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I’d like to address a common discussion that comes up on sites like this: your ABDL origin story. How did I get this way? What was my first awareness of being different? Would you change anything?
While looking back is important, I’d like to highlight the limitations of that pursuit and how it’s drawbacks can overshadow its benefits.
I’ll quickly and generically survey the possible origins for padded proclivities. There’s schools of thought that range from trauma, to neurodiversity, to genetic predisposition.
Trauma is a common thread people try to weave. It could refer to a general case of abuse or neglect, emotionally or physically. It could also point to a specific experience, like a loss of bladder or bowel control that had persistent social consequences, during the day at school, for example. I’d even include bedwetting as a trauma, because how our bedwetting is dealt with could be traumatic beyond just the even itself.
But trauma can take on so many different forms with so many consequences, like a stringy “Choose Your Adventure” book, where one little change can lead to a whole different set of consequences. In fact, it’s easy to take a idiosyncrasy and generate a trauma to fit that. Memory being a weird thing, especially early childhood memory, you should seek supporting information instead of reliving the same memories over and over.
If you consider the neurodiversity angle, some of us were late to toilet train and had more mental agency when we were finishing that transition. I’d even include those of us who had an accelerated mental development and were more aware of our toilet training in normal course.
And finally, the “genetic” argument, which I’m likely to dismiss out of hand unless better evidence is provided beyond “I can’t find the Nurture origin, so it must be Nature!” I have a VERY hard time thinking that preference a manufactured item could be coded into our DNA. I would entertain findings related to how a person who likes diapers has similar genetic markers for people who wear tight underwear or have vasovagal reactions to urinating, but outside of that, if you’ll follow me to my real point here, it matters less and less to the individual.
But first, I’m sure you can identify other origin categories, especially those specific to IC individuals, but I want to show that things in the past have consequences for the present. No one really changes the past by understanding it.
So, if I take a superhero metaphor, does squishing the radioactive spider that gave you your superpowers make those powers go away? Not really. I suppose you could say that knowing your kryptonite helps you stay away from it, but being exposed to a trigger is different from an ongoing persistent condition. And make no mistake, being ABDL is persistent and any resistance you develop will be temporary and will build up an indulgence debt.
What am I trying to say as my metaphor crumbles not even one paragraph in?
That this is you. Knowing your background will not help you break the spell diapers have over you. That’s where the limit of these types of endeavors leads.
There are benefits though, and I would be remiss if I didn’t give them some treatment.
If your origin is of traumatic nature, you do want to resolve that for many reasons. A therapist can help you come to terms with shame and keep from passing that trauma on to others, if it was inflicted on you in that way. If you jumped to the kryptonite example a split second before I presented it above, that applies here. How do you avoid the triggers that may cause the trauma? But it won’t resolve the idiosyncrasies you picked up.
This is the important point you should take away from this. You are who you are right now, and too much obsession on how you got this way wastes energy you could expend on increasing self-acceptance. And knowing your origin won’t make it go away.
So, by all means, share your origin if it’s an interesting story and you see value in the sharing, but if you have a hard time understanding how you got this way, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be this way. Depending on how you look at it, everyone is afflicted with a unique disorder: being themselves. Don’t compare your affliction with others expecting to find all the answers because everyone came by who they are honestly.
While looking back is important, I’d like to highlight the limitations of that pursuit and how it’s drawbacks can overshadow its benefits.
I’ll quickly and generically survey the possible origins for padded proclivities. There’s schools of thought that range from trauma, to neurodiversity, to genetic predisposition.
Trauma is a common thread people try to weave. It could refer to a general case of abuse or neglect, emotionally or physically. It could also point to a specific experience, like a loss of bladder or bowel control that had persistent social consequences, during the day at school, for example. I’d even include bedwetting as a trauma, because how our bedwetting is dealt with could be traumatic beyond just the even itself.
But trauma can take on so many different forms with so many consequences, like a stringy “Choose Your Adventure” book, where one little change can lead to a whole different set of consequences. In fact, it’s easy to take a idiosyncrasy and generate a trauma to fit that. Memory being a weird thing, especially early childhood memory, you should seek supporting information instead of reliving the same memories over and over.
If you consider the neurodiversity angle, some of us were late to toilet train and had more mental agency when we were finishing that transition. I’d even include those of us who had an accelerated mental development and were more aware of our toilet training in normal course.
And finally, the “genetic” argument, which I’m likely to dismiss out of hand unless better evidence is provided beyond “I can’t find the Nurture origin, so it must be Nature!” I have a VERY hard time thinking that preference a manufactured item could be coded into our DNA. I would entertain findings related to how a person who likes diapers has similar genetic markers for people who wear tight underwear or have vasovagal reactions to urinating, but outside of that, if you’ll follow me to my real point here, it matters less and less to the individual.
But first, I’m sure you can identify other origin categories, especially those specific to IC individuals, but I want to show that things in the past have consequences for the present. No one really changes the past by understanding it.
So, if I take a superhero metaphor, does squishing the radioactive spider that gave you your superpowers make those powers go away? Not really. I suppose you could say that knowing your kryptonite helps you stay away from it, but being exposed to a trigger is different from an ongoing persistent condition. And make no mistake, being ABDL is persistent and any resistance you develop will be temporary and will build up an indulgence debt.
What am I trying to say as my metaphor crumbles not even one paragraph in?
That this is you. Knowing your background will not help you break the spell diapers have over you. That’s where the limit of these types of endeavors leads.
There are benefits though, and I would be remiss if I didn’t give them some treatment.
If your origin is of traumatic nature, you do want to resolve that for many reasons. A therapist can help you come to terms with shame and keep from passing that trauma on to others, if it was inflicted on you in that way. If you jumped to the kryptonite example a split second before I presented it above, that applies here. How do you avoid the triggers that may cause the trauma? But it won’t resolve the idiosyncrasies you picked up.
This is the important point you should take away from this. You are who you are right now, and too much obsession on how you got this way wastes energy you could expend on increasing self-acceptance. And knowing your origin won’t make it go away.
So, by all means, share your origin if it’s an interesting story and you see value in the sharing, but if you have a hard time understanding how you got this way, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be this way. Depending on how you look at it, everyone is afflicted with a unique disorder: being themselves. Don’t compare your affliction with others expecting to find all the answers because everyone came by who they are honestly.
Plus...who knows? Maybe they got the answer right even though their reasoning was sketchy. It's (often) hard to prove a negative.
