Tourette’s syndrome – a presentation of unconscious shame

Tourette’s Syndrome is a condition that the medical establishment has been unable to cure. I’ve recently had success treating it as a presentation of unconscious shame. Here I present my reasoning and results.

What is Tourette’s Syndrome?

Wikipedia:

“Tourette syndrome (TS), or simply Tourette’s, is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that begins in childhood or adolescence. It is characterized by multiple movement (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic. Common tics are blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements. Tics are typically preceded by an unwanted urge or sensation in the affected area known as a premonitory urge, can sometimes be suppressed temporarily, and characteristically change in location, strength, and frequency.”

Tourette’s “has popularly been associated with coprolalia (the utterance of obscene words or socially inappropriate and derogatory remarks).”

“There is no cure for Tourette’s and no single most effective medication.”

So, how do we decode Tourette’s?

Parapraxes

In The Inner Game of Tennis, W. T. Gallwey writes that “we never repeat any behaviour which isn’t serving some function or purpose.”

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) Sigmund Freud, the ‘father of psychoanalysis,’ posited the idea of parapraxes. Better known as Freudian slips, they are attempts by repressed impulses to break into conscious awareness. Freudian slips are usually thought of as impolite verbal slips—hello, coprolalia.

Freud had a much broader view of parapraxes. He included not just errors in speech but also writing, memory, action, and chance events. What identified these as parapraxes was “the ability to refer the phenomena to unwelcome, repressed, psychic material, which, though pushed away from consciousness, is nevertheless not robbed of all capacity to express itself.”

The ‘premonitory urge’ described in Wikipedia is a clear indication of unwelcome psychic material seeking to express itself, as are the obscene utterances.

Freud’s theory of psychosexual development links the compulsive use of swear words to failed/incomplete developmental stages. Freud posited a three-stage process: the oral stage (from birth to 1), anal stage (from 1 to 3) and phallic stage (from 3 to 6).

Issues with developmental stages, for which there are various models, are known as arrested development.

In Debugging the Universe, Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes that damage at the anal stage causes “a lot of anal expressions or language relating to excretory functions and parts of the body.” Issues at the phallic stage result in “a lot of language that refers to sexual functions.” These are distress signals pinpointing exactly where the distress lies.

Shame

The association with coprolalia points to unconscious shame in general and sexual shame in particular.

Unconscious shame is a layer of invisible ‘emotional concrete’ that overlays the whole of society. It’s so widespread that its effects are considered totally normal and generally pass completely unnoticed. Because this shame is unconscious, it’s also invisible—to the extent that it’s not even recognised in our dictionaries.

This shame encompasses all the feminine aspects of our being—our emotions, our physical body and our sexuality.

1. Emotional shame—the shame of having feelings in a patriarchal society that has traditionally despised, denied, suppressed, repressed and punished emotional expression
2. Body shame—the shame of physical appearance (e.g. not beautiful enough) and the shame of bodily functions (urinating, defecating, menstruating, etc.)
3. Sexual shame—the shame of having genitals and having sexual feelings, wanted or otherwise, in a society that has traditionally despised, denied, suppressed, repressed and punished sexual expression

With this basic understanding, we’re ready to treat Tourette’s Syndrome.

Treating Tourette’s

Like any shame-based condition, treatment consists of two stages, one (the easy part) mental and the other (more difficult) emotional:

1. Establish the clear mental understanding that this aspect of us is ‘in shame’ (literally, buried in a mire of low vibration negativity) and that its symptoms are highly targeted distress clues
2. Feel through the mire of shame without judgment until we’re able to connect to the underlying distress and the unprocessed pain associated with it

The second stage is challenging because our psychic defences will do everything in their power to prevent us disturbing our homeostatic balance and feeling this pain.

Consequently—like learning to walk—we must fall down a few times, pick ourselves up and go again until we master the process. This is exactly what my client reported. After several attempts, instead of running away from the deeply unpleasant experience of shame, he was able to stay with it. “My Tourette’s and I relaxed again.”

The distress signals from our unconscious obey a small number of finite laws. Grasp those laws and all manner of psychic disturbances can be treated.

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash