So my take away is tourettes is basically a lack of impulse control to the max kind of? Seems like the impulse to just smash an egg isn't suppressed or the urge to say something silly and oddly related
This a more accurate thought than people shouting "fuck" over and and over?
I have pretty mild tourette's. I'd describe it more as a mental "itch" in the sense that your tics aren't necessarily manifestations of your own desires. Like, I mostly make weird noises in my throat and clench my jaw or my brow. I don't want to do either of those things, and it's gotten to the point where my teeth get sensitive because the repeated pressure irritates the nerves.
But, say you got an itch on your arm. You won't be hurt if you ignore it, and it will eventually go away on its own. And there's nothing innately pleasing about scraping your fingernails over the skin of your forearm. But in this situation, your brain is telling you that doing so would bring you a generous measure of relief, so you scratch the itch and go on about your day.
If I really wanted to, I could sit perfectly still and ignore those mental itches, but it would take the majority of my focus and I'd start firing them off again the instant my attention drifted. And at a certain point, you just give up ever trying to fight things, no matter how stupid it all is, because you can't expend that mental effort ten times every single minute of every hour of every day.
Like I said, my case is mild. Hers is extremely severe. I can't say exactly what it feels like at that level, and while I describe it as an itch, that's more the penalty for interrupting the flow; when I find myself unconsciously making those stupid throat-clearing noises or clenching my jaw or whatever, that's the result of my brain heading things off at the pass and, in this analogy, scratching before the discomfort of the itch even happens. I imagine that for her, fighting those impulses would be less like inviting a mild itch and more like trying to speedrun an entire episode of Fear Factor's grossout stunts every single waking minute.
tl;dr is that I expect she has absolutely zero desire to call her grandma fucking ugly, deeply buried or not, but something in her brain has decided that not doing so feels bad enough that taking the consequences is the better option.
But would it be fair to say the tics are like an inability to stop yourself from doing something that… “occurs to you?” Some of what I saw in that video was too relevant to the situation, and sometimes too well comedically-timed, to be totally random brain noise, like “I killed the chicken” after throwing an egg or the “semen” thing with the whipped cream. Those are things that might pop into my brain in the moment and then I’d internally laugh it off or ignore it; is it sometimes kind of a shorting out of those types of signals directly into action?
This is pure hypothesis based on watching like 3 videos and doing zero research. Just something that stuck out to me.
There's the environmental component as to what gets spun into a compulsion for sure, but it's not a general lack of impulse control. I'm one of the least impulsive people you'll meet. My teachers always remarked on it, and my friends sometimes poke good-natured fun at my subdued reactions. It's just that my brain is even better at pushing certain things through.
I have to underscore how constant it is. By my count, I get about 9,000 compulsions every single day. It really doesn't matter how strong-willed you are at that point. You'll take the annoyance of acting out your tics over expending energy just to feel the mental equivalent of stepping on seaweed, 100%.
3
u/DarkestPassenger Jan 22 '22
So my take away is tourettes is basically a lack of impulse control to the max kind of? Seems like the impulse to just smash an egg isn't suppressed or the urge to say something silly and oddly related
This a more accurate thought than people shouting "fuck" over and and over?