ChronicBedwetter

A lot of stuff which can’t really be articulated otherwise gets channelled through the sexuality, hence all the jokes about “girls with daddy issues” and how good we are in bed — science says “fucking terrible,” by the way (Yehuda et al., 2015; Wells et al., 2018).

Specifically, it sounds like your diapers are bound up with, and confined to, the active part of your sexuality — on some level, I’m guessing that they “feel,” to your mind, like part of, or a prerequisite for, sex. From what you said, I inferred that you don’t usually abstain from masturbation, but that you do while in diapers. It makes sense; if your diapers are part of sex, then when the refractory period causes loss of interest in sex, it will also cause loss of interest in diapers. If you also experience post-coital tristesse (PCT) — which you are disproportionately likely to do given that both AB/DL and PCT are trauma-linked (Fuss et al., 2019; Maczkowiack & Schweitzer, 2019) — that effect will be compounded. Like with many others, it sounds like this has put you into a frustrating “binge-purge” cycle (Grey, 2015).

Here are my recommendations.

Go x/7 first. The 12 Month Diaper Training Program is, in my opinion, the Holy Bible of untraining, to which I am merely a sort of off-brand Apostle Paul. However, the author suggests going directly from 24/7 underwear to 24/7 diapers. While “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law,” (—Matt. 5:18 NIV) I think it’s pretty obvious this doesn’t work for everyone.

I suggest an alternative strategy: titration. In medicine, titration is the process of increasing the dosage of a drug stepwise until you find the sweet spot between “it doesn’t work” and “it hurts” (Roden, 2014). Titration is especially important for, e.g., dopaminergics, the class which includes Ritalin and Vyvanse (Bidwell et al., 2011). Taken properly, they make your brain work wonderfully well; taken too much at once from a standing start, they kick like a mule (Ghoshal, 2019).

I think there’s a lot to be said for a comparison between drugs that directly regulate the reward system (Berridge, 2006) and diapers, for reasons that should hopefully be obvious. Start by committing to wear diapers in a small amount at intervals, say x hours a day 7 days a week (x/7), and gradually increase the amount of time you commit. If the maximum observed x ends up being less than 24 — still great, because you still have what you want! But, realistically, courtesy of Tommy Siegel’s “black hole effect” (Grey, 2020) it likely won’t be.

I also find that in colonising new time for your diapers, it’s good to track allocated time, “I am [already] wearing diapers x hours a day 7 days a week,” but also good to avoid time-based criteria, “I must now wear diapers x + 1 hours a day 7 days a week.” Task-based criteria are more effective: “I must wear diapers whenever I do z,” and then steadily expand the set of values of z that require you to wear diapers.

Don’t just wear diapers instead of underwear; actively replace underwear with diapers. Determine how long you go between loads of laundry, or alternatively establish a laundry schedule; let’s put it on the long end, one week. Figure out how many pairs of underwear you usually wear in a week, and, if necessary, destroy and throw out as many pairs as necessary to reduce your total stock of underwear to only that number. Next, figure out for what percentage of each week the average pair of underwear gets worn; each time the percentage of the week that you spend in diapers increases by that amount, destroy and throw out a pair of underwear.

Don’t go volcel. The underlying psychological structure that makes someone like diapers is likely pretty deeply rooted. The libido is even more deeply-rooted; it’s a fundamental drive. If you place your sex drive and your diaper-wearing in opposition, the sex drive will win. You need to get them working together. I would advise masturbating as often as you ordinarily would, without regard for whether you’re in diapers or not, except insofar as is necessary to make sure you’re not doing it when you’re already about to leave diapers for the day.

Right now, for you, being in diapers after you come produces an unpleasant feeling, which leads to the conditioned behaviour of taking off your diapers to evade it. If you instead consciously resist the urge to leave diapers and confront that feeling, you’ll be doing a form of de facto exposure therapy on yourself — and because of the nature of the feeling and how exposure therapy works, the feeling will lessen to nothing (O’Kearney et al., 2006).

References

Berridge, K.C. (2006, October 27). The debate over dopamine’s role in reward: The case for incentive salience. Psychopharmacology, 191, 391-431. doi:10.1007/s00213-006-0578-x.

