Unexpected Lessons on Chronic Pain through Parenting

What does potty training nighttime potty training specifically have to do with chronic pain? Well, as I've learned recently, it's actually amazing how much these journeys have overlapped and how much this specific nighttime training journey with my son has really brought some really important things to light and given me given me a lot of clarity on something that people struggle with when it comes to managing chronic symptoms, and so, in today's episode, I want to take the time to share the story with you so you can gain these really powerful insights and hopefully not make the same mistake that so many people do, or, if you are currently stuck in this mistake, it is okay that now this will bring in the awareness so you can shift out of it. Welcome, welcome, welcome to episode 76 of the Unweaving Chronic Pain Podcast. I am your host, dr Andrea Moore, and I am on a mission to empower people to move from chronic pain back into living their life full out, or living it full out for the first time If you've been in chronic pain for so long that you don't even know what it is like to live your life full out, or you've never had that opportunity to know what it is like. So I actually just finished day one of this beta training that I'm putting on right now. It was so powerful. The shifts that people were making, the mind blown moments were so awesome to witness because really, when we are able to change the way we look at certain things, it actually can shift and rewire so many things in our nervous system. And when we rewire things from a nervous system level, it can change the way we think. One of the things I emphasized in the workshop was that we are a two-way feedback loop. Too many paradigms try to come from all top down, as in it's all about your brain and your thoughts, or the opposite is, it's all about your body and your nervous system. And the truth is it's actually neither. We are a constant feedback loop and pain is always a triad, it is a trifecta, and if we are not addressing all three components, it leaves you feeling stuck. So if you are feeling stuck along your journey, I want to encourage you to go get signed up. The training is completely free. The link is in the show notes. It's not too late to get access to the replays. They will expire August 25th, so do make sure you get signed up before then, and sorry if you are listening in the future, and in that case, just make sure you are on the mailing list so you aren't missing out on these types of opportunities. 

I recently had an experience with my son. It really shined this light on this really big, glaring issue that we have now with the access to the amount of information we have, and it's a really it's an issue that brings in a ton of nuance, a ton of paradox and a ton of really actually uncomfortable conversations, and so what I'm going to first do is just to share the story and my experience with my son that really brought this to light. Maybe be like wow, I'm actually looking at some certain things in a really different way than I have in the past. So my son is six. Literally since the time he's been born, he has been changed on a baby changing pad. Y'all. We were still changing him on the same baby changing pad and he's six he is now. So he was so large for it, right, like his whole body was. You know, his legs are completely hanging off of it. It was getting ridiculous, but I don't know why people change their kids on the bed. I'm like I don't want to accidentally get poop on the bed. 

So, anyways, he was daytime potty trained, but he was not nighttime potty trained and we just kept putting it off. I had heard horror story after horror story. I just heard parents having to get up in the middle of the night and have to change the sheets like 10 different times. I have to deal with poop accidents and you know, I have to deal with so many things that it just wasn't something I felt like I had capacity to work with. On top of that, one of the biggest reasons that we were keeping him in diapers is because he wouldn't poop in the potty. He and he would only poop once his diaper was on, and so it felt like, oh, if we take away the diapers, we're now like creating a bigger potential issue and constipation and things like that. Right, but that was actually the biggest driver for me to get rid of the diapers, because I was so sick of changing poopy diapers. Momma's with more than one child more than one child who are like have been changing diapers for 10 years like holy shit, more power to you. It's been six years for me, I'm done. I was like I am done. I can not change another poopy diaper right now. All right, especially when I'm having to hoist this 40 pound kid up into his changing thing every night and anyways. So there was a lot of factors that were just preventing us and it was just one of those things where it was so easy to put it off and what would happen was every night well, every other night, because maybe my husband switched off nighttime duty, so I only had to do this every other night when it was my turn. 

I was noticing that when I had to change his diaper, I was getting more and more aggravated, more and more just like and like tense around it Like I was. It would piss me off, like they're like. I was starting to feel really ragey about it. It was impacting the way I was reacting to him and it's like I do this work. I was very aware of my emotions, but it also because it was so small and such a small like portion of the day, I wasn't taking the time to do anything about it, right, it was like because then I would leave the room and I would go downstairs and then I kind of just forgot about it, right, and it just kept happening, it just kept bubbling up and then I started, on top of it, becoming annoyed at the fact that I kept forgetting to do something about it and forgetting to either sit with my emotions or, you know, uncover what is my rage-iness about towards my kids poopy diaper Wow, I should just probably something deep there, right? And like, oh my gosh, I need to do research. I have absolutely no idea how you nighttime potty train a kid. That was another thing that was holding me back. Is that was like what do you do? Just go, go, go, go go turkey, like is that it? Or is there a whole like method around it? And I just was not taking the time to look it up, right? 

