition phase does involve learning new habits and muscle memory, it doesn't even get started on the broader psychological reorientation that embeds untraining, because it can't. It can't challenge your fundamental assumptions about being someone who has control, because while thoughtless, habitual voiding is a controlled action and unconscious voiding is an uncontrolled action, all other things being equal they are not perceptibly different in any way, to anyone, including the person doing them. When you start untraining you will likely perceive yourself as someone who has full control and subsequently form a coexisting perception of yourself as someone who is very good at choosing to void, and it is quite possible for this perception to continue to exist long after it ceases to be meaningfully true, because there is nothing to actually cause it to change.
This very inertia of self-concept, however, lays the groundwork for that psychological reorientation to begin. See, the initial process of acquiring the routine might not provide conscious reason to reevaluate your instincts, but it does begin the process of subconscious change, meaning that even though your conscious idea of what you might instinctively do in a given situation has had no reason to change, eventually your actual instinctive behaviours in that situation diverge from it. When you notice this divergence, it creates a tension which allows conscious change.
For instance, suppose you are in the "shy bladder around authority figures" example situation described above. You will probably continue to consciously perceive yourself as having this problem. Eventually, however, your unconscious will have adjusted enough that it is no longer a problem, and you will probably notice. When you do notice, this will cause your self-concept to change.
This is a specific situation. Your self-concept will be more resistant to change in other areas. For example, if you want to lose messing control, but are scared of doing so, you are likely to continue holding onto the idea that you are someone who has messing control. However, your instinctive behaviours will still change based on what you do and what you want to do, so the divergence will intensify over time. When the divergence intensifies enough, the basic framework of believing you will do one thing and finding out that you will actually do another has an easily recognisable name: having an accident.
Accidents and other events founded in the same principle are incredibly important parts of the learning process of untraining, because incidents you cannot predict either allow or compel you to learn things that you may very well want to learn, but, for whatever reason, cannot choose to (because you are expected not to, or because you are afraid to, or because you simply don't know the thing is there to be learned). In occurring, they disproportionately expand your knowledge and competence specifically because while you understand what you are going through you have no prior expectations of how it should go and can therefore extract the maximum value from the data.
Here are some useful ways in which accidents contribute to untraining. These seem to intensify toward the point of no practical control, a concept I recently discussed describing a point at which, while you might theoretically have a degree of control (maybe even quite a high one), it is compromised enough that in practice you have to act exactly as if you had no control at all.
They actively impair control. It is an excellent rule of thumb that all other things being equal, someone will be more able to do something if they have confidence that they can. Confidence is based on, among other things, previous performance. Impaired control will impair the individual's confidence in their control, which will impair their control further, and so on in a slow downward spiral.
They bypass the ladder. It's true that it's often difficult to void if the situation places you under too much of a certain type of stress. It's also true that with time you can become acclimatised to certain situations. However, if you start out with a bunch of situations in which you can't use your diapers until you've incrementally worked your way up to tolerating the stress, your untraining and possibly even just your 24/7 in general are going to be considerably hampered.
It's also true that when it seems noticeably difficult to use your diapers in a particular situation, using them in an even more difficult situation can relieve that anxiety by making the present situation seem trivial. For instance, at the point where I started voluntarily filling my diapers, my wetting control was noticeably shaky but present after about six months of wearing diapers. By about three months after I started messing my diapers, my wetting control was pretty much nonexistent.
Having accidents pretty much at random means that you are going to have accidents in situations that, at that time, are much more stressful than you would ever choose to void voluntarily in — but it will also, with any luck, mean surviving them, not finding them frightening any more, and finding a lot more of the world accessible as a result.
They force you to get over being seen. Anyone who's spent significant time in the AB/DL community will know we have something of a psychological split. There are people in the community who are outright exhibitionists to the point of being unethical. Perhaps in reaction to that, the mainline AB/DL code of ethics can be approximated as more or less complete secrecy: no one must ever know.
I'm definitely closer to the secrets camp than the exhibitionist camp. However, I'm also an AB/DL/IC person who has experience being treated as simply IC. There was an expectation that I as an IC person would be discreet, that I would want to be discreet, and that I would be considerate. There was stigma, sure, but there was no expectation that I would maintain complete secrecy at all times, to everyone, because that would have been unreasonable — there was only an expectation that I would take reasonable precautions. I'm a big fan of impact over intent in my analysis, which in this case leads me to feel that people doing the same things I did should have the same leeway I had regardless of why they were doing it.
The thing about the AB/DL code of ethics is that if you've strongly internalised it, as I had for a while (I still have, but I feel less shame about it), it kind of merges with your control. If you have control then you don't void where people can perceive you. As I entered my ambiguous choosing-not-to-hold/can't-actually-hold phase of control, I mentally revised this to taking active precautions: "if you void in a way that people can perceive then you immediately get the hell out of Dodge".
Accepting that I was having accidents also led me to the realisation that in circumstances where I could have an accident literally anywhere at any time, obsessively trying to actively preserve my secrecy as a matter of policy was stupid and unviable. It meant switching to sensible, sustainable passive precautions: better diapers, better waterproof pants, more appropriate clothing, etc — and accepting that there was a limit to what I could do and I couldn't possibly reduce the probability of being clocked to 0.
I think as a result of this one or two people found out who probably would have found out six months to a year later had I just fled, and one or two people found out who would otherwise never have found out at all. And, conversely, I am pretty sure there are dozens of people who never found out who would have.
They move the locus of control. There are certain expectations of how wetting and messing should be handled in a civilised society; consciously controlling your bladder and bowels are central to societal narratives about how those expectations can be met. Therefore, for as long as you believe you have control, when you can't satisfy those expectations (the most common example being when you have a diaper leak), you are prone to, on some level, attribute blame to not using your conscious bladder and bowel control. For obvious reasons, attaching guilt and shame there inhibits your untraining.
However, when you no longer believe that you have full conscious bladder and bowel control, it is less appealing to blame diaper-related embarrassment solely on your failure to use that control because it is less clear that using your control could have averted it. Consequently it becomes much easier to step back and diagnose other points of failure in the system. When the problem is I wet my diaper and it leaked, instead of immediate first reference to I should not have wet my diaper, it becomes much easier to situate the problem outside your bladder and your use of it: instead it becomes I should have changed earlier or I should have used more absorbent diapers or I should have worn better waterproof pants or I should have worn a onesie.
In turn, this process of problem-solving feeds back. When you stop believing you have control, you might initially still believe that having control is important and not having it is dangerous. However, as you solve more problems using methods other than exercising control, and still find yourself perfectly safe, the apparent importance of retaining control goes down.
For content to reupload/re explain. Could you cover how someone who is only “wearing for fun” could accidentally untrained if given the proper scenarios?
