What is Shy Bladder (paruresis)?

Shy bladder, or paruresis, is a condition where a person, who may be desperate to go to the toilet, finds that they are unable to if in a public lavatory, or if people may be able to see or hear them. It is also the expression used to describe someone who has similar problems when on a moving vehicle such as a train or a plane. Sometimes it even affects people when they are at home.

Other phrases used to describe this surprisingly common condition, a condition that can affect men and women, are ‘bashful bladder’, and ‘pee-shy’. The full medical term is avoidant paruresis.

It is important that you realise that these problems are nothing for you to be embarrassed about (easy for us to say, we know). It’s not like you are having the problem deliberately.

How Are You Going To Help My Shy Bladder Problems?

Question:
What’s the difference between someone that suffers from shy bladder syndrome, and someone who doesn’t?

Answer:
The person suffering from the condition will worry about it in advance. They will imagine the difficulty and embarrassment of wanting to go to the toilet and being unable to.

The person who doesn’t suffer from the condition doesn’t do this.

So one of the key methods to get someone to stop doing shy bladder is to train their mind to be comfortable and confident in advance, in other words to train them to be in control of their imagination, rather than being controlled by it.  This effectively stops people from unwittingly ‘programming’ themselves into continuing the problem. The best approaches for this kind of work come from the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Hypnotherapy Treatments For Shy Bladder Syndrome

In addition, there is a large range of hypnotherapeutic techniques that work well to help you to stop your shy bladder problems for good.  We work very directly, and we don’t concern ourselves with the ‘origin’ of the problem as the origin is irrelevant. Avoidant paruresis is a habit, a habituated pattern of thinking in the mind. We work to change this habit, to get rid of it, and we aim to do this quickly, and for good.