I wet the bed late into my teens and I have no idea why
So I continued to wet the bed way past 7 and I have no idea why.
different family members chalked it up to different reason:
- I am lazy
- I am a very deep sleeper
- I have a very anxious personality
- bladder issues
Amongst other things.
One thing I can see being a cause was that I was not raised in a peaceful household. It was a very violent household. not in the sense of physical violence like broken arms and such, more as in lots of yelling and screaming and things like that. My family really didn't know how to communicate well.
But I was not the only child raised in my household and I was the only one who wet the bed.
Anyways, different thing were tried, things to supposedly "fix" my bladder. shaming, etc. Growing up, my family had to always wake me up at around 4 or 5 am and take me to the bathroom, otherwise there was a good chance I'd wet the bed.
I personally was getting worried that it was a problem I'd have forever and it'd be an impediment to my social life (as in no sleepovers and etc (not that I had had friends at that age anyways)).
But I did start to notice that once I got into high school, it started happening less and less. Still did happen, but just wasn't as common. Then, I remember the last time it happened was when I was either in grade 10 or 11 but I am pretty sure grade 10.
Then that was it.
It just stopped on its own.
Weird thing is, I changed nothing about myself.
I'd still classify myself as lazy and a very deep sleeper and I still have an incredibly anxious personality.
The only thing that changed is that when I am asleep, and as my bladder is filling up, something in my bladder (or my brain) instead of just releasing, would instead block the urine until I wake up in pain and go to the bathroom. The change really caught my attention when I woke up with a really full bladder like 2-3 years ago and I remembered how a little over 10 years ago (I am in my 30s), no way my body would've reacted to it by holding it in involuntarily until I woke up.
I tried doing a bit of googling to figure out what parts of the body are involved in the process of holding in one's pee overnight to try and see what are the possible reasons for the change to occur so late in me to no avail.
I am forever curious what happened in my body to make that change happen so late but not sure I will ever know.
This doesn't answer your question, but older children frequently wetting the bed with no medical cause is a standard warning sign for child abuse, since there is a well known correlation between the two. Teachers, healthcare workers, and therapists these days are all taught to look out for it, and report it if they suspect abuse is the cause. And by the sounds of it that's exactly what was happening with you, so it likely was the cause. Hell, even the way your family handled it, by attempting to shame you for something you had no control over, was itself a form of emotional abuse, IMO.
I'm sorry you had to go through that, and I hope you can come to understand that it wasn't a failing on your part, you weren't to blame for it, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
If it was being caused by the abuse you experienced at home, your situation getting better at home could have just as easily ended it too, if that was the case. Or it might have simply been because of puberty too, which the timing suggests might be the case.
i've honestly considered that answer (child abuse which in my case was a mixture of emotional neglect and lack of validation) but the reason I lean towards dismissing that answer is that the problem when away while I was still living with my family.
If it had gone away once I had moved out, that would've made it more clear to me. but I continued to live with family till my early 20s. So if that is the answer, really makes me wonder why it stopped before I stopped being in that environment.
I don't think that is necessarily proof against it being a factor, or even the original cause. A lot of things can change for the better around that age, even if you are still living in the same environment. E.g. I got decidedly less scared of my own emotionally abusive father at that age, since it was about then that I finally got big enough and mature enough to stand up to him... And I also met a lot of my lifelong friends around that time too, whose families allowed me to stay with them for extended periods whenever things got too heated for me at home.
It's possible your enurisis (fancy word for bedwetting) was something like how inherited schizophrenia is theorized to work -- a genetic/physical component, and an environmental component. Many people are born with the possibility of becoming schizophrenic, but not all of those people actually end up with it. Instead, only those also exposed to some environmental stimuli (still being researched) actually present with the disease.
What that might mean in applied to your situation is that the physical changes of puberty improved your bladder function enough that you no longer had the "prerequisite" physical bladder problem for your abuse to cause your wetting. Your siblings might never have had that bladder weakness, so even being in the same environment, they did not wet.
Does that make sense?
A slower development of the interoceptive system can cause late bedwetting. Low interoception is common in neurodiverse folks, especially Autistic and ADHD folks.
I am a late-diagnosed Autistic and did wet the bed pretty late, developed my hand-eye coordination in my early twenties and still struggle with alexithymia. I recommend you take a moment to take the first three tests on this page to check whether this option is worth digging into.
Popped in to say this. Interoception is such a strange, scattershot system in autistic brains.... Is this sensory input going to be completely ignored, or send you spiralling into overwhelm? You're gonna find out sooner or later! Lol. And then, sometimes your firmware gets an update, but you miss the notification so you keep avoiding that stimulus until one day you don't and it's.... somehow fine? Manageable, anyway. Shit's wild.
Nocturnal enuresis-ers unite! I can commiserate, though I didn't have it as bad as you. I continued to wet the bed past the normal age and remember a few embarrassing sleepovers because of it. I think it finally stopped sometime in middle school?
I grew up in a non-abusive household and had no underlying medical conditions, so I have no idea why I was an outlier. All things considered it was a minor condition, but it did suck at the time since it's embarrassing and also something you have zero control over.
There is an old movie you might enjoy watching.
It stars Michael Landon ( Little House On The Prairie ) as a champion runner, who got fast running home after school. He did that because he wet his bed and his psycho controlling mother would hang his stained sheets out the window to humiliate him. He ran home to get there and take down the sheets before his schoolmates could see them.
It is called "The Loneliest Runner".
