By Susan P. Chizeck

My daughter has always been a sound sleeper and had wet every night since she was born. As she got older, this became a problem for her. We solved it temporarily by having her wear Pull-ups and then Good-nights, a larger child pull-up diaper, but disposing of them on sleepovers was problematical. As a child I had wet until my parents used a moisture alarm, and that worked within a week. We tried one for my daughter, but she became hysterical when the alarm went off and it had no real effect, as her sleep was too deep.

In a discussion of the problem, my daughter Helen asked a very good question. "How do other people not wet?" Since it happens when she was asleep, she couldn't imagine how one could control this unconscious process. I began to think about exactly how the process worked.

As she was preparing for bed, she was in a relaxed state, just right for hypnotic suggestions. I began talking about the different parts of her that took care of her body and helped everything work just right. We talked about hearts and lungs that work whether you are sleeping or awake and know exactly what to do. Then I mentioned that when people are babies the parts that control urine and bowels are still very young and just let everything go right into the diaper whenever it's ready. As they get older they learn to be "feelers" that tell the child when the urine or b.m.s are ready to come out, so the child can go on the toilet. As the child gets even older, some feelers are grown up enough to stay up at night and tell the child to hold in or to get up and go to the bathroom.

Now she knew she had bowel control at night, and occasionally woke up very early in the morning to go, and she knew that feeling of having it wake her up, so she knew one part of her already had that skill. So we thought of a way that that part could teach the urine feeler to do its job. She began talking of how the bowel feeler must be so lonely up all night by himself, so he would really like to have a friend to stay up and be with all night. We asked the urine feeler if he would like to be a friend of the bowel feeler and learn from him how to stay up all night and tell Helen when she needed to go to the bathroom. After all that was his real job. She worried that if they stayed up all night they would be too tired to work during the day, but I told her there were 4 of them all together, a day time pair and a nighttime pair, so no one would be lonely. (Probably girls worry more about this than a boy would.). That made sense to her, as she was aware of the daytime feelings and also thought of them as separate, since she had achieved bowel and bladder control at different times.

We did some future pacing and she could clearly see the two working happily together. Within a few weeks she was dry all night, every night, and woke up and went to the toilet without even remembering. I could tell because she would leave the lights on in the bathroom when she went at night. She was thrilled by this new ability and felt she really had learned how everyone else mysteriously stayed dry. She decided her parts had just been too shy before to ask how to do things. Now that we talked to them they understood everything.

I was very pleased to be able to use a reframing technique on a problem I had not realized was amenable to suggestion quite so clearly.