Tics: spiritual meaning and emotional causes

What tics are

Tics are sudden, repetitive movements or sounds that a person does not fully control. Motor tics include blinking, grimacing, shrugging, jerking the head or touching things. Vocal tics include sniffing, throat-clearing, grunting or repeating words. Many people feel an urge, like an itch, just before a tic, and a tic can sometimes be held back for a while, but it tends to return.

Tics are common in childhood, usually start between the ages of about five and ten, and are more common in boys. Many fade within a year or improve in the teenage years. When both movement and vocal tics last more than a year, the condition is called Tourette's syndrome. Tics are thought to involve the circuits in the brain that control movement, and they often run in families. They tend to get worse with stress, anxiety, excitement or tiredness, and ease when a person is calm or absorbed. They are not caused by bad parenting, and they are not a habit a child could simply drop.

Many tics need no treatment beyond understanding. When they are troublesome, behavioural therapies that teach a competing response can help, and medicines are sometimes used. A short-lived flicker of an eyelid is different again: see eye twitching.

The emotional meaning of tics

Spiritually, tics are read as a release valve. Inner tension that has had no other outlet finds its way out through a small, repeated movement or sound.

A very emotional nature, holding a lot in

Tics are often associated with a sensitive, emotional nature that keeps a lot of aggressiveness inside. Through the tic, worry and a hidden bitterness find a way to be expressed without being spoken. The question is not whether you are an angry person, but which irritation has never had a safe place to go.

Backed against the wall

Tics can appear when you feel stuck in a dead end, cornered, short of time, as if a danger were close. Something seems about to explode, perhaps your own feelings. Sometimes there is a sense of a family secret or an unspoken matter that wants to come into the open.

Movements that were not allowed

Another theme is movement that was once held back. Perhaps, as a child, you were told again and again to sit still, for example during a long ceremony, or you lived the rules around you as strict and demanding of perfection. Spiritually, the body may now move by itself, as if in protest against what was forbidden. As an adult, you can ask whether that old sense of restriction is still with you. This is a question about your own experience, never a verdict on the people who raised you.

Face, eye and jaw tics

The spiritual interpretation gives a few nuances depending on where the tic shows:

• Facial tics are linked to the feeling of having "lost face" in front of someone. The face seems to want to push away a danger or someone who felt threatening. You were irritated or put on edge, and now it is your own tics that irritate you.
• Jaw tics are associated with having often been told, as a child, to keep your mouth shut. Unexpressed rage comes out through the jaw, as if you were speaking in silence. See also jaw pain.
• Unusual blinking may recall a moment when someone was "making eyes" at you. In French, faire de l'œil means to wink or make eyes at someone. Blinking tics can also ask whether you are looking for someone's attention and gaze without finding it.

For twitches elsewhere in the body, the guide to body twitching covers each area.

A gentler way to hold it

The invitation is to become aware of what the tic may be carrying, without fighting it.

• Stop fighting the movement. Notice the urge with curiosity instead of shame. Fighting a tic usually feeds the tension around it.
• Give the energy a door. Move on purpose: run, dance, swim, drum or sing, so the body has a chosen way to let tension out.
• Clear what the past held in. Write about a time you were told to be quiet or keep still, and what you would have liked to say or do.
• Say what you need. Practise one clear sentence a day that names a need, a limit or a feeling.
• Look for real attention. Ask the people you trust for the time and attention you are missing, in words.