So what started happening over time is it did start entering into my day, it started filling my thoughts, it started becoming something where it's like it was actually taking a lot of time out of my day, of me spiraling and anxiety about it, but also trying to resist it because I'm like this is not important. I have other things to do right now. Anyways, long story short, I think we all know what that feels like. It's like something just slowly, over time, creeps in and it starts taking more and more of your energy, of your time. It starts to, and it's like it's so, especially for something like this where it was. Again, it was more subtle it was. It seemed so small so it was so easy to put off. It's like, andrew, it's you know 20 minutes of your day, just like get over it, right. But it's like it really was creeping in and I didn't realize how much it was until after the fact and after we dealt with this. As I started researching, I was like, okay, I'm finally ready to research, I'm ready to consider this. 

What I started running into is all this stuff in the gentle parenting worlds you are a parent and you are in the gentle parent world and this like world that is like all about tending to your child's feelings and stuff like that. You know what I'm talking about. So I literally just posted a question in a group. I'm in saying, hey, how did you all nighttime potty train, potty train? I have a six year old. We're ready to do this thing. Y'all. I got viciously attacked in this group. I should have pulled the comments up. It was not viciously attacked, but it was oh my gosh, how dare you. He will potty train when he is ready. You should never force a kid. 

And then it was like the next one is like oh my gosh, he could have a medical issue, unless his diapers are dry at night. You should never be trying it. This is a medical issue. You need to be taking him to the doctor. You need to be supplementing XYZ minerals, okay. The next comment was like oh, he definitely has constipation. He needs to be getting an x-ray. The next comment was he needs enemas for his constipation. 

Like this went on and on and on and I went into a total like freeze, like mixed with fight or fly, like it was like so many emotions. Oh my God, how am I missing all of this? Like I'm a horrible parent. And it was this moment of like oh my God, do we need to call the doctor? Do I need to get him? You know, because I guess you need an x-ray for constipation and it's this whole thing. And I know I'm like reading articles and listening to podcasts about this. 

Like this was like a probably a good four or five day period where now I was spiraling in so much more anxiety, trying to read and consume every possible thing I could, because, oh my God, if I took off my child's diaper at night and it turned out to be a medical issue, I would be the worst parent in the world. I mean, that's basically what they were saying. And then I took a taste of my own teachings and with the help of my husband and my sister, who lovingly pulled me out of this my sister is a parent of three and she's like Andrea oh my God, why are you listening to all these people on the internet? Just go cold turkey. You are so overthinking this. I realized, oh my gosh, I am giving all of my power away right now. So I decided to go with my sister's advice and we went cold turkey. 

Now this took a little bit of just me working through a lot of things and a lot of fears and a lot of beliefs around what that would mean for me as a parent to just go cold turkey, especially now that I had all of these other people in my head. And the conclusion I came to and this is I mean, this story has a couple of layers, but this is the one big thing that I realized was this obsession we have with medicalizing things that are just normal human things is really incredibly harmful. I am seeing this more and more in the parenting world and in the chronic pain world, so I'll come back to that in a second, I have noticed this and it took me it just it took me a couple of years to figure this out of being in this gentle parent world is that there are so many parents who had a shitty experience right, like their kid really did have some serious constipation issues or were maybe lacking minerals or did happen to have the medical thing that makes it so, some like kidney thing where their kid can't hold, you know, just is like physically incapable of holding their pee overnight, basically, and it probably took them some time to get diagnosed, to figure it out. They probably went through a lot of emotional turmoil in the process, and so it's like that gets to be true, that like, yes, these things are all existing, no one's making these up, and I'm not taking away that experience from those parents who had to go through that, because it's really hard. But we need to stop putting our experience on other people and assuming that that is the case for their children, because what happened to me as a parent and this is I'm taking full responsibility for this, but I'm seeing this right, I'm seeing this everywhere and it's really. 

