[Balladeer]

Having gone through therapy for misophonia over the last year, I'm happy that research on the phenomenon has progressed quite a bit since I last gave up on treatment back in the early 2010s. While not 100% gone, I find my misophonia response is nearly gone and I now have skills to deal with it should a response happen. (My therapist's goal was to take misophonia "from the size of an elephant down to a mouse.")

Some interesting things to look for here in the comments of folks describing their own experiences:

- occurrences are often much stronger with family members or friends

- occurrences are often stronger at home or in places that "should" be safe and controllable.

- the content of the sound is what matters (e.g. chewing, engines, tapping, etc), not strictly the quality of the sound (loudness, pitch, etc) -- that's a different thing called hyperacusis

- misophonia often forms in childhood

Anyway, for the many folks here suffering from it: yes, misophonia is real, but also, it is treatable.

[throwawaynoise]

Hello, would you mind sharing details on the treatment?

I’m really struggling at the moment with this and have moments of utter desperation.

For example an old woman moved in next door who shouts when she talks in a language other then English (Mandarin) - literally all day from morning to night. The constant background noise drove me into depression - it felt like there was no escape. I work from home.

I knew things were getting serious when despite wearing ear plugs and noise cancelling headphones over them when trying to sleep, I could still hear her talking - which was impossible. I was hearing voices in my head.

Things have improved as after repeated attempts to communicate to her through translated messages (she doesn’t speak English at all), she keeps the windows shut on the side of the house that matches mine.

Now I no longer hear “her voice in my head” and the induced depression had lifted.

But the sensitivity to sounds remains and I enter fight or flight response constantly at home.

I suspect getting permanent tinnitus from a Covid infection was a compounding factor in the heightened sensitivity.

Any advice on how to get a grip on this situation would help.

I was also diagnosed with ADHD recently.

[Balladeer]

I can empathize with you; I do hope you're able to find some relief.

My treatment was basically a targeted form of Cognitive behavioral therapy.

The first big hurdle was to learn that I had developed 'toxic hopefulness' regarding the behaviors of others: I had taught myself to eat quietly (because as a kid I learned that was the morally correct thing to do), and so I believed that because I could do it, it was reasonable to expect every other person in the world to change like I had. This is why the sounds of the city -- sirens, cars, crowds -- didn't bother me, but a single person eating did: because I had attached a moral judgement to 'correct' eating as a child.

Now, when the whole world didn't change to eat quietly like I did, I developed deep-seated moral indignation, which I covered with anger (I am very much a 'flight' person in life, except for when my misophonia triggers, and I have an emotional reflex to 'fight').

And because I was embarrassed about that anger, I added a layer of anxiety, where I was hyper-vigilant to sounds that might set off a misophonic response, which, in turn, made me that much more susceptible to people eating, or anything that could sound like someone eating. It turns out the first quarter-second of most sounds (opening doors, engines starting, boots stomping, etc) can sound like the crunch of a chip to a brain that's anxiously awaiting eating sounds.

So, if I had to boil my therapy down to a few points (and for reals -- I'm not a therapist, this is just my personal experience) it was:

1) come to terms with my toxic hopefulness and accept that there are entirely predictable ways in which the people will never change to accommodate me.

2) learn skills to manage the emotional reaction to hearing a triggering sound. For me, this came down to variations on telling myself, "This activity is natural. It is okay for people to make noise while eating" while imagining a triggering situation. I started really simple, for seconds at a time, before building up to more intense imaginal situations.

Those two combine such that it took a stronger sound to 'trigger' my misophonia, and when triggered, I developed skills to managed my emotional reflex, which in turn made the hypervigilant anxiety about getting triggered go down, which made it harder to trigger a response, which meant the skills I learned were more effective, and so on in a self-healing cycle.

Hope that helps a little.

[albert_e]

Wow. I have no experience with therapy but that sounds pretty personalized and useful. Your articulation is also great.

That makes me wonder if in a lot of places around the world the effectiveness of care and therapy is severely handicapped by the inability to communicate / articulate these nuances -- on the part of both the patient and the therapist. (Here in India for example we pride ourselves on having so many languages. Oftentimes this causes real practical issues too. For example in metropolitan areas like Bangalore -- local residents face challenges like being unable to communicate with their bank teller due to lack of a common language between both. Non natives from elsewhere in the country are also inconvenienced if not discriminated, excluded and intimidated basis language. In such a chaotic environment having a deeply meaningful communication channel with your therapist sounds almost like an impossible ideal.)

[Balladeer]

Yeah, having a nuanced vocabulary to talk about misophonia really helped me. Even just in the context of English, the vocabulary just wasn't there back in the early 2010s when I first sought out treatment; basically all you could find as a lay-person was articles like "What is this 'misophonia' thing? Is it even real?".

Thankfully, the field has developed in the last decade, but I can only imagine that if people find themselves struggling to conduct day-to-day interactions due to language differences, then trying to talk about something as nuanced as misophonia responses would be unreasonably difficult, if not impossible.