Subconscious
This will be a multi-part post, so strap in.
A large part of the reason I advise about being careful with untraining is that much of it has to do with parts of your mind that you donāt control. Itās much the same principle as āyou canāt be hypnotised into doing something you donāt want to doā.
The idea that your muscles are weakening is a common way of explaining untraining. This does eventually happen. However, it happens at a much later stage than most of us talk about. By the time that actual significant change has occurred in your nerves and muscles, you will likely already have experienced a complete lack of control for some time. Up to that point, untraining is a process of
breaking your compulsive toilet training;
getting into and strengthening a new habit of voiding freely;
waiting for your brain to, over time, start filtering out voiding urgency signals because theyāre no longer strong enough or around long enough to be relevant, so your brain simply starts voiding without asking you.
In short, untraining is a process of psychological behaviour training and filtering. This doesnāt mean that your untraining isnāt real or that it can be reversed if you wish hard enough. āOf course it is all in your head, Harry, but why should that mean it is not real?ā The changes you are experiencing are just as real as if you were getting surgery to make them happen. What it does mean is that your untraining progress is determined in large part by the reward stimuli you receive from pursuing it, and, given time, the punishment stimuli you receive as a result of fearing or experiencing having to go without protection or use the toilet, as well as dissatisfaction and physical pain you might experience from trying to use your control.
This is why all my untraining advice is centred on making it as easy as possible for yourself to untrain. If you fear wetting yourself freely then you never will. A lot of people who can mess with little difficulty canāt lose messing control because they fear doing so. This also means, however, that controlling or reversing your untraining progress is also a battle of subconscious reward and punishment, and emotions associated with them, and it is a battle that many people lose.
Essentially, your subconscious wants to take you down the path that promises the greatest net reward. This is why one of the most effective methods of retraining, if done early, is simply leaving diapers completely and immediately. The reason for that is because, in short, most people who would like to fill their diapers 24/7 would not like to fill their pants 24/7 without ever being able to use diapers. As a result, you experience the following stimuli during retraining -
Reward -
Hope, because youāre drawing closer to whatever it was that you wanted to retrain for.
Triumph, because you tried to use the toilet and succeeded.
Punishment -
Fear and shame, or the expectation thereof, if you void in your pants.
Disappointment because you tried to use the toilet and didnāt make it on time.
However, also, disappointment because youāre not untraining, which you wanted to do in the first place.
The theory is that if you want to retrain, and if you make it easy to get to the toilet, and you get there in time, then you will get enough of a reward that you will successfully retrain. However, in practice, it doesnāt always work.
Part of this is because untraining is an end in itself and retraining is not. When you untrain, youāre doing it to have been untrained, and you can wait indefinitely. When you retrain, youāre doing it for a variety of different reasons such as discretion, dry pants, and so on - in short, you want to escape the negative consequences of incontinence. You usually also have a concrete and material reason to retrain, and the existence of that reason usually imposes further particular conditions on the manner in which you must retrain, such as a time limit (which mandates how fast you must retrain).
However, regaining your control is only one way of doing this, and while it may be the best conceivable way, it may not be the best possible way. The other way of escaping the negative consequences of incontinence is wearing diapers - thatās what theyāre for. If youāre headed from Incon Town to Dry Pants City, and you find that Toilet Training Road is blocked with miles of queued traffic, you cannot avoid being aware that you have more chance of getting there via Giving In To Diapers Boulevard. If deep down you feel you have a better chance of reaching your destination that way, it stands a very good chance of being the route you take - and that fact itself makes your retraining less likely to be successful.
tl;dr - When you want to untrain, your destination is voiding uncontrollably in your diapers, and you can get there by voiding uncontrollably in your diapers. When you want to retrain, your destination is avoiding the consequences of incontinence, which you can do by ceasing to be incontinent ā¦ or by really committing to diapers. Your knowledge of that makes leaving diapers way less likely.
Continued in Part III.
However, this is only the most clear and unambiguous situation, where youāre making a conscious decision to leave diapers, knowing that youāve untrained somewhat and want to retrain. In reality, there are a huge variety of situations where you can find yourself spinning your wheels futilely, for any of the following reasons -
āWhy do it?ā While you have a good conscious rationale for retraining, on an emotional, subconscious level, it doesnāt make an impact. You get insufficient reward, such that the other stimuli, and in particular your need to untrain, are stronger.
āCanāt do it.ā You donāt have enough continence; you succeed in making it to the toilet too rarely, and fail to make it too often. You get insufficient reward and become desensitised to punishment, so you continue on the path you were on, which is untraining.
āDonāt care enough.ā You may want to be dry and clean over the long term, but in the short term, you simply arenāt viscerally shocked or put off enough by voiding in your pants (part of why the success of retraining attempts decreases with repetition - youāve already been through it, it canāt shock you).
While these factors are relevant in all retraining situations, they can lead to failure to retrain even when it seems unintuitive that that would be the case. Spiralling is a prominent example of this. People with previous chronic continence issues have considerably lowered āHopeā rewards because they know from experience that regaining continence is often temporary anyway; they also have significantly lowered āFear and shameā stimuli because if theyād felt the same amount of fear and shame every time they wet or messed their pants, theyād be suicidal. As a result, the retraining equation is tilted so far off that retraining is practically impossible for them; their drive to regain continence is nowhere near as strong as their drive to lose it and to move to a position of complete safety.
Another less-prominent, but much more common situation is metastability. In physics, a system is metastable when it appears stable, but when that stability is being maintained by an external input. An example of a metastable system is a spinning top: you input a pulse of energy to keep it spinning, which it does in a very predictable and stable way. Once it runs out of energy, however, it wobbles and falls over. By analogy, an untrainee/retrainee has metastable continence when their drive to lose continence is perfectly counterbalanced by their drive to regain it. What happens in someone with metastable continence is that going cold turkey doesnāt fail, but doesnāt succeed. While they donāt continue losing continence, they donāt regain it.
As in physics, metastability ends with a phase transition: the top eventually spins out. In this case, the reward and punishment stimuli generated by continual unstable continence without protection result in the personās continence rapidly heading in one direction, always (in my experience) down.
