Incontinence: emotional and spiritual meaning

What incontinence is

Incontinence is the loss of control of urine, or of stool. Urinary leakage may come with a cough or a laugh, with a sudden urge, or because the bladder never quite empties. Faecal incontinence is the inability to hold stool. Muscles, nerves, childbirth, prostate care, infection, and medicines are among the medical reasons. A weak muscle is a physical finding. It is not a weak mind. Treatment can include exercises, a medicine, or, sometimes, an operation. Children who wet the bed need a clinician and a house that does not shame them.

The emotional meaning of incontinence

Both forms are read as a question of control. The suggestion is that life is asking for more flexibility, and for the skill of letting people and situations go. Rigid thoughts are understood as a protection against your own sensitivity, in the places you cannot steer. Disappointment can be immense, and can tip into despair. You lower the flag. You no longer feel you are directing your emotions. Action gives way to guilt, to letting everything slide, and to the sense that you have no power over yourself or over events.

Faecal incontinence is given a blunt question, in the coarse French line for what makes life intolerable: who, or what, is too much? The reaction is often towards authority, including the authority of a life that is forcing a change you do not want. Childhood is a place to look for who that authority was. In an adult, the question becomes whether you can decide your own direction. Feeling soft, or overloaded with responsibilities, can carry a wish to be a baby again and to have someone care for you. That wish can be said. It is not a diagnosis.

Urine, night, and a child

Urine is read as feelings that are normally released when they are no longer needed. An uncontrolled loss is taken as those feelings leaving before you have chosen, sometimes as a way of being noticed. Rejection, a sense of having no merit, insecurity, and fear of the future are the notes underneath. Affection feels missing. Being crushed by someone else increases the powerlessness. Anguish meets a situation you cannot defend yourself against. Love and tenderness may be resisted, because they do not seem to exist in your world, or because you believe you do not deserve them. Fear of losing what is yours, or of being separated from someone you love, can feel like marking a territory in the night. The leakage you cannot control mirrors a life, and a set of emotions, you also cannot control. There is fear in that. The fears need to be heard.

A great fright or a lot of nervousness can sit with incontinence, especially in children, who pick up the mood of the house. Bedwetting often appears when another child is born, and, spiritually, this is a child who no longer knows their place in the family. Too little framing from a father, or too much, is named as one background. The child feels guilty and withdraws, when what they want is care. A parent’s part is to take away the guilt, to look at their own anguish rather than blame the child for carrying it, and to help the child find an inner steadiness. The wetting is not a method the child chose in order to exist. It is a body that needs kindness and a medical look.

A gentler way to hold it

• Pick one thing you are failing to control, and set it down for a day.
• If you are the parent, reassure first. Then ask what in you the child may be living beside.
• Feelings can be named without being leaked in shame. The muscle still deserves its own care.