Bidwell, L.C., McClernon, F.J., & Kollins, S.H. (2011, August). Cognitive enhancers for the treatment of ADHD. Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behaviour, 99(2), 262-274. doi:10.1016/j.pbb.2011.05.002.

Fuss, J., Jais, L., Grey, B.T., Guczka, S.R., Briken, P., & Biedermann, S.V. (2019, June 22). Self-reported childhood maltreatment and erotic target identity inversions among men with paraphilic infantilism. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 45(8), 781-795. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2019.1623355.

Ghoshal, M. (2019, November 21). Understanding drug tolerance (L. Slowiczek, Ed.). healthline.

Grey, B.T. (2015, July 23). The ABDL binge and purge cycle. Understanding Infantilism (.org).

Grey, B.T. (2020, July 19). ABDL glossary and search: “black hole effect.” Understanding Infantilism (.org).

Maczkowiack, J., & Schweitzer, R.D. (2019, February 7). Postcoital dysphoria: Prevalence and correlates among males. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 45(2), 128-140. doi:10.1080/0092623X.2018.1488326.

O’Kearney, R.T., Anstey, K., von Sanden, C., & Hunt, A. (2006, October 18). Behavioural and cognitive behavioural therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder in children and adolescents. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 4, CD004856. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD004856.pub2.

Roden, D.M. (2014). Chapter 5: Principles of clinical pharmacology. In D. Kasper, A. Fauci, S. Hauser, D. Longo, J.L. Jameson, & J. Loscalzo (Eds.), Principles of clinical pharmacology (19th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Wells, S.Y., Glassman, L.H., Talkovsky, A.M., Sohn, M.J., Morland, L.A., & Mackintosh, M.A., et al. (2018, November 16). Examining changes in sexual functioning after cognitive processing therapy in a sample of women trauma survivors. Women’s Health Issues, 29(1), 72-79. doi:10.1016/j.whi.2018.10.003.

Exhaustive diapering and protection

This is a mechanically-mediated, convenience-based incentive, i.e., it’s based on how difficult and inconvenient it is to do something. As I’ve mentioned before, untraining tends to keep going under its own steam beyond a certain point because the more diapering you wear, the more difficult it is to easily remove.

It’s easy to go to the toilet when you only have to pull down your pants and underwear, and then do the reverse when you’re done. My job is to add a sufficient number of steps to that process that it becomes annoying and inconvenient, and wetting or messing your diaper and being changed is the simpler, more straightforward task.

For example, excluding physically secured clothing, I might dress my untrainees in two layers of diapering, waterproof pants, a onesie, a button-up shirt, overalls with a belt, and a woollen V-neck pullover. This might sound like a lot of clothing, but it’s actually not necessarily that much; a decent onesie is breathable, and “cold” in Brisbane is often wind chill, which woollens on their own don’t do much against.

If they want to use the toilet, here’s what they have to do:

Take off their pullover and find somewhere to hang it.

Undo their belt loops, which is useful if you want them to look like pants).

Undo the shoulder straps of their overalls.

Undo the side buttons of their overalls (up to three buttons per side, and in my experience kind of a bitch to undo).

Drop the overalls to the floor, potentially having to wriggle out of them.

Unbutton and take off their shirt and find somewhere to hang it.

Undo their onesie and hike it up to their chest or take it off.

Wiggle out of their waterproof pants.

Take off their outer layer of diapering.

Get out of their inner layer of diapering. If I okayed it for whatever reason, they can just undo their diapers as normal, but that can be an annoying, stressful strain. If they don’t want me to know, however, they have to wriggle out of their diapers. This is especially difficult if they’re dealing with a wet diaper, and even tougher if they’re already a bit messy.

Once they’re finished using the potty, not only do they have to do everything above in reverse, but (if they’re trying to be subtle) they also have to find a comfortable and secure fit for their diapers. I use fairly traditional plastic-backed four-tape diapers (such as ABU LittlePawz), meaning their tapes don’t deal well with being refastened, and it’s virtually impossible to unfasten them after extended wear without ripping the front wing apart.