I genuinely cannot tell from your description if the film is a drama or a comedy.
/u/b3_k1nd_rw1nd, it's terrible that your parents shamed you for a condition that was completely out of your control. That's a form of child abuse in itself, and I hope you've been able to get help for any consequences of emotional abuse. It sounds like your parents had too much chaos in their household to get you to a doctor when that might have been psychologically helpful to everyone concerned. Your parents might never have acknowledged this to you, but it's very likely one or both of them suffered from enuresis as well, or were raised by people who'd had the condition. Their treatment of you may have been reflective of their own abuse.
Just so you know, primary enuresis (not developing nighttime bladder control by developmental milestone age) is one of the most common reasons for children to go to the doctor. As /u/PepperJackson said, it can be caused by physical mechanisms, like constipation. Mostly, enuresis seems to be a combination of very deep sleep, and developmental delay of ADH (anti-diuretic hormone) expression. ADH stops or slows the rate at which your kidneys produce urine while you sleep. It's a critical hormone for regulating blood pressure and water balance in the body throughout the day. The full expression of ADH regulation takes a while to develop after birth, which is why "enuresis" isn't considered a problem until age 7 or later. There are rarer conditions which can contribute to enuresis, like occult spina bifida, but these conditions usually have other impacts that make the underlying cause easier to find.
/u/cfabbro mentioned what's considered "secondary" enuresis, when a child who had developed nighttime bladder control loses it again. Secondary enuresis is more likely a sign of extreme child abuse, especially sexual abuse. For completely unrelated reasons, I had frequent UTIs and occasional enuresis or incontinence starting around age 10. Some very pointed questions got asked about abuse, but it was just a minor physical anomaly worsened by puberty. The enuresis/incontinence went away on their own with treatment of the underlying UTIs. [I feel like I singlehandedly supported the cranberry juice industry for years after that...] It was an uncomfortable and hideously embarrassing episode that many women will probably recognize. That's just an example of the complexity of physical and mental issues that can surround "shameful" conditions in childhood.
If you yourself have kids with enuresis, there are safe and non-traumatic treatments available now that the causes are better understood.
I can relate, I wet the bed until my teenage years too. I never had an explanation for it. It was embarrassing and out of my control. I'm happy to say I was not abused, so that wasn't a contributing factor. I do remember at some point becoming aware that I was dreaming of urinating as it happened in real life, and eventually I was able to wake myself up whenever I realized I was having one of those dreams, in time to use the bathroom.
As an adult, I've been in physical therapy for a pelvic tilt issue that impacts my urine retention. No idea if that was related to childhood bedwetting, I first saw a doctor about it in response to post-void residual dribbling.
My spouse has observed that I typically fall asleep very quickly at night. I'm also a light sleeper, and can wake instantly if one of my kids knocks on the bedroom door, or if I need to use the bathroom. I think that's a learned thing, probably brought about by childhood bedwetting, and having small children, etc. As a kid I was a heavy sleeper. I have a weird memory: When I was around 5 or 6, we had a model railroad village built on a sheet of plywood, that we rolled on caster wheels to store under my bed. The plywood was wider than the bed so we pulled the bed away from the wall so it wouldn't stick out into the room. It was a bunk bed, and I slept in the top bunk. One night I rolled over and fell between the bed and wall, all the way under the bottom bunk. I woke up naturally, hours later, in the dark under the bed with little buildings and trees poking into my back, covered in that glittery grass stuff, totally disoriented. The point of my story being, apparently when I was little I could sleep through anything. Another contributing factor, perhaps?
I'm not sure how old I was when it stopped. It was an infrequent occurrence in the first place, never nightly. Maybe monthly? I'm not sure. I didn't notice it hadn't happened in a while, until it had been a long while.
Strangely, it happened one time after that, when I was 21. It was the night before I moved myself cross-country to start my adult life in a new place and I was a bundle of nerves about it. As far as I know there had never been any correlation between my bedwetting and anxiety, but there certainly was this time.
So that's my story. I don't have any answers but maybe my data points will be useful. It's one of those taboo subjects that no one really talks about. Maybe in the medical community it's been studied but I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't. It's good to speak freely about this sort of thing so we can understand it better.
A very common cause of wetting the bed in pediatrics is being constipated. If I ever refer patients from my clinic to Peds nephro/uro they always ask me to give the kid a thorough cleaning out with a heavy course of miralax. Unlikely to be the case here unless you remember straining to use the bathroom all the time as a youngster.
I wet the bad several times as an adult. I wasn't even drunk. Now everyone knows! I never felt ashamed of it for some reason. For a period it was just untreated mental issues, sometimes I was so incapable of even leaving the bed that I slept with a full blader. Later it became a consequence of medications themselves. When I'm really tired and also take stuff that make me sleep, sometimes I don't wake up to pee. I haven't wet the bed in years. I retrospect I went through so much deep tragical shit that bedwetting didn't even register as something to worry about. When it comes to night time, I was way more concerned with my night terrors and sonambulism.
I wet the bed for the last time probably at age 18. It happened fairly regularly fairly late in spite of me having a whole arsenal of preparation (peeing right before bed; making sure I slept flat and didn't "tilt" my bladder), but I got good at hiding it. One embarrassing time though I was visiting relatives with my father in a different city because I had some college interviews :eyes-covering-face:
I still remember the last time it happened. I was living in a private dormitory after leaving home for college, and in despair because it hadn't happened in over a year since I left home, and I'd thought I was past it. Luckily though, that was the final time.