Sure. I'll re-explain this here, in case I never get around to reuploading it. Note: novel-length post ahead.
The core problem is that wearing diapers encourages wearing them more and using them, and using them encourages wearing them more and using them more.
In these circumstances,
Wearing diapers means wearing them more
This is driven by the fact that pretty much everyone likely to get into this situation wants to be wearing diapers full-time, even if their purpose for wearing them is, just as you say, "fun"; nobody who's genuinely content with 30 minutes of diapers a day and does not want to wear them any more is going to get into this situation. It can be assumed in pretty much 100% of cases where this is relevant that the person would prefer to be wearing 24/7 and simply sees themself as unable to.
Wearing diapers is simultaneously the process of mapping out the constraints on your ability to wear them. If you wear them for a certain amount of time and there are no adverse consequences, then you have no reason not to wear them more. However, if there are adverse consequences, they are likely to be intervenable, meaning you can change things so that next time you are in the same circumstances the same adverse consequences do not arise. Presumably you do this, and so the next time you are in the same situation, the same adverse consequences do not arise. Therefore you have no reason not to wear diapers more, and so on.
Wearing diapers means using them
Part of this is the quite simple and elementary statement that obviously you're more likely to use diapers if you're in them because you can't very well use them if you're not in them. The other part is that diapering (and thence using diapers) beyond a certain very low level imposes switching costs on toileting and not being diapered, while the reverse doesn't apply.
Before we go on I should explain what I mean by "beyond a certain very low level". Most of the statements in this answer don't apply to pull-ups. However, most people, regardless of what they normally wear, don't use pull-ups as their primary form of diapering; whether they normally wear underwear or normally wear heavier diapers, they usually treat pull-ups as a special case of underwear, so pull-ups aren't really considered for the purposes of this answer. It should be noted that people who actually use pull-ups often end up using heavier diapers as their mainstay, so pull-ups could be considered an onramp to the feedback loops being discussed, but aren't in the loops, per se.
A switching cost is the expense or disadvantage incurred by switching from one alternative to another. Not being in diapers doesn't impose a switching cost on diapering — for it to do so would require a fundamental alteration in the nature of causality; as it is, once you're done not being in diapers, you can simply get into a diaper. Similarly, toileting doesn't impose a switching cost on diapering; once you're done using the toilet, you can immediately put a diaper on.
Using diapers means wearing them more
Diapering does impose switching costs on not being in diapers. For a very minor and inconsequential example, if you change out of a diaper into underwear, certain diaper hygiene products are liable to permanently stain your underwear. If you don't have immediate access to a shower — for example, you are not at home — and you change out of a wet diaper into underwear, then no matter how conscientiously hygienic you are, you are liable to smell faintly like pee; ironically, simply changing into a dry diaper and then not wetting it would probably control the odour better. If you are changing out of underwear into a diaper, you will have no trouble slipping your underwear into some corner of your diaper bag; if you are changing out of a diaper into underwear, you have to find some way to either store or dispose of the diaper (this would also be the case with changing from a diaper into a diaper; the point is that with moving from underwear to diapers the underwear does not impose a nontrivial amount of labour on you, whereas the diaper does if you move in the opposite direction).
Diapers also impose switching costs on toileting. If you pull down your diaper to sit down or to pee standing up, you are liable to have it stretch out of shape. If you untape it the tapes may very well not re-stick (even if they are supposedly refastenable). If you pick only diapers that have neither of these problems, you are liable to run into the problem of low cost-efficiency, meaning you will be stuck with diapers that are either cheap but low-performing, namely pull-ups and their cousins (like Depend Adjustable Underwear, RIP) or high-performing but expensive (like any Bambino diapers with Ultrastretch). Toileting means either spending a diaper or wearing bad diapers; if you are also using your diapers then the problem intensifies, because you have more of a reason to care whether your diapers are well-performing and cost-efficient.
Of course, you could wear cloth diapers, but firstly it would be a bit odd for a casual wearer in my audience to wear cloth diapers, and additionally: they're expensive, making it financially painful to buy them if you don't intend to use them; cloth diapers that are substantial enough to be used as diapers are fairly bulky, meaning those who buy them are most likely to be people who have less to gain from not using them; and, due to waterproof pants and (where applicable) pins, they're a mechanical hassle to get on and off. Depending on the diaper, its mass might also necessitate a onesie to hold it up, adding to the mechanical hassle further.
If you're in diapers, therefore, and you don't have the immediate use of a body-washing facility such as a shower (either in terms of physically being able to access it, or in terms of the time to use it) — which is going to be the case for almost everyone some of the time — you are incentivised to continue wearing them instead of switching back to underwear, and incentivised to not use the toilet, which implies either holding it or using your diapers. If you don't hold it and do use your diapers this incentive framework is reinforced further.
This has an erosive effect on control because control is developed to facilitate voiding at a time and under circumstances of your choosing, and is maintained by a societal structure which incentivises you to void under certain circumstances and at certain times. Wearing diapers flattens out the objective preferabilities of different circumstances and times with regard to voiding; i.e., wearing diapers makes it so that, across a reasonable measurement period, it makes little to no objective difference when you void [note 1].
This nullifies the aspect of "choosing". For example, if you are peeing in a toilet then in terms of achieving this aim it is clearly objectively preferable to pee within the toilet cubicle with your pants down, and clearly not preferable to pee in the garden with your pants on, and therefore you choose the former. However, if you are peeing in a diaper, then there is no difference in objective preferability between peeing in the toilet cubicle with your pants down and peeing in the garden with your pants on, so there is no choice to make.
There will still be differences in the subjective preferability of given circumstances for voiding. However, once the objective differences have flattened out to zero, this is going to be basically a matter of your residual internalised social expectations about when it is appropriate to void.
In any given situation, you are going to choose to either hold it or void. If you feel that something bad is going to happen if you choose to void, that will weigh in favour of you holding it. However, that may cause you to get to the point that you feel it's preferable to risk it and void, rather than continue holding it. This eventuality may consistently fail to arise in instances of the given situation; however, over enough instances of the situation, it will eventually arise (everyone needs to void real bad sometimes).
If something bad does happen, then your aversion to voiding in that situation will be increased. However, that just perpetuates the loop because you will once again likely come to a situation where you need to void urgently enough to overcome your aversion even though your aversion has increased.
If something bad does not happen, then your aversion to voiding in that situation will be decreased because you learned that your internalised social expectations are wrong and voiding in that situation actually has no effect whatsoever beyond relieving your need to void. Ironically, because of how diapers work, voiding at a lower level of urgency decreases the chance that something bad will happen, making it a self-reinforcing effect.