It takes a lot to step into this full responsibility place and to know who to trust and to know what to listen to is that it made me doubt everything I knew as a parent, everything I thought about my son. It made me doubt myself. It made me, you know, doubt all this stuff and it freaked me out and it put me into fear mode and it started making me start treating my son, or like trying to treat this issue I wasn't treating my son any differently but start treating this issue as some big, complex medical problem that was going to be challenging to to work with. That was going to be some big, long journey that's going to require, you know, all kinds of crazy things. Which, by the way, honestly, the thing that woke me up, the thing that made me be like what the fuck, was the multiple recommendations for enemas. I'm sorry. Here's the thing If you are trying to suggest that it is better to give your child an enema, okay, at an age where they cannot fully understand what that means, than to just to try to go cold turkey and see what happens, we have a really big fucking problem as a society. That was the thing that was like, wait a minute, why? And people were arguing like about this, like it was like it would be better for me to do an enema, to do enemas in this entire this, like this complex protocol, versus just trying to see what happens if I want cold turkey and took out his diapers. Y'all like this is not the way to approach problems, or to approach things, not even problems, okay. Like this is not how we can approach this, and I will. 

In chronic pain and in pain. This is where it was this massive realization, because here's the thing is I saw so many clients and patients over the years that have had things get missed, like, let's talk about endometriosis. It is a big thing that we know the medical community misses constantly. There are so many serious medical conditions that do get missed. I am not about to say that that is not true, because, holy shit, it is very true. We have the research to show that right. There are so many things that get missed and there are things like chronic pain, which are only amplified by a constant search of thinking something is wrong because we think something has been missed. And so how do we hold both of these as truths and figure out which is true? 

For us, when you are considering something or trying to figure things out, we have to start broad based and narrow down to get to the solution. Most medical things are a ruling out of things In physical therapy. This is how we operate it. It's like you have a hypothesis, you have things, and then you rule out, and then you go based on how they respond it. Oh, okay, this one test. How do they respond to it? Okay, that's going to send me in this direction. Oh, we tried this one exercise. How do they respond? You know, we go to this direction when we start operating from a paradigm of needing to come to this very rare condition that only affects 0.005% of the population, even like 3% of the population, right Like? I mean, that's a pretty big number, right, even 20% of the population, right Like? If we are assuming the thing that affects 20% of the population as the first line of defense for 80%, for the 100% of the population, it doesn't make sense. We have to start with 80% first, right, we have to start with the most obvious thing first, and if that doesn't make sense, then we go narrower and then we go narrower and then we go narrower. 

And I think what happens is that people want the correct, quote, unquote diagnosis Right away, and when they aren't given it it's, it is seen as some huge failure or that something went wrong, and really that is often part of the process. Now Are there times where a lot goes fucking missed and things go wrong. Yes, yes, yes. And this is the nuance, and and that the hardest thing to hold about this conversation is we do need to make sure that people are being taken care of that if you, you know, have these symptoms, that you know that that went missed and then you've got a solution, I understand where you want to share your story, but don't assume it's the same for someone else. Right and same thing. If someone's telling you about their story, don't assume it's you. 

I was, oh my gosh, I was. This is a total tangent now, but I was watching a YouTube video and this woman I cannot remember what she shared. It was something that was just funny. It was like a funny, weird Something that happened to her. It was like so it wasn't even like. I don't even know if I would label it a symptom. I wish I could remember what it was. So sorry, I can't kind of takes away from it, but literally one of the first comments was like hey, this happened to me and it turned out. I have this really really incredibly rare disorder that like point zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero two percent of the population have and if it wasn't caught I would die, sir, you know. So you need to go get checked out for that and it's like y'all, can we Take a breath? That is like we cannot assume the worst. 

Now again, the nuance is that in some cases could be life-saving right, and this is where our power has to come in play. This is where we need to understand our own bodies, be able to communicate with our own bodies, so when we are receiving random comments like this, we can actually discern is this right for me? Was this meant for me? Maybe in that comment section there is one person who reads that comment and they are like this is for me, I needed this and this comment did just save my life and Everyone else, hopefully, can just scroll on by and not get sent into like fear mode of like holy shit, what if I have this thing right? But what's happening is we are sending people into fear mode so unnecessarily and Okay, so going back, sorry again, like I said, this has like multi-pronged things for how I feel, feel like this is applying to pain and how we are treating it. What's stepping into my power meant once I was able to kind of just like open my eyes, wake up and realize what was happening, that I was letting my power be taken away. 

I stopped and I was like what is true for my son? I know him best now. He had a UTI when he was an infant. We were in the emergency room when he was five weeks old. All right, he did have a kidney Thing that they said would hopefully just development and fix with it with time. We never got it rechecked because if they never got another UTI, they said you don't need to get it rechecked. So that's in the back of my mind of like it is possible he has some kidney thing. 

