In Reply to: Can't do it !!! posted by Israeli on October 24, 2006 at 14:46
Firstly, a question. Do you want to wet the bed by accident (ie. you go to bed, dry, sleep, wake up wet, no idea how it happened), or do you simply want to pee while lying down awake?
If you just want to pee in your bed, you can't because you are trying to force it. Wetting is about relaxing and letting it happen, not forcing it out. Its the brain that controls the pee, not the muscles in your bladder.
The brain is very clever and deliberately doesn't let you pee because it knows you shouldn't pee there. Firstly you are laying down, and secondly you are in a place the brain knows ou shouldn't urinate. I bet if you got up, walked into the bathroom and sat on the toilet it would let you go - because the brain knows its ok for you to pee there.
Now you can normally pee if you can overcome one of those. So if you lay on the toilet (somehow!) you could probably pee, or if you sit in your bed or stand on it. So start of doing that. Sit in bed and relax, like you do on the toilet. You don't force it out when sit on the loo. You relax and it comes.
After a few wettings over a few days, the brain will start to be ok with you peeing in bed. During this time, increase the angle you are laying at to the bed until you are laying flat, and remember - practise makes perfect. If cleaning the mess up is a problem use diapers each time.
Now, if on the other hand you want to accidentally wet the bed, that is a lot harder to do. It is possible to regress into full on bedwetting, but if you are in a relationship with someone or a situation where you would not want to wet the bed, it is impossible. A few people can wet the bed by just getting hammered. As a one off, that is your only hope and generally it probably isn't more than 10% likely to happen. As a kid I wet the bed until 12 full time and on a few occaisions up to like 15. With a lot of alochol I do still wet the bed but not all that often.
If you want to go back to full in bedwetting though it takes a lot of time. Again, it is about mastering the brain.
The first thing you need to do is untrain yourself. That (unless you live alone and never leave your house) means diapers. Buy them and wear them. 24/7. Never use the toilet to pee in. It all should go in your diaper. This won't untrain your bladder, don't worry about that. You won't then go back to pants and suddenly start wetting yourself.
What you are doing is two-things. Firstly you are weakening the pelvic floor muscle that supports the bladder, but most importantly you are telling your brain you can always pee. The brain doesn't have to worry about where you are or what you are doing. You can always pee.
What will happen is you will start off by conciously deciding "hey I can pee now", and going in your diaper. After a couple of weeks, you will be doing it sub-consiously. You still make the decision to pee, but it is no longer at the for front of your mind. You barely notice that you have made the decision. Again, don't worry about dropping out now and going back to pants. The brain is amazing and when you switch, it will automatically go back into the "can't pee here mode", because it knows you are not diapered. However, you shouldn't miss days out and wear pants, because the idea is that you don't want the brain to be on danger alert. You want it to get used to just going any where, any time.
Now, the bedwetting part takes a lot longer. When you are awake you can decide, hey I'm going to pee. When you are asleep, the brain makes that decision for you. You can untrain the brain over time by using the same principles as during the day. Now, diapers are no longer necessary as you can pee the bed every night and no one has o know. But it can work with diapers too. Whenever you are awake in bed, pee. Get the brain used to peeing in bed.
The biggest challenge is that, even if you pee in your bed / diaper just before you go to sleep and as soon as you wake up, you still have this time when the brain is in 'danger mode' during the middle of the night. To speed up the process of getting the brain used to peeing in bed, you can set your alarm to wake you up in the middle of the night. When the alarm goes off, pee and go back to sleep. This is perfect as you will normally still only be half awake when the alarm goes off, so it will also get your brain in the mode of peeing while you are not fully awake.
Follow this, and you will eventually start peeing in your sleep without thinking about it. The amount of time it takes can depend on the person, but I would leave a good 4-5 months before you get a genuine wet night. Keep at it, and the bed wetting will become more and more regular, until it is almost nightly.
You should still during this time use a diaper during the day, to make sure the brain never goes into the 'danger mode' of needing to worry about when and where you are when you pee. You should at this stage notice that although you are now peeing in your sleep regularly, you still won't wet your daytime diaper without even knowing it. It will be now deep within your sub concionce, but you are awake and so you still manually decide when you go. When you are asleep, the brain decides for you.
If at this stage you wanted to switch back to pants in the daytime you can. Perhaps try wearing pull ups just in case, but not wet them, as you can treat them as pants and the brain will start to go back on 'danger alert'. However, this shouldn't be too necessary, you should be able to switch back to pants and not have accidents, it can depend I guess on how longer you have spent 'untraining'.
During this time there is a chance the natural bedwetting will stop slightly, in which case you should switch back to daytime diapers and start again, it won't take long to get it back to full wetting, but the more times you do this and the longer you cann be day dry and night wet, the better chance you have of making it a permanent arrangement.
So in summary, it is all about training the brain, as during the day you can make decisions yourself about when and where you pee, but at night the brain goes onto auto-pilot, which is a strict "No Peeing!" at the moment. You need to, over time, get the brain trained to say it is ok to pee while you are asleep.
If you can do that, you will be a proper full time bedwetter - go to sleep dry, wake up wet!