This learning loop has the capacity to apply to all forms of voiding across all situations. Factors limiting the situational preferability of voiding are almost always intervenable. For example, messing when fully untrained and adapted to having no messing control is generally a much less dramatic process than messing when fully continent. This phenomenon has an observable gradient effect between the two extremes, because the factors that underpin it still apply to different extents at different points on the gradient. For instance, being fully adapted to messing generally requires specific dietary choices; if you want to keep your messing control but want it to be easier to mess, you are still likely to make some of those dietary choices. This in turn will make it less problematic to mess in a given situation, and so on. Eventually, through the operation of looping processes like this, there will be minimal difference in the objective and subjective preferability of voiding in almost all situations.
But this doesn't compel you to lose control, right? I did say that using your diapers in a given situation will ultimately come down to pushing through your subjective discomfort in doing so. By the same token, you could choose to push through the switching costs of toileting and continue doing so. Well, sure, but not so fast. There are a number of points to consider.
Using diapers means using them more
The first point is that voiding in your diaper and voiding in a toilet are, in economic jargon, rivalrous: if you choose to do x of one, that's x less that you can do of the other. If you were peeing in a toilet three times a day and are now wetting your diaper twice a day, you can probably only pee in a toilet once that day. Of course, it seems like you could do three of each by simply doubling your fluid intake, but that's fundamentally changing the starting conditions (and also you should not be drinking so little that doubling it wouldn't be drinking too much).
The second point is that the costs of voiding in a diaper are not materially quantifiable, and the costs of voiding in a toilet are. You may spend significant effort and focus on voiding in your diaper, but you will spend 0 cents. On the other hand, if you are in a $2 diaper, it's 0% used, and you have to make it unusable in the process of voiding in the toilet, you just blew $2 of value. If it's 50% used, you just blew $1. Over time, every use of the toilet while diapered becomes a sharp reminder to use your diaper instead, in the form of a sharp prod to the hip pocket.
The third point is kind of an extension of the first: just as voiding in a diaper and voiding in a toilet are rivalrous, diaper-oriented voiding behaviour and toilet-oriented voiding behaviour are rivalrous. Moreover, diaper-oriented voiding behaviour has an erosive effect on control because it reduces the average and aggregate time you spend holding.
This is easiest to explain through a model. Let's say
you have some sort of external routine to your day — college or work, doesn't matter
it's an 8-hour day
you have 2 types of time allocations: rest periods, during which you can pee, drink water, and do other things, and work periods, during which you can't [note 2]
you have 3 major 40-minute rest periods alternating between 3 work periods that are 120 minutes in length, and the first major rest period comes before the first work period because you like to arrive early
the work periods contain toilet breaks, minor rest periods of 10 minutes in length (last 5 minutes of the first hour, first 5 minutes of the second)
during each major rest period you drink enough water that you need to pee starting 15 minutes into the next work period
Let's also say that you are wearing underwear and toileting. This means the first time you will get to pee is 40 minutes later at the start of the toilet break. You will be holding it for 40 minutes, 40 minutes, and 40 minutes, for a total of 120 minutes and an average of 40 minutes.
Let's now say instead that you are wearing diapers but have different subjective preferences about how much you would like to pee during each work period. Let's say that during the first and third work periods you are fine with peeing where you are, but during the second work period maybe you're sitting next to someone whose opinion you're worried about, so you wait until the toilet break. This means you are holding it for 0 minutes, 40 minutes, and 0 minutes, for a total of 40 minutes and an average of 13 minutes 20 seconds.
Of course, this is going to feed back into the subjective preferences I mentioned above — where you might feel you need to go badly enough to risk it. If you are holding it you are going to feel urgency. If you have to hold it for 40 minutes and your control is optimised to hold it for an average of 40 minutes, you will feel such and such a degree of urgency, the reference degree of urgency u. However, the urgency you feel is determined by the degree of your control relative to the demand on it. If you have to hold it for 40 minutes and your control is optimised to hold it for an average of 13 minutes 20 seconds, you are going to feel a degree of urgency >u (greater than the reference degree of urgency). This means that after long enough optimising to hold for 13 minutes 20 seconds and trying to hold for 40 minutes, you will probably eventually find yourself uncomfortable enough to say "fuck it" and give up on the 40 minutes. Which means you will now be optimising for 0 minutes.
The fourth point is that, as I mentioned above, subjective preferences about voiding are altered by its outcome: if you void and nothing bad happens, the weight of "something bad will happen" as a decisional factor against voiding is decreased because you both relieved your sense of urgency and learned that nothing bad happened as a result. The thing is that this happens regardless of your intention regarding voiding because, as with all other things, if literally all other things are equal then intention has no bearing on the psychological effect of the outcome. If I go out not intending to spend the extra money on a chocolate bar and then someone hands me a free sample, I don't feel bad simply because I originally intended not to buy a chocolate bar.
What this means is that accidents also teach you it's okay to use your diaper, which is significant because the more you become accustomed to routinely immediately using your diaper and optimising your control for doing so, the more likely you are to have accidents because breaks from routine are an unavoidable fact of life. Let's say you are at a point in your life where your control is optimised to hold for 10 minutes. One day, a 40-minute special occasion takes place — maybe a C-suite executive takes a 40-minute tour of your site — and you feel like you need to hold the whole time. Because your control is optimised for 10 minutes, you don't make it; you accidentally wet yourself at 25 minutes.
It's almost certain that you are not going to suffer an adverse event as a result of this, because if your control is unstable enough to have accidents then your diapering routine is likely such that you are not particularly in danger of leaking at any time, and you are likely having relatively small voids which you may be using your remaining control to try to close off. Therefore you learn two things from this:
You were not in more danger from wetting your diaper on the special occasion than you would have been under ordinary conditions;
You were not in more danger from wetting your diaper before 40 minutes than you would have been from wetting it after.
The fifth point is that accidents cause more accidents, because continence, like many other things, is affected by confidence. Confidence doesn't matter much if you have 100% control, where you will almost certainly exhibit functional continence under all circumstances, including those where you feel like you can't. It also doesn't matter much if you have 0% control, where you will almost certainly not exhibit functional continence under any circumstances, including those where you feel like you can.
In the middle, it matters a great deal. It matters in terms of abstract cognition: if you want to make it and think you can make it, then you will think it's worth investing the effort to try. If you don't think you can make it, then even if you want to make it, the return you expect on your investment will be 0, so it's logically not worth the effort to try. It also matters subconsciously: if you both feel you can make it and feel it is urgent that you do so, then you are more likely to be able to tap into that reserve of emergency strength. On the other hand, if you don't feel you can make it, then the fact that it's urgent is irrelevant, and your control is likely to give out sooner, which, in turn, will make you feel you were right that you couldn't make it, feeding back into the effect.