But when I really stopped to be like what is true for my son, it is that he is not one to take initiative Really, isn't one to be like all right, I'm ready to do this thing without exposure to it first. He needs like something to urge him into that, whether it is reading books about it, whether it is just talking about it and bringing it up in conversation and starting to present things like that like we need, like he needs some impetus there and we had not been doing that, like we really hadn't been talking about it that much other than trying to get him to poop on the Potty. We had to been, like, talking about going all night without diapers. The next thing I know to be true about him is that he is always extremely resistant to anything new. For a very, very short period of time, y'all like I am very Blessed with my child when I can remember this, because his initial resistance is very strong. But like when I can sit with it and be with it and let him move through that, he opens up very quickly. 

All right, and that has been the case for a lot of shifts that we've made. Like when we shifted from we're not dressing you anymore at night, you need to dress yourself, which, by the way, that also was apparently a terrible thing because a kid should Decide to do that on their own. He wasn't. He was like five and he wasn't doing it, and it's like he didn't know how to dress himself. He needs to know how to dress himself, he needs to learn life skills, and so we stopped dressing him. It literally took like three days and the kid dresses himself totally fine now, because what we had to be the one to be like this is the change that's happening. We will be with you to support you through it. We will be there to help you through it, but this is what's happening. You know, put up a fight and then he gets over it real quick, and so I also knew that to be true. 

I had evidence to so much evidence of changes that we implemented that sounded so hard and so exhausting, always went way smoother than I anticipated and I was always Resisting doing it and taking way too long to implement the change Then was necessary, all right. So again, this is my evidence. This is where, knowing what is true for you, this is what it's been true for my experience with my son. Lastly, most importantly, is now I have this information about possible things that could, you know, go quote-unquote wrong while potty training, and I actually already knew all of those things. I knew that there are different I'm a nutritional therapist like there are different, like mineral deficiencies and stuff that can make it actually very challenging for a kid to hold on light and things like that. So it's like I've already been aware of this, but at this point, while he always did have a wet diaper in the mornings. 

I was pretty convinced he was just peeing in the morning in his diaper, like I had. No, I had no way of knowing. I had no way of knowing. How am I gonna check his diaper in the middle of the night? Also, I didn't want to get up in the middle of the night to check it right, like that's not an easy thing to do. So I did not know if he was capable of holding it or not. What I do know is he is capable of holding it all freaking day long, and this kid is a camel and he will hold his pee all day long. So I know he has the ability to hold his pee. So it's like I was missing data. Can he hold it or not? I did not know the answer to that, but what I did know is, if he is consistently not holding it and is having accidents, then I can just take the next step and see could it be a constipation issue, could it be a mineral issue, and I could go from there. But I cannot take that step until I know more information. And then the last thing I already said. 

Lastly, but I'm gonna add this one more thing is that what I realized with the biggest resistance was that I didn't want to get up in the middle of the night. I love my sleep. My child sleeps through the night. We have gone through great lengths to ensure that that happens and like he does great, and so I didn't want to get up in the middle of the night. That was like such a big factor and so part of it was I needed to get over myself and step up and be a responsible parent and not let my own things get in the way of him just progressing developmentally. 

All this to say, we did started potty training, I think, like three weeks ago now. He's had like three accidents All in the morning, by the way, all after he has woken up, because he didn't realize he could go pee by himself. So now we just have to remind him he hasn't had a single poop accident. He now poops in the potty. It took like five days, like he went five days, I think, without pooping. So I was starting to getting really anxious about oh my god, is it constipation? And then I'm like no, he just doesn't want to poop in the potty. He just like just needs to break the seal. Yep, after that first poop he's got, he got, has gotten poop. Actually, in fact, his poop scheduler schedule scheduler schedule has gotten far more regular and he goes much more like easy now and much more often now like like daily, almost daily now, whereas before he was kind of going more every other day and I think it's just because he was holding it because he didn't want to go in the potty, and then he was holding it until he would have the diaper on. Right now He'll kind of go sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night and he's still getting on a schedule there. But it was so easy. It was so easy Like I cannot believe how easy this was. 

Such a moment of like gosh. Why do we make things so hard on ourselves? And I get that not everyone's experience is gonna be easy. Not at all. I've had plenty of things that I thought were gonna be hard and they're hard. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying you will not know until you try and, more importantly, until you get the information from trying, you will not know the next best step to take and this is the huge, huge thing with chronic pain, with any symptom, is we sometimes just need to take the time to try something and see what happens, because from that we can gain new information that will actually better guide the next step. On top of that, we need to step into our own personal power. 

