Trouble with urination? Paruresis or an Over-active Bladder can be retrained
Going for a pee should be one of the easiest things in the world. It should be one of those things which just happen, easily, effortlessly and naturally. It’s a surprise to some people, therefore, to learn how it can also become a source of fear. Paruresis and over-sensitive bladder affects a good many more people than you’d think. I’ve worked with both conditions in Reading, Oxford and using online therapy.
Both those with a shy bladder and those with an overactive one can find leaving their own homes a source of fear and discomfort. What if I can’t go? What if my bladder gets so full that it hurts and I just cant go no matter how much I try? People with this problem eventually withdraw from social situations as they feel less and less comfortable urinating anywhere but in their own homes.
Eventually, of course, the fear of urinating, of not being able to urinate at all, comes into the home and affects even that place. There is eventually no place to hide from the fear.
An over-sensitive bladder will often result in the same problem, as the person affected will feel the embarrassment and inconvenience of constantly having to leave a social occasion, a class or suchlike, in order to pee. Again that person will withdraw as far as they can, finding that the problem continues to worsen over time.
I also offer counselling and psychotherapy for paruresis / shy bladder online, using vsee, whatsapp, zoom. Please get in touch for details.
How do these problems even begin?
As with most things, they often happen to those who were already prone to worry and anxiety and whose worry and anxiety came to fixate upon these issues.
With shy bladder / paruresis it can happen that a little boy is being pressured to hurry up when going to the loo. Perhaps his family are rushing to get out of the house, or to get back home and the boy becomes fretful that he’s taking too long.
Another adolescent might be worried that his penis isn’t big enough and come to fear the use of urinals, just in case somebody sees and makes a comment.
Sometimes the fear of going for a pee follows on from somebody actually making such a comment. It may just be that the boy concerned was incredibly anxious about something entirely unrelated, then found that it was hard to go to the loo and so began a fear.
The fear then escalates into a self-fulfilling prophecy, worrying about it happening before the person concerned has even left the house.
An over-sensitive bladder can arise when someone goes to the loo a little too obsessively, for fear of being told off for needing the loo during a lesson, for example. The constant effort to squeeze a few drops out, ‘just in case’ can train the brain to become super-sensitised to the sensations of having urine in the bladder. Once again, this becomes a spiral of hoping that squeezing a few drops out will end the feeling when, in fact, it only makes it worse.
What can be done about it?
Well, there are, as usual, two jobs to be done here. The first is to solve the presenting issue – the problem with going to the loo. The second is to work through any anxieties which may have led to that problem beginning to start with. The second problem could potentially be worked upon via any number of means, depending on the age, stage and nature of the person concerned.
The first problem is generally a matter of focus, retraining, habituation and calm. In my first training as a psychotherapist / hypnotherapist I learned about the power of the imagination.
I learned that people can talk themselves into states of anxiety. I learned that they can focus upon a problem to such an extent that they train their brains to focus on little else. I learned that they can literally imagine a problem into being.
The good news is that I was also trained to use and teach a whole load of practical hypnotherapeutic methods by which people could learn to use their imagination to a positive end, to relax around the issue and so reduce it, to refocus their attentions elsewhere and to retrain the brain not to focus, for example, on sensations in the bladder. Combining this with a carefully graded form of exposure therapy works well, with good results. Of course, these can’t be guaranteed.
Get in touch to find out more.
If you live in or around Reading, Oxford or wish for me to work with your child online then please do get in touch. You can call on 07786123736. You can email on paul@resolvedcounsellingforchildren.com or use the contact form in the footer of this page. Get in touch and we’ll discuss how I could help your child to be free of this problem once and for all.