Diapers exacerbate this further because they insert a complex task you have to undertake before you can use the toilet. This can be explained through an analogy. Say you're doing a timed challenge which requires you to reach a certain destination by doing certain tasks. Say you reach 10 seconds from the end and you think it's plain sailing, then you run into another task which you know would take you 5 seconds to complete under normal conditions. Your confidence that you can reach the end will be diminished even though 5 seconds fits fine into 10 seconds and in fact is half the size of it. Your ability to complete the task will also be diminished because for the entire 5 seconds you'll be thinking about how you only have 10 seconds left, which might distract you enough that it takes 6 seconds, or that you stuff it up completely and have to spend the next 5 seconds doing it again, so you don't make it to the finish line and you lose.
This is basically what diapers are. You are less likely to be able to deftly undo your diaper quickly if you're frantically trying to undo it and feel like your eyeballs are swimming, which means that even though you need it off faster, that need makes it slower. Worse, it's obvious that if you were toileting regularly while wearing diapers, you could have developed the habit of accounting for the additional time, but if your control is unstable enough that the additional time matters, then you aren't likely to have been toileting regularly and therefore are unlikely to have learned to account for the additional time.
The effect depends on things like your subjective capacity for control (the effect strengthens as your subjective control weakens) and the amount of time you've spent in diapers (the effect strengthens as your time in diapers increases) because it depends most directly on the relationship between the complexity of getting out of your diapers and the degree of control of which your body is capable. The less control you have and the more complex it is to get out of your diapers, the stronger the effect will be.
This is easiest demonstrated by an example. Let's say you have a degree of control x, which under the conditions under which you usually exist is reliably just enough time to get to the toilet and pull down your underwear before voiding in the toilet. If you typically wear underwear, you will make it. If you typically wear a diaper you may or may not make it. If you typically wear two layers of diapering, waterproof pants, and a onesie, you will never make it. Even though someone less prepared for an accident would make it to the toilet, your preparation for having an accident will cause you to have an accident.
The sixth point is that control issues tend to colonise. Say your toilet at home is one minute away at all times; it takes you one minute to get there and you never need to wait to use it. If at work you are constantly optimising your control to hold for 40 minutes, you are never going to have problems reaching your toilet at home. If at work you are constantly optimising your control to hold for 0 minutes, you are eventually going to have problems reaching your toilet at home.
Managing these problems will mean instantiating the same feedback loop at home that was eroding your control at work, eroding it further. Moreover, phenomena which arose in certain contexts at work will continue to apply in different contexts at home. If your control is heavily optimised toward 0 minutes' holding, you are going to develop nocturia (frequent night-time urination) and you will have to decide whether to deal with it by going to the toilet six times a night or by wetting your diaper in bed. If you feel comfortable wetting anywhere you are probably going to wet your diaper in bed and will likely eventually develop bedwetting as a result.
The seventh point is as discussed previously on this blog: types of control are interdependent because they both rely on the pelvic floor. Typically, this shows up through loss of wetting control affecting messing control. If you display 100% diaper-oriented voiding behaviour with regard to wetting, but 100% toilet-oriented voiding behaviour with regard to messing, it won't matter; if your wetting control decreases then your messing control will also decrease, albeit to a lesser degree.
The eighth point is that once all the factors dictating the relative objective preferability of voiding in various situations have ceased to be relevant, the remaining factors, the subjective, are largely social, primarily the expectation of social stigma. The main relevant factor in that case is shame, which can be quantified as the magnitude of incident disapproval (how much disapproval everyone directs at you) multiplied by the subjective stigma sensitivity factor (how much you care).
Shame can be qualitatively described as the internalised expectation of adverse consequences. If consequences fail to manifest then shame becomes less indicative and less relevant to you and you become less sensitive to it. The degree of felt shame indicates the degree of expected consequences; the greater the magnitude of incident disapproval or the degree of your sensitivity to it, the greater the degree of expected consequences, and the greater the degree of desensitisation if they fail to manifest. This means that, all other things being equal, more socially stigmatised events that attract no adverse consequence have a greater desensitising effect than less socially stigmatised events.
This is important because both wetting and messing operate in the same direction along the social stigma dimension, and, all other things being equal, messing is more stigmatised than wetting, but it's also equally subject to basically all of the factors noted above.
As a result, if you're already struggling with wetting control, the arrival of issues with messing control is liable to trigger your wetting control to completely collapse because the only thing propping your wetting control up is differences in the subjective preferability of various situations with regard to wetting, and the subjective preferability difference profile of messing makes that look small and irrelevant by comparison. Accidentally wetting your diapers might seem like the biggest problem in the world when it's the biggest problem you have, but when you start accidentally messing them, accidental wetting becomes a sideshow.
Summary
Accidental untraining can occur because:
most people who wear diapers enough for accidental untraining to be a risk would prefer to be wearing them as much of the time as possible;
the more time they wear diapers with no adverse consequences, the more time they feel free to wear diapers;
wearing diapers encourages continuing to wear them and using them because it imposes switching costs on wearing something other than them and using something other than them;
this erodes control because control exists to allow you to void at a time and place of your choosing and is maintained by your doing so, and diapers take away the reasons to choose to void at one place or time over another and therefore the element of choice;
voiding in your diapers and not experiencing adverse consequences increases your willingness to void in them again, but experiencing adverse consequences doesn't break the loop because you will eventually run into a situation where you're willing to risk the adverse consequences for relief, and that relief itself is perfectly capable of not having adverse consequences, restoring your willingness to void;
the costs of learning to use your diapers are not materially quantifiable, the costs of not using them are;
the more willing you are to void in your diapers, the less time you will spend holding on average, and the less time you spend holding, the less time you will be able to hold;
control depends partly on you feeling that it is not OK to void in a specific situation, but whether a voiding in that situation teaches you that it's OK to void is unaffected by whether you intended it (i.e., your failure of control undermines your control further);
accidents cause more accidents because your control depends partly on the belief that you can prevent voiding, so you are more likely to have an accident if you believe more strongly that you're going to have an accident, and you're more likely to believe that if you've already had accidents;
a lack of control increases the probability of accidents not only because it increases the probability of continence failure but because it increases the complexity of getting out of your diapers, meaning what might have been a successful toileting out of diapers turns into an accident in them;
a substantive lack of control doesn't stay in the context in which you nurtured it and will eventually lead to loss of functional control in other contexts;
either type of loss of control increases the probability of the other type of loss of control because they both rely on the pelvic floor;
messing issues tend to trigger a collapse of wetting control by making the subjective preferability differences between wetting in various situations seem irrelevant.
Notes
On an instant-to-instant basis it does make some objective difference. For instance, it is clearly preferable not to void when you're about to leak. However, if you are using your diapers, over time you adapt your choices and behaviours so that the probability of leaking is constantly minimised, so that, across a reasonable measurement period, the weight of "leaking" as a factor in determining objective preferability of voiding flattens out to zero.
