Did you ever have toilet troubles?

Just a warning this might be a little much. If poop grosses you out maybe don't read.

Hey, so I'm a 27 year old guy awaiting an assessment as I really can't be sure I'm autistic or not and one thing from my childhood I'm very unsure of putting down to autism is that I basically soiled myself up until I was about 13 years old.

The reasons I don't know if this is potentially due to autism is that my parents were both drug addicts and I was really neglected but I knew how to urinate fine, it's just with number 2 I just held them in because I was scared and didn't really know what I was supposed to do so it just came out and I was constantly smelly and dirty. It made my childhood an utter hell.

My Mum did sometimes get people like social workers to help but nothing ever worked. Someone tried a star chart I'd put a star on when I went to the toilet but I didn't keep at it.

When I was 11 I did stay with my aunt for three months and she really helped me get into a routine of washing (something I never did at home) and going to the toilet and that was the only time I was really in a routine and I thrived so much. Then the social work gave me back to my Mum and everything fell apart again until I moved in with my Dad about 13/14 and I just decided to go to the toilet when I had to poop and boom. Problem solved.

Basically I just want to know if this sounds like autism or a consequence of neglect. Maybe it's both, the confusion just comes in that I could pee fine so I'm so unsure.

  • Hi, don't be embarrassed. My son is 13 and struggles too like you did. He gets confused how the stool should come out. Even wiping himself is hard for him to know when to stop wiping. Im sorry how it was for you as a kid. I think it must of been confusing for you cause my son has autism too. Hope this helps you:)

  • I think it's really hard to separate out the things that have affected us as children from how they have interacted with our autism. I suspect that often autism compounds things but obviously you had to deal with some seriously terrible stuff in your childhood and autism might have meant you dealt with it one way rather than another. 

  • I've come across the term 'stool withholding' a fair bit on the PDA (pathological demand avoidance) forums. [PDA is an autism spectrum condition]

    As for me, I had bedwetting late into my childhood. That was pretty uncomfortable and difficult to deal with when I was 10 years old at boarding school. The problem continued until I was a teenager. In my case, I had a lot of child abuse at home too, so it would be hard for me to say it was necessarily an autism-linked thing.

  • I wet the bed a lot as a child. However, that's linked to trauma through child abuse.

    I think that your issue is also based on childhood fears.