The Brain Still Piddles Sometimes

I think about puppy training a lot in the context of this work.

Not because our clients are puppies, bear with me here,  but because puppy training is one of the clearest illustrations I know of what it actually means to build a new pattern in a brain.

You train a puppy. Consistently, patiently, with repetition and positive reinforcement and a lot of cleaning up messes you didn't anticipate. And slowly, genuinely, it works. The puppy learns. The behavior changes. You are no longer finding surprises behind the couch.

And then one day — out of nowhere, for no discernible reason — the puppy piddles on the floor.

Not because the training failed. Not because you did something wrong. Not because the puppy has decided to undo all that progress. Just because that's what brains do sometimes, even trained ones, even on a Tuesday when everything seemed fine.

What we tell our clients...and what we don't.

We are good at teaching our clients about neuroplasticity. About how the brain builds new pathways. About how patterns can change with time and intention and the right support.

What we don't always do is prepare them for the piddle.

The moment, weeks or months into good work, when the old response shows up anyway. The anxiety spike. The shame spiral. The reaching for the coping strategy they were certain they were past. The voice that sounds exactly like the one they worked so hard to quiet.

If we haven't prepared them for that moment.  If we've let them believe that "trained" means "never again."  Then the piddle becomes evidence that they're broken. That the work didn't take. That they're back at square one.

They're not at square one. Their brain just piddled on the floor.

There's a significant difference.

Setting the expectation in advance.

This is the clinical move worth making early.  Sometimes in the first few sessions, certainly before a client hits a hard patch and interprets it as failure.

The brain is not a light switch. Training is not a one-time event with a permanent outcome. New patterns get stronger with repetition but they don't erase the old ones entirely.  They just become the more practiced path. The old path is still there. Sometimes the brain takes it anyway, especially under stress, especially when something in the environment rhymes with something old.

That is not relapse. That is not regression. That is a brain doing what brains do.

When clients know this in advance, the piddle doesn't undo them. It becomes something they can look at with curiosity instead of despair — oh, there's that old pattern again — and return to the work without the detour through self-condemnation.

And then there's us.

Here's the part worth sitting with.

After years of doing this work.  After supervision and personal therapy and professional development and all of the doing our own work that brought us to where we are.  Our brains still piddle on the floor sometimes too.

The anxiety that shows up before a hard session. The self-doubt that arrives uninvited. The old wound that gets bumped by something a client says. The reaction we didn't see coming that we're still processing on the drive home.

We know better. We have done the work. We have the training.

And sometimes we piddle on the floor anyway.

That is not a sign that we aren't fit for this work. It is not evidence that the therapy we did wasn't real or that the growth isn't genuine. It is just what brains do.  Even experienced ones, even educated ones, even ones that have spent years learning exactly how brains work.

The training holds. The piddle is just the piddle.

An invitation.

For you and for your clients:

Trained doesn't mean finished. Progress doesn't mean perfect. A hard moment after a long stretch of good ones is not the same as going back to the beginning.

It's just a Tuesday.

Clean it up. Take a breath. Keep going.

Dr. Jamie English is a licensed clinical social worker, supervisor, and educator. The DJ English blog explores the inner life of the clinician — the parts of this work we don't always talk about out loud.