When I stepped back into my power and my responsible self, my adult self that knows that she knows her son, and I stepped back into that and embodied that, I was then able to kind of run all those comments through and be like oh my gosh, these are so irrelevant. And if they are relevant, I trust that I'm gonna find them again. Right, that, no, this does not apply to his situation. Like, I could just know that. And this is so much about what my work with people is about is finding their bodies yes and no. Like yes, this is right for me, no, it's not. And being able to differentiate that from the fear response, by the way, because that one will get you every time Right. Because my initial fear response was oh my gosh, yes, constipation does apply to him, he doesn't go to the bathroom every day. But that was not my true response. That was not my in my power response. That was a fear based response. But I know what fear feels like in my body and once I was able to just wake up and be like, oh my gosh, wow, I'm like really really giving away my power here. I was able to, just within like 30 seconds, know exactly the right answer. 

All the extra time was me spiraling in anxiety in my head and it would have never gotten me anywhere. I like ordered all these books from the library of like, oh, I'll be like research, how to potty train and do all these things, and my sister's, like you, literally just take off their diaper and put them in bed and see what happens. And I was like, okay, that's it. Like I really don't have to do anything else. She's like no, you don't have to do anything else. Okay, I'm just gonna try that. And I was like I decided we're like we're going to give it two weeks and then if past two weeks like accidents are consistently happening, then we're going to like regroup, right, same thing for the pooping. After he wasn't pooping, but for the first, like three days, I was like I'm going to give it like three more days. If he's passed that, then I'm a little worried about the fact that he hasn't pooped, been pooping. And then I was like maybe I'll add a supplement to help kind of force him to go Right. 

But it's like I gave myself a time to just let things play out and to really take the time to like try something out. Now in potty training it's obviously a little easier. The time zone is like a little more collapsed and especially in our case it ended up being very collapsed just because of how he was totally fine with it. But for some things we also need to be realistic about the time frame. We're putting on something, because trying out a new mindset or a new process or a new tool for communicating with our bodies like we can't just do it for three days and expect to see results, because it's not how it works Right. Like we also need to be really, really realistic about what results are feasible in this time period. So actually I say I say the two weeks, but I think really I was giving myself. 

I think I ended up saying about three months before I would go to like something deeper. It was like two weeks to reassess. So in my head I had given myself like a three month time frame to be like is he capable or not? And then I allowed myself to be like maybe it would happen even faster, maybe he'll actually be like this will be one of those things where he just fights it for the first few days and is totally fine, and I open to both possibilities that any attachment to either one and I happen to get the faster one, which is amazing, and so that's the other thing I want to open up to is, like, you want to be, yes, realistic about a time frame of implementing something, but also are you open to it happening faster than you ever expected? Because sometimes that's the case too. 

We can release from the outcome, release from attachment to it happening in a certain way, looking a certain way. It actually makes things so much easier. When we can detach from the need to perfectly know every step and have a perfect plan for everything that could come up actually makes things so much more useful. All right, that's what I was trying to do is like, oh, I gotta have this perfect, rigid plan and know exactly what to do. And well, no, I didn't need to know that. I needed to know like two things one, take off his diaper, and two, my sister made the recommendation of put multiple layers of sheets on the bed with, like, the waterproof in between, so if he does pee in the middle night, you just have to strip it off and the next one layers ready to go. That was all I needed to know. That was enough to get me into the next step, which, in our case, we didn't have to have to take another step. 

For some people and for some cases, and especially for chronic pain, there usually is then a next step, but that next step has to be guided by getting information from taking an action and just trying it out. Like I said in my workshop today, it's like in this container. We take messy but aligned action. We take action that is uncertain, where we aren't exactly sure what's going to happen, but we're open to finding out. So can you do that? 

All right, this actually ended up being way longer than I thought it was going to be and I'm like, oh, I feel like I had so much random commentary I could say on this, but I'm going to just I'm pretty sure y'all can put it together for yourselves on how this can overlap or be applicable to your journey when have you been stuck in, like fear mongering or other people telling you something? Where have you just not been taking action because you're scared of what could happen or you don't know all the steps, so you're just not taking action right? Where are you making something way harder than it needs to be and you're stuck in anxiety about it because you were only imagining the worst case scenarios. What is it for you? I'm going to trust that whatever comes up for you is exactly what you need to hear. So with that, I really want to invite you and encourage you that, if you are not in it already, make sure you get signed up for the beta. 

Training is so powerful and I'm about to do some amazing trainings next week that you know you still have time to sign up and attend live and within the Facebook group. I am here to support everyone, to answer any questions related to the trainer or not. So if you have burning questions like, just get yourself in the group and ask away. All I'm asking in return is feedback and a testimonial if you feel like it applies and this. Otherwise, this program is completely free. So go ahead and get signed up. The link is in the show notes and if you know anyone who also could benefit, please feel free to share it with them as well. All right, see you next week. 

Transcribed by https://podium.page