First of all, there’s always a small chance this is physical. Please make sure to bring this up to your GP.
If it’s not physical (and it probably isn’t), you will find the reason by answering the following questions:
What does this behavior allow you to do?
What does it allow you to avoid doing?
Who is the audience of the behavior?
To give an example, my mother suffered from horrific migraines for twenty years. The medical science was impotent to find a cause, let alone to offer relief. My mother’s very last migraine happened on the day before her youngest child moved out. Then she was cured. It’s a medical miracle.
The audience left, and the behavior was no longer needed. Mind you, this doesn’t mean the migraines weren’t real. They were very, very real. And so was the gain they brought her, outweighing the costs of the terrible suffering they inflicted.
With the accidents, you are either addressing somebody else or yourself. There’s something in your current situation that you want to change in the direction allowed to you by the accidents. Only you know what it is. When I advise people to remove themselves from the proximity of the sufferer, it’s not to be cruel. To the contrary, it might be very helpful to the sufferer to have the audience leave the theater.
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