You physically can't drink water at work. Whatever. You are a perfectly spherical ideal diaper wearer in a frictionless vacuum.
Thank you for your intelligent responses to questions asked of you. I have been a follower of yours for quite some time, and vaguely remember a post you had made (well several) that got removed in the “purge”.
I was hoping that you could re-explain the dangers of untraining while not exactly wearing 24/7, I remember that it had a lot to do with the amount of hours worn, and if done doing the same things every time, like everyday for work.
Thank you for your time and hope to hear more from you soon.
Hey @blmwet1. Thanks for the kind words.
I would suggest that if you are wearing and using your diapers, the risk of untraining is likely to be influenced by the following factors: what you are using them for; for what percentage of the time you're wearing them; when you're wearing them; and off-ramping.
What you're using them for is important because, to give one extreme example, if you are just wearing them, refusing to use them, and only voiding in toilets, you are likely not compromising your control; in fact you are probably strengthening it because diapers make it more logistically difficult to go to the toilet. At the other extreme, if you are wetting and messing your diapers from the off you are much more likely to lose at least wetting control and probably messing control than you would be if you were just wetting them alone.
It's also worth noting that for the vast majority of people who will be within two standard deviations of the median and on the conservative side, there is an incentive framework pushing them toward more liberal use of their diapers. Namely, people with full continence who aren't in diapers will generally endure situations where they need to pee really badly and can't access a toilet, because they have to. People with full continence who are in diapers are eventually just going to start wetting their diapers because the alternative is extreme discomfort and wetting their diapers is the rational alternative. This still means they are going to be holding for less time overall than people not in diapers.
Of course, once you start wetting in only those situations where it is most uncomfortable to hold it, you then find yourself confronted with the new most uncomfortable holding situation. And you eventually stop holding in that one. And so on. This isn't helped by the fact that as you get more comfortable with diapers you become more subject to the latchkey effect — i.e., your urinary urgency is no longer being automatically amplified or muted by your brain depending on circumstances and you are instead feeling it at full urgency all the time, meaning you will experience the same amount of discomfort at a lower absolute level of bladder filling.
The percentage of the time you're wearing them is important for relatively straightforward reasons. If you're developing new continence behaviours as a result of adapting to diapers, then that adaptation is going to happen faster and consequently those behaviours are going to normalise more quickly if you're spending more time in diapers.
As a general rule, I would suggest that for new continence behaviours to become norms they have to be statistically normal, so in the phase before any untraining happens I think wearing them 50% of your waking hours or more (8+ hours a day) is probably a good rule of thumb for where the area of concern begins. As I've discussed on this blog before, I also believe that once bedwetting sets in it creates a form of sleep learning regarding untraining. and therefore I expect that once you start bedwetting the amount of wearing during your waking hours at which further continence degradation would be a concern would be somewhat lower — but most people who get to the point of bedwetting would be wearing all the time.
I also believe consistency is probably a factor. You're probably more likely to damage your continence wearing 12/7 than you are wearing 24/3 + 12/1.
When you're wearing them is important. This is because untraining comes about as a result of not exercising control; it comes about when instead of holding for long enough to make it to a toilet, you simply immediately void in your diaper. Thus, the amount of impact that wearing in a specific situation has on your control is related to the amount of time you would have otherwise spent holding in that situation which has been eliminated by your diapers.
Consequently, wearing at your home is likely to have fairly limited impact for time spent wearing, all other things being equal, because in most homes the interval between becoming aware you need to go to the toilet and actually going would be fairly short anyway under most circumstances — 1–2 minutes maximum.
On the other hand, in the workplace, potentially needing to hold for at least one hour is not uncommon (I've never been in a workplace where it was that brief, for example). Consequently, wearing in the workplace eliminates a lot more of the time you would have spent holding, and thus a lot of the practice in holding you would have gotten and a lot of the time you would have spent maintaining tone in your muscles.
Erosion of control under workplace conditions is also more likely to be perceptually "silent" — your control could collapse quite significantly in the workplace before you were likely to start noticing problems reaching the toilet at home.
There's also the question of off-ramping. Because of the incentives of wearing diapers and the psychological conditions of being in them, if you're trying to recover control then it's pretty essential to dial back and/or stop your use of diapers. However, if you've lost control you also have the problem that you have indeed lost control and therefore you risk accidents and consequences if you don't wear protection, or a specific degree of protection.
If you're actively setting out to untrain then you may be able to plan it such that you have a big block of vacation time or something similar available a couple of months in, so that if you don't like where things are headed you will have that time to take those risks and effectively take the off-ramp. However, if you're just wearing a lot without any specific plans to untrain, then you are, by extension, likely not planning for this.
This has the potential to leave you in a bit of a pickle because if you lose control, even if you become aware of it, you may not be in a position to take any risks with your protection, and therefore your awareness may be a moot point. There is also the problem that even for the length of time for which a continence issue remains remediable, the longer you have it and it's uncontrolled, the longer it will take to fix. If you realise you have a specific continence problem and it will take a month to fix, and you know in three months' time you have a month off, by then it could have developed far enough to take six weeks to fix and consequently have passed beyond your reach.
Off-ramping is of particular importance to me because my untraining was punctuated by a series of failed attempts to off-ramp, because it happened during a 3-year period at university punctuated by yearly mid-year 1-month and inter-year 2-month breaks (which is a lot more than most people get in vacation time). I realised I was having wetting control issues in the middle of the first half of year 2, couldn't start doing anything until mid-year break, and ultimately didn't manage to get out of diapers during mid-year break.
By the time the year 2/3 inter-year break came around, I'd developed messing problems, was struggling to fix those, and had given up wetting control as more or less a moot point. I didn't manage to fix my messing problems by the start of year 3 and by the time mid-year break came around I was more or less convinced that I couldn't.
My final attempt to off-ramp was at the end of the following year, took six months, and failed. I don't know that I ever would have regained significant wetting control, but I think it is possible I eventually would have regained functional bowel control; ultimately though we'll never know because after I had to give up on that one my bowel control collapsed, and if it was saveable then it definitely is not now.
Hi, I'm considering doing diaper training in the summer. I was wondering if you think it's possible to regain bladder control after being diaper dependent again?
Hey there. I refer to my traditional response on this one, which is: don't count on it.
It will depend what you consider diaper dependence, how you achieve it, and to what degree. Isolated loss of daytime bladder control is likely to have the largest purely behavioural and habitual element and is thus the most likely to be fully reversible. However, this is not a guarantee and it's also not a guarantee that you will be in a position to get out if it goes any further than that.
