My last post has me thinking a little more about misophonia. In case you missed that post and need a definition: Misophonia is a neurological disorder in which sound cues are misinterpreted within the central nervous system. The word means “the hatred of sound.” People have misophonia are triggered by specific, entirely mundane sounds, responding with irritation, rage, panic, the need to flee. People describe it as feeling as if they are being driven mad.
Me. I am “people.” I’ve been dealing with this for decades. In responding to comments on yesterday’s post, some new thoughts came up for me.
First is the inherent meanness of misophonia. It’s bad enough that common sounds make misophones feel as if they’re going crazy. But it also makes them feel like bad people. They must be bad if they feel such violent rage — often toward beloved family members. So you don’t just suffer from the trigger, you also question your inherent goodness as a human. And then I responded to Ramona’s comment and realized that, on top of suffering from the trigger sound, if you aren’t always able to control your response, you might lash out at the person making the sound, and that person would have no idea what they’d done or why you were acting so irrationally. Thanks, misophonia.
Misophonia was only made an officially recognized disorder in 2000 or 2001 (sources disagree). Twenty years ago! How in the world is that possible? People have surely been suffering from this for about forever. I’ve been dealing with it since I was a kid, and that was a thousand years ago, so … where was the medical profession all this time?
But it makes sense, right? It would never have occurred to me to say to anyone, “Oh, you know, when you make that sound, I want to grind you into dust.” Because who would ever say that? And because “that sound” was usually something harmless and normal like taking a breath or whispering. So being set off by a trigger sound is maddening and makes you feel like a secretly-homicidal person. Who wants to talk to the doctor about that? And as I type that, I realize that I’ve know about this for years, and I’ve never once mentioned it to my doctor!
I need to do a little research, find out how this disorder finally made its way into the light. I joked in last night’s post about misophones uniting and shouting, “We’re here! We’re here!” like in Horton Hears a Who, desperately trying to get the attention of the world’s doctors. Of course, that wouldn’t have happened, because so many of the sounds involved in that mass uprising would have triggered more than half the assembled crowd, and everyone would have fled. 🙂
Disorders are “discovered” all the time — quotation marks deployed because in most of those cases, people have been suffering for any number of decades and it just takes a while for medicine to catch up, but damn. That’s so cruel.
Lakshmi commented that living in a city must make it harder to deal with misophonia. Do you know, until I read her words, it had never once occurred to me that living in this huge, many-peopled city must absolutely have made this disorder worse for me. Just from the greater number of people I encounter in a day, the triggers would increase exponentially. And, by the same token, the fact that I’ve spent so much of the last two years alone in my house has meant that I’ve had significantly fewer run-ins with trigger sounds. How have I not seen that?
One of the articles I read about misophonia talked about ASMR helping people calm down triggered. Um … no. Not me, at any rate. That’s for certain. ASMR is a trigger. That whispery nonsense makes me want to slap the speaker. Ugh. Calming? I mean, if “calming” is another way of saying “setting me off.”
I really do feel as if I talk about misophonia a lot. I haven’t posted that much about it here, but I think I’ve posted a number of times on FB. Each time I write about it, there are many people who comment that a) they’re learning about it for the first time as they read my post, and b) that they or someone they know suffer from it. Meanwhile, all the articles say how rare misophonia is, that only 15 – 20 percent of the population deals with it. It’s unlikely that I just happen to know a huge number of that small 15 – 20 percent. I’m not buying it. What rings more true is that most people have never talked to their doctors about it. Misophonia makes us keep the suffering to ourselves, so the number of folks who have it is dramatically undercounted. I mean, I’m a total over-sharer, and we’ve already established that I’ve never mentioned this to my doctor. Definitely a serious under-counting.
Does it matter that people don’t know about misophonia? What difference would it make if more people were aware? Well, for one, more sufferers would know they aren’t evil and insane. Yes, that’s a big one. But also, people who don’t suffer from it would (maybe?) be more understanding when a misophone snaps at them to stop yawning so loud, stop shuffling their feet, stop chewing with their mouths open. Maybe. Or at least they might not take it so personally. Well, except for the open-mouthed chewing. Please take that personally. And stop. Stop right now. People, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON TO CHEW WITH YOUR MOUTH OPEN!!!
Ahem. <pats hair back in place>
The unfortunate truth is that there isn’t a lot anyone can do to help someone who has misophonia. I mean, I have my self-soothing tactics, and sometimes they work. Interestingly, one of the things that helps the most is recognizing what’s happening. Having the lightbulb moment of knowing that I’m responding to a trigger doesn’t erase the sound’s power … but it sort of does, too. It can make me feel less out of control. And that helps me remember to use other tools to calm myself. I can listen to music or white noise. I can walk away from the sound, from the person making the sound. I can engage the noise-maker in a different way so that they stop doing whatever it is that has me wishing an anvil would fall on their head.
There are a number of studies being conducted — there’s an International Misophonia Research Network, for example, and a Misophonia Research Fund. It’s encouraging to see that people are working to find treatment options. One interesting treatment I read about was wearing hearing aids that play a relaxing sound. There is still the DIY treatment of reducing stress and getting more sleep. That’s what I’ll be focusing on. That and remembering that throat-punching is generally frowned upon.
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