Dear Lara:

I should have asked, “I hate you!”- who is the you, do you know? I assumed you were referring to yourself?

Other statements: “You are a bad person”, “When will you finally end it” and “Why can’t I be better?”

You wrote that you googled and it doesn’t fit Tourette’s and OCD. Interestingly enough I have suffered from both, Tourette’s and OCD from a very young age, diagnosed with both as an adult. In addition to these two, I also blurted out statements to strangers similar to what you described. I say “in addition” because my said out loud statements were not the tics and compulsions of Tourette’s and OCD that I experienced.

But the driving force for the tics, the compulsions and the statements was the same, anxiety/ distress. Fear is a very powerful emotion, energy-in-motion; it moves our muscles. In nature animals, when feeling fear, are motivated to run (muscles moving) or fight (… muscles moving). We are animals living in a complex society and in childhood we have nowhere to run to and no one we can fight. So we are stuck doing nothing. But the fear still motivates us to move, our muscles to contract, so some of us move via tics, and/ or OCD compulsions, and/or blurting out statements.

What do you think?

anita