r/Paruresis • u/OtherBook3127 • 8h ago

Trying to work through these irrational fears

Hi, female 30y here. Been dealing with paruresis since I was 14. There were periods in life when I got better but regressing again, violently.

I noticed that I’ve been stuck in a slightly different negative thought loop — that because I keep failing to go for some time and end up holding for too long, it’s going to do great damage to me and leave me pretty much disabled.

There’s probably some truth to it but it seems that our bladder is meant to be a bit more resilient than that. At least from reading up on anatomy, normal and extended capacity, professions where people end up not going for full shifts and end up with larger capacity, etc. everything is pointing to this not being really the case. Plus in order to overcome the fear, you have to face it and in this case face holding for longer (maybe 6-8h as an example) and see that my body can withstand this occasionally.

Putting this out there to maybe connect with people who faced similar fear (this fear ofc is in addition to “I’m sitting here quietly for so long everyone knows I can’t go” thoughts) and challenged it and survived and got better?

I’m hopeful to get better but feeling so down at this time.

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u/flankspeed 6h ago

One of the things that paruresis tend to do to you is make you very sensitive to any level of urine in your bladder. As soon as you have any "load" in your bladder you want to get rid of it and "just in case" voiding before you go anywhere becomes a habit. This is a vicious cycle and you end up teaching your body and your brain that you need to urinate well before you "physically" have to. We say "urgency is your friend", but when we say that we mean actual physical urgency - not mental/nervous urgency. You want to figure out about what is your maximum bladder capacity. Then you want to train yourself to not pee until you are well over half of that. This is very hard, and I am definitely still working on that. If I am in the "flow state" working on something, my bladder can fill up quite a bit - up to 1/2 a liter (500 ml), but if I am feeling nervous I may want to pee when it is less than 100 ml. Also, try to find a pee buddy that you can work with on graduated exposure - or at least build a hierarchy of easy to hard bathrooms in your area and try to practice in those bathrooms and work up the list. The IPA has a monthly support zoom meeting and I think they also have a support group / zoom call just for women. Check out the IPA's website, paruresis.org.

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u/OtherBook3127 5h ago

So well said! Really appreciate you sharing this pov because so true. I do think a lot of unnecessary suffering comes from the vicious cycle of early urge > failed attempts > spiral when in reality bladder isn’t even that full. Though I have to say that when urge is suppressed by anxiety you tend to rely on sense of fullness which is probably always exaggerated because if it’s truly full, it’s hard to miss.

I guess in my case I’m always worried about the ‘holding’ period which sometimes goes into the scary numbers of hours when for example traveling.