excerpt from Metropolitan Woman
Understanding Enuresis

Its Sufferers, typically children who feel "different" from everyone else, know it as bedwetting.

by Barbara Moore

Bedwetting, or Enuresis, as it is technically called, is a problem based upon abnormally deep sleep, one that is so resistant to arousal that the bedwetter's brain cannot automatically keep the bladder shut during sleep. The deep sleep is the inherited factor. This anomaly, while not life-threatening, almost always creates some psychological and emotional stress within the bedwetter and the family. The enuretic feels constant failure, low self-esteem, frustration, and feelings of shame, living in constant fear of discovery and mocking by his peers. This is especially so if the bedwetter also suffers from daytime "accidents" which often accompany enuresis due to the very limited sensitivity of the bladder's "signal" function.

Not only does the enuresis itself cause emotional difficulties, but also the myths surrounding the causes of the problem can create damage. Contrary to the myths, the bedwetter is not lazy, "a baby," or harboring some deep psychological problem centering around anger or sexual conflict.

Instead, the bedwetter's brain has failed to move into healthy sleep and the enuresis is created. Any effort at treatment that does not attack this core of the problem is almost always doomed to failure. Therefore, psychotherapy, drugs and medications, surgery, invasive procedures, and sometimes prolonged and often costly tests, do not end the disorder.

Physically the enuretic most often suffers from a small bladder capacity as a result of the chronic emptying at night. This can result in daytime urgencies, and repeated bladder infections in females. Fluid restriction and getting the enuretic up during the night creates further bladder retardation. Most parents have learned neither measure solves the problem.

Again, all of this adds to the enuretic's trauma and can fill his or her life with frustration. The idea that enuretics will "outgrow" the problem in time allows them to continue to suffer all of these painful difficulties. The best recourse for all is to seek professional help.

Barbara Moore, as director of the Enuresis Treatment Center in Farmington Hills, has been treating the problem for 20 years through a bio-feedback, physio-behavioral method that is drug free and emotionally supportive and claims a 95% success rate.

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