Loss of night wetting control isn't loss of absolutely everything, but in my experience it is generally not reversible and it generally places a permanent limit on the degree to which daytime wetting control can be regained.
Loss of messing control is also generally not reversible and to the best of my knowledge it reliably tends to entail being stuck with minimal wetting control. I've also noted that where people have talked about regaining control, loss of messing control is the situation in which regaining control is least likely to mean getting out of diapers. I am aware of at least one account in which the subject managed to regain most other control but had to give up because loss of messing control made having other control largely pointless.
Having said that, I would not be over-concerned that you're going to lose messing control in the summer, and the risk that you will lose night wetting control is, at least, relatively low ... but you should always go in with the mindset that you might not be able to get out
Hey there, you probably did this a few times before on here, but I was wondering if you could give us a quick rundown on what total incontinence is like? Like what to expect and what it feels like?
Thanx in advance!
Hey there. No worries, but that's a pretty broad question! While I'll try to answer it as written, I'll probably be able to give a more useful answer if you can provide me with some clarifying questions as well.
Physically, what I know is different from how things felt before is that the area below about the level of my sternum, front and back, usually just feels like anywhere else on my body, for example my arm. I don't usually feel any kind of urgency in there. On occasion, if I sit still in a weird position for a very long amount of time, I will occasionally feel a very mild, almost unnoticeable sensation letting me know that there is something in there, but it's hard to quantify what it is or how it happens. I do know when it happens, and my overall impression is that it happens when I'm sitting in a way which directs my body weight vector down through my external urethra (for example, leaning really far forward), so I think it's just pee building up in the urethra. How that evokes any kind of sensation I have no idea.
I don't feel myself wet. I wet slowly and consistently over the course of several hours. Dehydration usually makes me wet less, but not in a predictable sort of way. I think I wet less while I'm asleep, but not by a huge margin.
I do feel a faint sensation of weight in my lower back if I'm about to mess. Under normal conditions, I don't feel any other sensation of urgency. I do feel myself mess and feel as if I'm going from somewhat full to empty/-ier, but there's less mass transfer involved and it's a much less dramatic and marked experience than voluntary messing. I think this is partly because I mess way more often than I ever voluntarily went #2 in a toilet, not because I want to but because it's just how my body works now — it doesn't happen against my opposition, either, it's just that it wouldn't be relevant if it did.
I'm definitely more likely to have a more dramatic experience (more like the accidents I had when I was continent) if I'm having a chronic illness flare, or transient acute illness, or if I eat something which irritates my GI tract. I can also "push," although not like I used to be able to, and it will happen faster. It will also happen faster if I engage my abdominals for other reasons, such as physically exerting myself, and/or if I'm in certain positions such as squatting, which I assume is due to the lower GI tract lining up in such a way as to completely stop obstructing voiding.
If I try to engage my muscles to not void, the result has varied over time. At present, I just can't get any sensory response from my bladder muscles at all; I'm sure they're still there and I don't have any impairment of sensation around that region, but nothing seems to happen — I don't even feel anything different — when I try to do what I thought was the motion that was supposed to make them close or move or flex or anything like that. If I try to hold my messing, nothing actually changes, but I do think I might be feeling the faint, almost imperceptible sensation of something moving, but I'm not sure.
I had difficulty with bladder and bowel control even when I was continent so the one aspect of this which was completely new to me when it started happening was chronic bedwetting, i.e., wetting heavily literally every night. Between my original toilet training and my untraining I had random widely-spaced "one-off" incidents of pretty minor magnitude, but actually just never being even close to dry at night at all is something I only experienced after turning 18.
One thing I will say is that if you were previously continent — or at least close to it, as in my case — actually having lost your continence and coming to the point where you have to consciously realise that is a little scary. I started wearing in mid-2012 and started seeing my control properly collapse in mid-to-late 2013, so I had to think about this a lot at that point.
I found then, and it continues to be true for me personally, that stress and unhappiness aren't the same thing; in fact, the axes of stress/lessness and un/happiness are basically perpendicular to each other, in my view. However, while I rarely feel viscerally unhappy, anticipation, stress, tension, and things like that are much more able to break through to me and make me viscerally feel them.
In the 6-to-9-month period where I went from "sure, I could get out of diapers, I'd just need a moment to adjust" to "absolutely not getting out of diapers anytime soon, nope, no way José," I was very rarely unhappy apart from a vague feeling that I owed it to other people not to do this thing that I wanted to, but my brain constantly ruminating and ticking over the potential implications, complications, and outcomes put me under a fair amount of stress.
It was really strange to go from January 2013 and being a DL adult who was dry at night with no sign that that would change to June the same year and being an equally DL adult waking up in non-optional diapers every morning, wet most mornings, and assuming (correctly, as it turned out) that I'd be waking up that way for the rest of my life. I actually got to enjoying bedwetting long before I stopped feeling stress about it, but it was existentially terrifying that it was happening.
Part of the reason my AB side has stepped forward more since untraining is that I regressed to relieve stress, and also flat-out simply involuntarily regressed, more often, until I'd actually gotten used to my continence going downhill and was able to handle it as an adult without feeling like I was staring into a yawning abyss in the possibility space — and guess what, hey, it turns out regressing relieves my stress quite well.
Returning to the topic, I want to note that once you do get to the point of no longer qualifying as functionally continent, whether for both voiding functions or simply one, you start to develop a relationship with your diapers which is agnostic of and separate to being AB/DL, simply being that they're what keeps your clothes dry (and clean).
I think this relationship is especially likely to form, and to do so especially quickly, if you try to go back into pants for whatever reason — I've mentioned before that in mid-2013 I tried stubbornly to break back out of diapers assuming I could just stop wetting by going cold turkey (nope).
I think this is just because if you're actually not continent, once you've tried to deal with that with insufficient protection or the underwear you used to get away with, diapers are so much less stress and danger that it's almost forgettably, trivially easy to accept them as the lower-stress, more effective alternative, even if you haven't processed your AB/DL guilt along the way. @serah-in-diapers mentioned becoming a bedwetter partly by spending a month drinking a lot of water and forcibly disrupting her own sleep by making herself get up and go to the toilet, after which her body immediately surrendered and started bedwetting. I think this is pretty much exactly the same thing.
I also want to note that once your functional continence is poor enough that you need to be in diapers, the prospect of losing more continence is ... perhaps not as confronting? I would say the first time I had a messing accident was very stressful, in the way that making it to the head-to-head final round of an elimination game and waiting to find out if you won is very stressful. It was not the heart-going-200-bpm, sweat-out-all-the-water-in-my-body-in-5-minutes panic that it would have been if I'd had that accident un-diapered, or perhaps even significantly earlier in my stay in diapers. Pre-diapers it would have ruined my entire week. In diapers I stopped thinking about it within six hours — and that was the first one! The ones after that were easier!
