Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Glad my input is somewhat helpful to you. I hope you feel comfortable to let me know anytime what of my writing to you is right with you and what doesn’t feel right: what you agree with and what you disagree with. I am here to teach you and to learn from you. Both.

I will explain the Tourette’s as an expression of anxiety: as a child, I was stuck with my mother who scared me by threatening to commit suicide or by attacking me in various ways. So the animal part of me, instinctively and emotionally, needed to either Fight or Flight (run away). Both natural responses require MOVEMENT. But I wasn’t able to do either: couldn’t fight a bigger person and my own mother and had nowhere to run away to. But the urge to make a MOVE (fight or flight/run) persisted, day after day. That urge “MOVED” my facial muscles to form facial tics. That urge to move, MOVED my neck muscles to form neck tics, and so forth, as I suffered from tics all over.

So I didn’t RUN, but my facial muscles “ran away” and every other muscle “ran away” or engaged in the Flight response – or the Fight response, while my overall body stayed in one place.

If I did Fight or Flight, as animals in nature do, then I wouldn’t have developed tics. I would have been out of danger (either dead if I lost the fight or away from danger if I ran away).

anita