Secure clothing

The simplest and most ubiquitous example of this is waterproof pants that lock with a waist chain. Like all properly fitted pairs of waterproof pants, a properly fitted pair of locking waterproof pants should top out at or around the small of the back. The chain, when correctly locked, prevents the waist of the pants from stretching by more than an insignificant amount. Since the body is wider directly below the waist (because of the butt, and in this case especially because of diapers), the pants can’t stretch enough to come off.

You do need a solid, metallic, relatively heavy-gauge chain, so it can vary depending on the make, and many models come with a diary lock (a tiny lock which is trivial to pick and which can often be forced open by hand), so you might like to replace it with your own lock. The absolute best plastic pants I’ve seen for this role are Fetware LPCXT.

Less directly related to diapers, there are, for example, chastity belts; these don’t reliably work with diapers alone (which can be untaped and migrated out of a leghole), but with pull-on plastic pants they work reasonably well, as under the best possible conditions you need to have an immense amount of flexibility to get plastic pants off while having a chastity belt on.

There are also clothes that are fastened in a normal, not particularly secure way, but in such a way that it’s incredibly difficult for the wearer to take them off. Onesies and sleepers tend to be particularly good for this; the Little Keeper Sleeper* in particular is designed to be virtually impossible for its wearer to get out of unaided, because of where the zip is located and how it’s protected when the sleeper is fully on.

(* Be nice to these folks — their primary market is disabled kids and I don’t want them to be flooded with badly-concealed AB/DL emails and wondering why.)

Make the system work for me

This is definitely founded in political bitterness, but it also works.

I will (genuinely!) allow my untrainees out of diapers for short stints on a very specific case-by-case basis. However, I think it’s counterproductive if they realise that all they have to do is say, “But I really have to!” But then again, I don’t want to demand more information from them about whether they really have to, make that call myself, and be wrong, either

causing something bad to happen (because they really did have to, but they ignored their better judgement and listened to me), or

compromising our relationship of trust and my moral authority (because they really did have to, so they were forced to ignore me)

As a result, I endeavour to leverage society’s general inaccessibility for incontinent people in order to ensure that the maximum possible amount of time that my untrainees are spending with me, it’s genuinely not up to me whether or not they use the toilet.

This varies massively from situation to situation, but one of the most prominent ways I do it is by using public transport. I do this because I have been a person who is severely incontinent and was commuting on public transport, and I know, for example,

that Queensland Rail SMU- and EMU-class trains don’t have toilets, as well as roughly which lines those trains are most likely to run on

that Transport for Brisbane buses also don’t have toilets

that the practical incidence of toilet facilities outside zones 1 and 2 on the QR City rail network (”practical” in the sense that they’re both materially present and aren’t, for example, permanently locked for some bizarre reason) is poor

that the practical incidence of toilet facilities beyond, and sometimes even at, major bus interchanges is even worse

I am also a dab hand at scheduling; I’m good at picking the journey option where you will definitely be able to catch all your connecting services and will not have to run through the walking portions of the journey to make it to the designated endpoint at the agreed time, but you also will not have 3 to 5 minutes spare to use the toilet if catching your connecting services and getting there on time is what you’re trying to do.

As a corollary to this, I will deliberately plan, and if necessary ad lib, stall, and waste time, so that we are consistently on the very latest possible journey home. “Sorry, darl, I know you really need to go #2, but we’ll miss the train and I don’t want to be stuck on the concourse until sunrise.” (It particularly entertains me to use this one because last time I checked there are basically no toilets within about 2km of Brisbane Central station that are easily accessible between midnight and sunrise.) “Just use your diapers, we’ll worry about it at home.” (Also particularly entertaining because I have a great, and completely accidental, tendency to live at least an hour out of town by public transport, so this one must really bite to hear.)

Integrate them into the system

While a small amount of this part works under pretty much any circumstances, much of it is explicitly premised on having friends present who I have privately discussed the situation with and who explicitly understand it and consent to be part of it. Taking into account that that may not be a factor in many people’s untraining regimens, I think it works remarkably well for the relatively small percentage of my time to which it applies.

