A curiosity question: does anyone else do teeth-tapping? This refers to lightly tapping ones teeth to the tune or beat of either the tune in their head or a tune being played out loud, similar to how one might tap fingers or feet. The tapping is not hard enough to really hurt the teeth—and is definitely not akin to grinding. Growing up, one of my older brothers would tap his feet and drum his fingers a lot, and I would see him get scolded or criticized or be talked about by various people (for more than that too), so even though I also will foot tap and finger drum, somewhere along the line I think I subconsciously developed teeth-tapping as a masking strategy to still tap in settings where I was trying to also follow the social rules I had learned about by watching my brother get ‘in-trouble’ for breaking those social rules. (To clarify, my parents never said much to him about it—my dad would maybe say something if it had gotten to be more than he could bear and needed a break from it, but my dad always did it nicely)

Posted by D C at 2022-09-20 17:20:51 UTC