The Longer-Term Consequences of Untraining
Well, this is fun, isn't it, I get to talk about a subject I never originally thought I would! A bit of a ramble on some of the repercussions of untraining yourself so heavily in the past and then attempting to live with the consequences of that.
So, to get right into it, before I did any untraining, I would have considered myself to have basically perfect bowel control, right, like, essentially as good as was possible to have, and it was something I was pretty proud of, to be perfectly honest! The thought of ever having a messy accident was kind of mortifying to me, and not something I could ever really entirely imagine happening. I'd heard of how people who had untrained their bladder control had also lost bowel control accidentally, of course, I did a lot of research, but in your mind you're like, oh that wouldn't happen for me (for whatever reason, haha). After the untraining I did though, and in the current time where I've tried and failed to some extent to get a large chunk of my control back since those days, I'd say messing is probably my biggest incontinence "problem".
It's like, some days it really feels like the only factor that comes into play about whether I will mess myself or not is how immediately accessible a bathroom is when an urge hits me, like it gets very rapidly out of my control, and I feel kind of genuinely helpless sometimes to prevent it. It feels basically like my body will just start pushing on its own all of a sudden, regardless of what I want or what I might be in the middle of doing and it's honestly something that has been surprising for me, because one would think at first that bowel control should be a lot easier than bladder control.
Now, that isn't to say my bladder control is particularly great, haha, but outside of the bedwetting part, I would place it more in the stress incontinence category, where I'll leak fairly passively when running or picking up something heavy or (and the almost guaranteed way to make me wet myself for whatever reason) sitting down or standing up. This is fairly straightforward to manage though right, as even though I'm wetting myself more times during the day than I would ever mess myself, diapers and pull-ups and even pads are largely designed for this kind of situation and will absorb it all with no issues to speak of.
Messing though, it just feels like I don't even have specific triggers like I do with my bladder. It's not like I can plan and be like, okay, I'm just not going to sit down right now or pick up that heavy thing, it'll just decide suddenly on its own that it's happening and I either get to fill what I'm wearing or manage to get to a bathroom quickly enough.
So, it's very strange now to look back and think that I used to classify myself as having like, perfect bowel control, and compare it to now where it feels very close to out of my control whether I mess myself or not. I'm not even totally sure what I can do to manage it more effectively, except to go and find a bathroom as soon as I feel any kind of initial pressure which could be a subtle warning sign of what's about to happen.
It's so much of the time just luck, or careful planning to be near a bathroom, but of course even the most dedicated can't be near a bathroom 24/7, haha. I guess this all part of my relapse and backslide further into incontinence since I kind of gave up on retraining. My body's just kind of gone like, nope, you tried for a while, but this is how it's gonna be now, this is the norm long term.
The irony of course is that if I let things just go totally naturally and whenever it wanted again, it'd probably become more predictable like it used to be, shortly after eating, and then it'd be, in a way, easier to manage. That's always the catch of incontinence, right, do you want to put more effort into stopping it and risk greater failures at potentially bad times, or give in to it totally and have a more predictable routine of filling your diapers.
I'm sure none of this is helped by the fact that I must subconsciously have some kind of conditioning left over from my untraining that equates me wearing any kind of protection with the need to let go. It's the spicy catch of my whole situation, that I need some kind of protection during the day for my bladder leaking, or I'll end up with wet clothes, but wearing that protection by itself probably makes it even more likely that I'll mess myself, haha.
All this to say, untraining yourself is like that saying about getting a dog, right. Turns out, it's for life, not just for Christmas! <3
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