It’s OK Little Jess, I’ll Look After You

10/06/24

I wet my bed for a very prolonged time as a child – I think I was about 12 by the time it stopped completely.

It was a source of great shame for me, interfering with my ability to socialise (staying over at a friend’s house is not an option when you know you’re likely to wake up in a pee drenched bed).

The seeming lack of ability to control it causing me huge anxiety and grief.

No root cause could be found, nor a solution, and trust me they tried.

I was dragged to doctors, tested for goodness knows what, even having a week’s stay in hospital while they tried to get to the bottom of things.

I had tablets and injections; reward charts and incentives; I was woken in the night to go to the toilet; I wasn’t allowed fluids after a certain time.

I had this horrific contraption they called a ‘buzzer’. This was two thin wire mesh sheets connected to a massive alarm box battery pack. The mesh sheets were separated by ordinary cloth sheets and placed beneath me in bed. Any moisture (i.e.. pee) would make a connection between the mesh sheets, causing the alarm to go off. The idea was I’d then wake up in time to get up and finish my wee in the loo. Ultimately, eventually, the idea was I’d be trained into waking before starting to pee.

The reality was I wouldn’t wake enough to stop weeing.

Being a very tired child, I’d just switch off the alarm, take off my wet pyjamas, fold my bedding over and curl up at the bottom of the bed. This inevitably let to a parental berating in the morning.

Maybe it’s just a sign of different times, but it’s curious to me that no one seemed to realise that the bedwetting was anxiety induced, and that all this pressure around it was just making it worse.

It’s as if everyone thought I didn’t want to stop wetting my bed. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Every night I’d go to bed, praying to a god I wanted to believe in, to keep me dry. Or I’d just try to stay awake all night.

Every time I woke and felt that dreaded wetness, I’d be filled with an overwhelming sense of failure and fear and shame.

This was compounded by the fact that I started being punished for wetting my bed. I could only visit a beloved relative if I was dry for a week, or I couldn’t have dessert if my bed wasn’t dry…stuff like that.

One morning, mother’s husband, Rassgat, came to wake me up for school and found me curled at the foot of my wet bed.

He hauled me to the bathroom and told me to strip. It was the middle of winter. He’d taken the bathroom window out during the summer but had failed to replace it, so there was a sheet of plastic stapled over the gap.

I stood there, naked and shivering while he ran two inches of cold water into the bath and told me to stand in it.

Rassgat then took a bottle of disinfectant and proceeded to roughly scrub my entire body, face and head with it. I was squirming with shame, trying to cover my nine year old body, flinching as he roughly scraped the cloth over my genitals.

The entire time, from the moment he’d pulled me out of bed, he’d maintained a diatribe of abuse about how disgusting and lazy and filthy I was.

Without realising what was happening, little child me absorbed it all, believing every word. I’ve carried that shit with me, in one form or another, ever since.

I’ve unconsciously sought out people who will keep on affirming that to me, right up until the start of this year.

Since EH left, and I started to realise the extent to which childhood trauma has affected my adult life, I’ve been doing a lot of work with my ‘inner child’.

I recently did this really powerful visualisation exercise where I went back to that time in the bath, this time as an adult, only seen by child me.

As an adult, I sat on on the closed lid of the toilet, softly calling to Little Jess. She turned her tear streaked face towards me and I held her gaze.

I told her that I couldn’t stop what was happening but that she must keep looking at me, keep listening to me – what he was saying was all lies. She didn’t deserve any of the things being done and said to her.

I told her she didn’t need to listen to him. I told her she was loved; that I was the grown up and I knew the truth; that she’d been hurt and harmed and didn’t know how to say so. I asked her to trust me when I told her I’d make her safe in the future.

Something massive shifted inside grown up me, as if Little Jess had stopped sticking out her elbows and had settled into a snuggle instead.

Little Jess isn’t entirely convinced that she’s not bad and dirty, but she is willing to put her hand in mine and trust me to show her.

We’ll walk this journey side by side. It’s comforting to hold her hand.

JP