In short, I will not go out of my way to expose an untrainee as being in diapers or highlight the fact that they are, but I also won’t do anything to hide it. I won’t deliberately speak loudly and humiliatingly; I won’t point. Conversely, I won’t speak to them more quietly about changing their diaper than I would speak in a non-diaper-related situation to someone who was going to the toilet, and I won’t use delicate circumlocutions (no “Do you need — ?,” just “Do you need your diaper changed?”).

If I am in a private space and have friends present whose consent has explicitly been secured, I will dial this up further, in ways that I’ll discuss in a separate post.

Make the system work for them

I set myself only such contract conditions as I can deliver (Marx, 1859/2009), and I deliver them.

Part of this is suspension of disbelief. An untraining contract obviously can’t be enforced under law, and in fact there are some jurisdictions in which it could be illegal (Pegg, 2019). It also can’t be enforced by social expectation; not on the macro-level, because we’re a bunch of fucking weirdos, nor on the micro- level, because even among our worldwide clique of fucking weirdos, untraining is considered rather extreme edge play — ADISC forbids discussing it (“Moo,” 2019). It exists, binds and has effect, solely because I and my untrainee believe it does.

Part of it is creation of a safe space. I’ve mentioned that untraining is an extremely psychologically dependent process; you can’t go ahead with it if you have reservations about it. More simply, “AlwaysDiapered” (2004) calls it “drill and practice,” and as someone who’s done a fair amount of that, I know practice doesn’t work if you only do it with part of your mind.

Part of it is ethics. I just believe contracts go two ways, and I don’t believe in vae victis, “woe to the vanquished” (Livius, 9 BCE/1905, pp. 34—49). I don’t get to fuck with the contract just because I’m in charge. I realise that’s how contracts work in the real world, but I’m not the real world; I’m me. There are therefore some things I make sure that I do.

I check and change them when I say I’m going to. I will check and, if necessary, change them at a set time of morning (even if they haven’t woken up yet). I will check them at as close as possible to an agreed interval while out of the house (using my phone alarms when possible).

I make sure to know where to change them, and be ready to change them. I keep two diaper bags (theirs and mine). I will always have enough diapers, spare pairs of waterproof pants, gloves, wipes, changing table covers, and a change of clothes. I have a pretty much encyclopaedic knowledge of viable adult diaper changing spots in my city and how to reach them.

I minimise the risk that they will be subjected to real pain or humiliation. The reality of pain is based on whether it is actually associated with injury — “unreal” pain is the feeling of a bisacodyl suppository after 30 minutes, “real” pain is diaper rash.

The reality of humiliation is based on whether it does actual reputational harm — “unreal” humiliation is having an accident in the City Botanic Gardens, where nobody you know will see it; “real” humiliation is having an accident in front of your boss while you’re on performance monitoring.

As a subset of this, I minimise the risk that they will accidentally damage my property, or anybody else’s. This is the secondary reason why there is so much protection on my car interiors and furniture (the primary reason being that I am in there all the time and need it myself). If they do leak or otherwise mess up my property, I don’t get mad; I put them there and I knew the risk. If they do it on someone else’s property, I take responsibility.

In short,

I get my untrainees to keep in line by:

arranging for it to be impossible not to;

making it as inconvenient as possible not to;

acting quickly to normalise the state of affairs where they do;

making that state of affairs as comfortable as possible;

being fair to them;

letting them choose to stop whenever, so that they don’t stop.

References

“AlwaysDiapered” (2004, June). The twelve month diaper training program [PDF]. Docdroid.

Livius, Titus (1905). Book V: War with Veii; destruction of Rome by the Gauls. In T. Livius, Books from the founding of the city (W.M. Roberts, Trans.; E. Rhys, Ed.). J.M. Dent and Sons. (Original work published 9 BCE).

Marx, K.H. (2009). A contribution to the critique of political economy (corrected 1977 Progress Publishers edition — S.W. Ryazanskaya, Trans.; T. Delaney, “Zodiac,” & M. Carmody, Eds.). Marxists’ Internet Archive. (Original work published 1859).

“Moo” (2019, May 4). Do NOT try to become incontinent [forum thread]. AB/DL/IC Support Community (ADISC).