Define This: Oral Compulsion

I was always a very oral child. Mom has told me how she and my father used to despair, convinced that I was permanently walking around one minute away from choking on the latest whatever I had popped into my mouth. I sucked my thumb, I chewed my pencils, I bit my nails, I gnawed on my dolls. I am not going to say that if it was long and thin, I had to have it in my mouth - so far as I was concerned, I had standards, and if something tasted nasty or didn’t feel right, I would never try it again. But you have to try it once, just to find out, right?

My first visit to an emergency room, apparently, was for something I swallowed. My first major childhood trauma was when I discovered I’d chewed Barbie’s hand off. My parents were non-smokers, but I couldn’t wait for the chance to find out if I was, and I developed an early fascination for the books and films of Sherlock Holmes, simply because I admired his pipe.

My first romantic dreams and imaginings invariably involved a soft hand on my face, firm fingers on my lips, and my tongue and teeth exploring them...and yes, as I got older and heard about other things, there was one that went straight to the top of the to do list. Where it remains to this day, long after most of my other childhood chew toys have been forgotten, or even induce frowns of disapproval from me. I am very selective about what I put in my mouth.

Yet all of this, according to the most commonly held definitions, places me firmly in the ranks of the world’s oral compulsives. Good news for my boyfriend, bad news for whatever smoking cessation therapy my doctor will be recommending next time I see him. I still chew pens, but I gave up chewing gum when they started to stuff it with artificial sweeteners. I occasionally bite my nails, but I no longer snack on doll parts. And my dentist, who I’ve been seeing since childhood, no longer lectures me on the subjects that I think I once knew by heart and which, apparently, are all ranked high among the primary symptoms of an oral compulsion (or fixation - the terms are interchangeable, although the latter has fallen from fashion lately).

Sucking my thumbs. It can knock everything out of alignment.

Lip biting or sucking. Apparently it can shift the upper teeth out of position. Or the lower ones, if you enjoy extending your bottom jaw and latching teeth onto your top lip.

Tongue thrusting - that is, swallowing food and drink with the tongue at your teeth, rather than the top of your mouth. It’s how babies swallow before they get teeth, and you’re meant to stop when they first poke through. Oral compulsives, apparently, don’t.

Ah. He’s stopped lecturing me, but have I stopped doing them? Thumb sucking, yes. I stopped that when I discovered nail biting. Tongue thrusting, yes. I think. Lip biting...sometimes when I’m thinking, especially when I’m writing, I catch myself having a quick gnaw. But that’s not a compulsion, that’s just a way of concentrating, right?

Which is usually my response when I wonder why I do any of this stuff. As a child, we are told thumb sucking is a form of self-comforting, which is fair enough. The world is big and scary and it gets bigger and scarier with every passing day, as your eyes and mind widen to all that is out there. Psychiatry suggests that the thumb becomes a surrogate for the mother’s nipple (or however else you were fed as an infant), and that makes sense.

Later, it could just be curiosity - this is pretty, is it edible? Or boredom. Or nervousness. Or any of the myriad other things that go through a child’s mind and dictate its behavior, that we lose touch with as we age. But it could also be because it feels good to have something in your mouth. It’s relaxing. It’s enjoyable. And yes, it helps me concentrate.

To be honest, I think a lot of this compulsion/disorder/syndrome stuff is nonsense, a modern need to explain away every single idiosyncrasy that a person might have, to neatly file it away in a box. Which, of course, is a leading symptom of an obsessive/compulsive disorder! Somewhere, someone is currently developing a treatment to help you break the habit of putting your left shoe on first every morning. As if it matters to anyone apart from a pharmaceutical industry that has discovered that if you attach the word “disorder” to a perfectly normal habit, you can probably market a drug to cure it.