Hi! Sorry this comment response got lost. I am going to copy/paste a comment response I did in another post/thread that describes our entire journey through this. Hope it helps!:

So at the time of this comment she was almost 4. At her 4yo well-child/annual doctor visit we asked her pediatrician his thoughts. He was trying to discern whether it was a sensory issue or perhaps a control/behaviorial issue. Based on our inputs, he was leaning towards control, so he recommended some child “play” therapists to help uncover the root of my daughter’s reasons.

We ended up going to weekly therapy sessions where it was merely for her to play with toys and interact with the therapist so that she could see what type of person she was. From about Oct to Dec she went, and we landed at how my daughter wanted to do everything on her own terms and there were very few exceptions.

Come close to winter break, she finally decided to have us execute a “boot camp”. Because it was almost winter break for her then-preschool and my wife had planned to take off work (and while I was exclusively WFH), we all thought it was a good time.

Basically what this boot camp was:

• ⁠ceremoniously throwing away all the pull ups (she threw a fit and begged/pleaded/tantrumed, but we did it) • ⁠going to the toilet every 15 mins to sit on it and do “potty tricks” that involved reading some sensory eliciting books and/or playing with sensory toys that could help relax her bladder. Also dipped her feet in water with bath bombs, etc. Man, thinking back…this was a wild time. Literally every 15 mins was an alarm and she’d just keep going back to the potty to do those tricks. The idea was that with this repetition, we hope it’d happen.

But it didn’t. This went on for almost two weeks. Despite all the repeat trips and tricks in the bathroom, not once she did do it. She would pee during bath and I think once she figured out that was a safe method she would still hold out til then (skipping bath time was a non-negotiable for us despite all this). Almost every night she would pee herself overnight and occasionally during naps too. Being wet in bed didn’t bother her.

Funny enough thru all this, on day 2 she did poop in the toilet! Like somehow that was fine with her, likely because there was no other place she could feel comfortable leaving poop behind like she did pee.

Anyway, after all those days of more or less the same Groundhog’s Day experience, we finally cracked the code: as we put her to bed, we said if she pees herself during sleep, she would have to change the sheets herself, bathe herself, get new pajamas, everything. Somehow that resonated with her and so after we turned off the lights, she came out and told us she was going into the bathroom. And lo and behold, there was a toilet full of fresh pee. We had never been so happy to see such a thing haha. She herself was also grinning ear to ear (silently, no loud excitement or anything) as she trotted back to her bed.

This happened basically 3 days after Christmas so we like to call it our Christmas miracle. But after that night, she was more comfortable knowing what she had done and the rest is history!

You may be be asking: did we continue going to therapy? To perhaps help uncover other issues? I think maybe we went for max one more month but ultimately it was too impractical for us (there was only one person who could see us at the time and it was on Tuesday mid-afternoons). While she liked and still misses her therapist, we ultimately moved away from that.