I have both aspergers and tourettes and dyslexia. (i put the sexy back in dyslexia lol). Here is some coping tools....
1) when you have at tic, you can change where it goes, you can't stop it without it coming back and making up for lost time. For instance if i conciously stop my throat clicking tic for 1 minute, then the next minute ill click twice as much. So what you do is create a seperate tic first. I "crack" my toes. basicly i flex them inside my shoes.... its completely unnoticeable. Once i start that, then i conciously stop the tic where ever it is (head twitching, throat clicking, finger twitching etc.) Now its manageably in my toe and no one can tell i have terretes, while i still get the santisfaction of my tic's.
another strategy is put a dot on a wall with a pencil, make it fairly small. Focus on the dot and start working on noticeing and processing things conciously from your perephial vision. This will allow you to stare at one area for long peroids of time, while still being able to twitch your sight, by going from object to object. it seems just object recoginition is enough for your body to consider it a tic.
Not the next thing i found turns having tourettes from a negative to an almost superhuman like quality. start glacing at new surounds, then close your eye really fast. the object is to memorize the objects your seeing only for an instant. Using where is waldo books helps with it to. if you can glance at something and quickly close your eyes and remember the objects you focused on then you combine that with the staring at a dot excersize, which i learned in martial arts. The result is that when you move your tic to your eyes and head, you can quickly desern an entire area in an almost grid like effeciency, and gives you a form of super awareness. So you can glance at a room, and instantly know where everything is.
This is how it works for me in practice: I'm invited over to a friends house for the first time. I change my tic to my head and eyes and look around and gather all the information about the room and surrounding rooms. I then process these as fast as i can, which takes usually 10-15 seconds. then my friend may say "lets go watch TV". I know what the room looks like, what fabrics are on the couch, what light sources are there, and how to prepare for that envirement. when i enter it feels like i know the place, and prevents the ackwardness and overstimuali of entering a new surounding.
It might seem weird or far out, but it's helped me on so many situations that i would want my tourettes gone. The best was when i could recall passwords by watching people type out of the corner of my eye, and calling upon those memories to remember where i left my keys (cause i'm horrindiously disorginized.)
hope it helps.
23 Jun 2011, 6:57 pm
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