So I've blogged earlier about my copropraxia which I have never been too fond of. When people think of Tourette's Syndrome a lot of them think of someone swearing uncontrollably, however very few people with Tourette's actually suffer from uncontrollable swearing which is called Coprolallia. I am always able to say "I do have Tourette's, but I don't have Coprolallia" but unfortunatly I have never been able to say " I do have Tourette's but I don't have Copropraxia". For those of you who don't know, Copropraxia is a tic that involves inappropriate gestures or inappropriate touching and it's something that i've dealt with since I was a kid. One of my first tics as a child was grabbing at my crotch area and it was a tic that I truly hated. Since then I still will occasionally grab at my crotch area but certainty not as frequently as I used to. Now two of the tics that I have been dealing with that would be classified as Copropraxia are making the gun gesture with my fingers and extending my middle finger. I do the gun gesture tic every now and then as a hand tic but I haven't had the middle finger tic since October. Well that is until last night. Last night I started all over again with the middle finger tic *sigh*. That one went away in October when I practiced the competing response which is grabbing my middle finger instead of the inappropriate gesture. Hopefully I can just practice doing that again and then the tic will go away like it did last time. I figured I would give my boy friend, Speed Racer, a heads up about this one in case I am doing the tic when we hang out. He's really cute with this kind of stuff and always likes to joke about it so when I told him about it, his response was that we should go hang out at an old folks home. Haha, this made me laugh. Hopefully it will go away this time again, we'll just have to wait and see.
Hello. My daughter has Tourette's and she just started doing the middle finger gesture a few days ago. It is so hard to watch her struggle to try to not do it and then eventually she just has to. Thanks for posting this. It's easy to feel alone about this kind of situation.
ReplyDeleteMy son is 7 and he has just started this tick. His doctor had warned that Tourettes might accompany his ADHD, and it's looking like it has. Thank you for this post. I told him about holding his finger, and he felt better knowing he wasn't alone, and that there was something which might help. It's an old post, but you just gave my little guy hope. :(
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