Good News Everybody - I've found a cure

[WheresThe Clip?]

We can shut down this forum once everyone has been through the program (good news eh)

https://www.thelindenmethod.co.uk/ticklehypothesis

 

[milagros317]

a quack

 

[BritishSteel]

Hmmmm......do I want to be cured? Nah, I think I'll stay the way I am, a tickle-lover through and through! 😀

 

[siamese dream]

Just from a basic look... It seems like they aren't really trying to cure ticklishness per se, but using the idea of the ticklish response as a comparison to other types of anxiety responses to things that are not dangerous or that don't represent such an immediate threat as to warrant obsessive fears and anxieties. It is true too that some people learn how to "stop being ticklish"... I have only heard of this in people who were tickled excessively, bullied and harassed in childhood by being tickled, usually by older children/siblings who were much larger and stronger, and eventually learned to "shut off" the ticklish reactions in order to get their bullies to stop doing this to them. Once they were able to shut off the response they usually remained non-ticklish or only ticklish when choosing to allow themselves to react into adulthood.

I don't think any of us here would want to cure ticklishness 😉 ...but the ideas on how to treat anxiety disorders might be useful to apply to unrelated phobias and fears causing discomfort or interfering with daily life.

 

[OmahaTickler]

quackery indeed. I've read a little about this in the past. Many here likely notice now and then how people say in posts here how someone's reaction to tickling was "oh, that's childish/kid's stuff." That actually once was mainstream scientific dogma, that tickling was something you shake when you become an adult----and if you don't, it means you're either full of angst, neuroses, or other psychological conditions that make you overly sensitive to stimuli. Goofy shit like that. Of course, as people noted, some have bad memories of abusive tickling growing up, but this is more broad, linking ticklishness with psychological health. They showed a Johnny Carson rerun from the '70s recently, with a creepy-ass psychologist on, who said he would be invited to schools to test children for psychological conditions through ticklishness, that the more ticklish, the more neurotic or otherwise angst-ridden the kid was.