Well, those are about all the things I can think of off the top of my head. I hope they're some help.
Hey Kali, glad to see you posting more again. I currently wear about 10-12 hours a day 3-4 days a week and 1-2 days a week 24 hour+ just because. I have noticed that while I’m undiapered that my control is relatively fine (maybe a small bladder but I’ve been used to that most my life). However, often when I am diapered wetting takes virtually no effort at all and many times I find myself wetting immediately after feeling a small urge and occasionally forgetting shortly after to the point where I have to physically check to confirm (which becomes much harder as the diaper gets wetter obviously).
At the moment I haven’t noticed too many flags but I have noticed my bowel movements have increased from what used to be 1 time a day average to 2-3 usually shortly after meals or physical labor. Additionally over the last couple weeks being diapered and “relaxed” has felt more of a natural state than undiapered and clenched. It’s not that I have trouble holding it while padded but it feels much easier to just stay relaxed and open than bother clenching (especially while padded).
My question pertains to what might be on the table here as I already don’t wear 24/7 really to avoid actually untraining but I realistically don’t think I’ll want to reduce my time wearing much more than I already am. Is there potential risk here and if so what might I be looking at over time?
Hey Kali,
Hey anon.
glad to see you posting more again.
Glad to be posting more again. It's very much a function of my wellness and cognitive clarity, which vary unpredictability on a day-to-day basis, so I'm desperately trying to punch out as many answers as I can while I'm still going.
Is there potential risk here and if so what might I be looking at over time?
Yes, there is potential risk here.
Ironically, out of the two I think you are actually more likely to deal with bowel control issues sooner. This is because, while the state of bladder regulation that you're describing is only slightly removed from the state which leads to bladder untraining, the state of bowel control you're describing is the one that actually does lead to bowel control untraining.
This isn't a comment on how far any lack of control has actually progressed. Rather, it's a comment on whether your control is positioned on a vector which if followed will cause lack of control to progress.
As an analogy, consider a rail turntable — a device placed in a fixed rail track, consisting of a piece of track on a deck which can rotate under power, so that it can receive an incoming locomotive coming from a permanent way in one direction and deliver it onto another (or turn it 180° and send it back the way it came). If a locomotive is on the turntable and moves forward while the turntable is not mated to a track in that direction, then it will derail. However, if it moves forward while the turntable is mated to a track then it will move onto the new track.
For you, your bladder control is not quite "on track" — it's a couple of degrees off. Your bowel control, however, is "on track" and is free to move forward (or in this case backward).
2–3 bowel movements a day, shortly after meals and physical labour, is what I'd expect from someone who has not necessarily lost control, but has adjusted to voiding when their digestive system requires it instead of when they have access to a toilet. It's not a sign of loss of control in itself, but you can expect it to be the new normal.
I would expect that you will have to deal with irregular, minor bowel accidents within the next 6 months, but I wouldn't expect marked loss of control in that timeframe. I also expect that you may have to deal with mild loss of bladder control, but it's not a given. However, if for some reason you develop bedwetting within the next six months (which I don't see, but hey, I didn't see it before it happened to me), then I would expect more substantial loss of bladder control.
I think now would be a good time to decide whether, if placed at gunpoint, you would choose to remain in diapers permanently or leave them permanently. Either way, you can start contingency planning if things develop to the point where you are forced to make a decision.
You’ve mentioned that even people that don’t wear 24/7 can be at risk. At what point does “wearing frequently but not 24/7” start trending into more dangerous territory and what can be the possible effects of just “wearing often”?
You’ve mentioned that even people that don’t wear 24/7 can be at risk.
I have mentioned that.
At what point does “wearing frequently but not 24/7” start trending into more dangerous territory
I'm going to be a pedant about wording — I know what you meant but it may be less clear to the couple of dozen people who will read this.
24/7 expresses two quantities. "24 hours per day," which we might call duration, is one; "7 days a week," which is probably closer to frequency per se, is another. Another useful metric might be their product, hours per week (hrs/wk), which for 24×7 would be 168 hrs/wk; let's call that quantity diaperedness.
I think the least-diapered regimen which has a chance of endangering your control is "wearing diapers only outside the home, but using only diapers whenever wearing them". For most people, the activity that takes them out of the house will be either study or work, so "only wearing outside the home" is likely to come out to somewhere between 6/4 (24 hrs/wk) and 10/7 (70 hrs/wk) for most people. The chance of developing control issues certainly scales with the absolute numbers — the person averaging 70 hrs/wk in diapers is much more likely to develop control issues after a year than the person averaging 24 hrs/wk.
However, in this case, the most important part is the underlying mechanism. The median country for mean residential square footage is France, at approximately 145 sq m. In a 144 sq m home, you are virtually guaranteed to be within 12 m of a toilet (in contrast to, e.g., my last workplace, where the distance from my station to the toilet was ~50 m). While at home, the chances are also significantly higher that you will be able to use the toilet immediately upon feeling the urge to void.
"Wearing only outside the home, but using" usually means you are diapered for fewer than 7 days per week and for less than half of your 24 hours per day, and indeed may be diapered for less than half of your 16 waking hours per day, so it's quite easy for it to feel safe. However, it eliminates virtually every reason you might need to use your control for more than a few minutes at a time. If the endpoint is "not being able to hold it for more than 5 minutes," "never holding it for more than 5 minutes because you never need to" won't get you there anywhere near as fast as "never holding it at all," but it will certainly move you in that direction given consistency and time.
what can be the possible effects of just “wearing often”?
There are direct and indirect effects.
The most prevalent direct effect I've noticed is simply "subjective experience of more effortful control," which is relatively innocuous — if you ask people to hold it for, say, an hour, someone who reliably wears and uses diapers will feel a lot more stressed at the end of that hour than someone who doesn't.
Slightly less prevalent is "failure of bladder control due to diverted attention". This is sort of an accident, but not really — it's more that "never having to hold it for more than 3 minutes" implies a routine where you can usually switch task focus immediately to going off and voiding, so you never need to incorporate it into multitask. As a result the mental routine of "consciously maintaining control while also primarily directing conscious attention to something else while needing to pee" gets rusty, and you absentmindedly forget to maintain control until five seconds later when you realise why you should have.
Over longer periods (i.e., generally >1 year), the effects tend to shade into "actual loss of the substance of continence," but in a different way and at least initially to a lesser degree than untraining.
The most prevalent direct effect in this category is probably "introduction of limitation of continence". Most people who are fully continent will feel on one or more occasions in their life a sufficiently intense need to void that it feels like their control is about to fail, but it's usual for them to make it to the toilet without their control failing. For people who are functionally continent but reliably wear diapers for a significant number of hours per week, it's not unusual to experience, for the first time, their control actually failing because they tried to hold on too long or because it was placed under additional load by an external stressor.
It's difficult to know what to call this because, at least initially, it usually doesn't represent an impairment of continence in practical terms — you might wet yourself if you try to hold it for longer than two hours, but realistically if you want to access a toilet you will almost certainly be able to do so within two hours of needing to. On the other hand, most people can hold it for longer than two hours (discomfort aside), so clearly some substantive change has actually occurred.
The next most prevalent direct effect is probably "failure of bowel control under influence of external stressor". The proximate cause is the application of external stress (e.g. raised intra-abdominal pressure) to someone's bowel control, although if they've already been holding it for a while, that doesn't help either.
Of the people I know who've worn diapers regularly but not 24/7, none have gotten much past this point without either choosing to stop wearing diapers or, voluntarily or otherwise, going 24/7, so it's difficult to know what the further direct effects are.
The indirect effects are the effects which develop from the direct effects and your response to them. The big nexus of concern here, of course, is lock-in: an initial loss of continence which is relatively insignificant in its own right but creates the conditions for further loss of continence.
Mechanical lock-in, extensively discussed on this blog, is one relevant form. It is circumstantially dependent. If you lose just enough control that a sufficiently strong IAP spike will cause a messing accident, but you work a sit-down job from home and have a sedentary lifestyle, it's unlikely to have a meaningful effect. If you work an on-site job with heavy lifting and you have extracurriculars requiring physical activity, however, you are probably going to have to both upgrade your protection and extend the amount of time you spend protected, causing more toileting failures, ultimately likely leading to worse control.
Psychological lock-in is also a factor here. Remember that one factor in the ability to exercise control is the confidence that you have it. There are many people for whom their first messing accident will be a bit of a shock, but not an earthquake. However, I know a few people who were long-term non-24/7 regular diaper wearers who had basically fine control out of diapers prior to their first few messing accidents, after which their general control started to fall apart quite fast and they ultimately found it necessary to go 24/7.
I realise this is a long post and I'm sorry — the writing and editing functions of my brain have not been at their best in the past couple of days! I hope this is some use.
Once a person has untrained is it possible to get continent again?
Short answer: no.
Medium answer: don't count on it.
Long answer:
Assuming you start untraining with wetting untraining, there is a long period during which
your actual objective underlying bladder control moves from "easy, thoughtless, but still technically conscious wetting" to "wetting which is easy and thoughtless because it's actually unconscious and you don't meaningfully have the ability to stop it"
your subjective experience of bladder control remains largely the same, i.e., easy thoughtless wetting with an unclear degree of control
Of the attempts I have seen to retrain (i.e., to regain continence after untraining), the vast majority that achieved virtually perfect, as good-as-new success, happened during this period; basically, the person lucked out and managed to start retraining before they were deep into "unconscious wetting" territory.
After the point where unconscious voiding is clearly established (which, for many people, becomes evident at the onset of bedwetting), retraining seems to be considerably harder. There are a few factors and phenomena playing into this.
Destabilisation
I don't have a full theoretical workup on this topic, but significant loss of continence generally seems to preclude full and/or durable recovery of continence, with the degree of impairment worsening with the degree of continence lost and the amount of time spent without it.
The "fullness" of one's continence, here, is multifactorial: it includes
endurance: the amount of time for which one can reliably exercise one's control without failure;
start control: the fraction of one's voids which one consciously initiates;
stop control: the fraction of one's voids which one can stop through conscious control when attempting to do so;
stress control: the resilience of one's control to systemic shocks such as sudden increases in intra-abdominal pressure.
In my experience, an example of how significant loss of continence precludes full recovery of continence is that the optimal achievable outcome available to people who retrain after the onset of bedwetting seems to entail largely unaffected bedwetting and consistent but relatively shaky bladder control, which in almost all cases seems to include impaired stress control and often also includes impaired stop control.
The "durability" of one's continence is simpler; it refers to the reliability with which, and the duration for which, one can maintain one's "fullest" post-retraining degree of continence over time.
It isn't unusual — it is in fact arguably usual — for retrainees' control to take the shape of a parabolic graph. Let x = time and y = "fullness" of continence. The point at which someone starts retraining is obviously at less than full continence, so let's assign it an arbitrary negative y-value, say y = -10. While the range of input x-values (i.e., the time it takes this process to play out) varies, it's quite normal for someone's continence to climb gradually, through active retraining, to their peak continence (say the x-axis, y = 0, for full control), then equally gradually fall back down to and past the original y-value. This process seems to happen regardless of original or ongoing conscious intent.
Funnily enough, this actually seems more likely to affect people who were originally fully continent. Friends who have had, e.g., impaired but toilet-compatible bowel control while out of diapers, and then worse bowel control while in them, seem more likely to be able to claw their way back to their original level of bowel control and stay there. If on the other hand I hear that a friend who was originally fully continent but ended up as a bedwetter has managed to retrain, I generally expect that they will be back in diapers within 3–5 years.
Splash damage
Regardless of a person's conscious intentions going in, continence loss of any type, particularly significant "milestone" events in continence loss, seem to be associated with the onset or acceleration of continence loss of other types.
For instance, the onset of bedwetting seems to be associated with a sharp decline in most or all of the continence "fullness" variables described above, with respect to daytime wetting. That is, it's not unusual for someone to be able at a point 2 months before the onset of bedwetting to maintain functional daytime wetting control (keep their pants completely or almost completely dry) if out of diapers, while, at a point 2 months after the onset of bedwetting, having significant trouble keeping their pants even only a little bit wet.
Similarly, unintended messing accidents (i.e., messing accidents not taking place in the context of a desire or attempt to untrain messing) are very rare before the onset of bedwetting, while being much more common in absolute terms (although still, at least initially, relatively rare) after it.
Logistics
Retraining typically requires easy, guaranteed, unobstructed access to a toilet; the ability to focus attentively on your body's voiding need signals; and the freedom to chance wetting (or occasionally soiling) your clothes.
For a lot of modern adults, this simply isn't really possible; only people working from home with flexible hours reliably have all of these things. People whose workplace de facto completely controls their schedules and who have a high proportion of contact hours (i.e., have to spend a lot or all of their working hours on site) often work in a context where maintaining a routine that permits retraining simply isn't possible, and they have to rely on protection instead.
Part of this is a concept I discussed recently, mechanical lock-in, where one's control might be impaired in such a way that one can still usually reach the toilet, but accounting for the times where that isn't the case requires one to use protection and adaptations the nature of which significantly restrict one's ability to use the toilet.
TL;DR
You may be able to retain your continence if you get out early and if you're lucky. If one or both of those things aren't the case, you're generally about as well-served by making peace with being in diapers as you would be by retraining.
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