Introducing myself / asking for technique

[Guest guest]

Hello everyone -

Thanks for making this a very useful resource for those of us who deal with this

alienating condition. I am about to turn 25 and have been quite severely

inhibited by misophonia from the age of around 10-12. My symptoms are uncannily

similar to many of those in the forum here, and for that reason I wanted to

quickly share what is going on and hope to hear some of your reactions. This

condition is awful, but I also find it curiously interesting. It has become,

regrettably, a very central part of my life.

I want to start out by noting that I am a sound guy for a living. I record sound

for films, write software for sound art installations and spend the rest of my

time immersed in electronic music production. In fact I am writing this from the

middle of a sound installation that I am working on right now. Headphones are

glued to my head. Sound is my life, for better and for worse. I have always been

extremely responsive to music from a young age, and continue to have very

full-bodied physical responses to music today. Sound is just as associated with

euphoria for me as it is with horror.

My " fight or flight " reactions to sounds started, as with many of us here, with

my parents, and the triggers are common ones. It is very hard to remember the

first time I asked someone to close their mouth, but I can remember (with

nausea) countless hellish mealtimes, countless exasperated sighs, countless

waves of aversion and hatred. The sounds that I have come to have the strongest

adverse reactions to are the sounds of tongues peeling off the roofs of mouths,

of wet, squishy food sliming around the inside of a mouth… repeated over and

over with relentless certainty. The anticipation of it, the feeling of my skin

crawling, cold sweat and fear. My reaction is immediate and involuntary; one of

sickeningly potent rage. Against all rationale, all I can think about is

violently jamming my fork into the mouth of whoever is producing the offending

sounds. This is rage that I swallow and leave deep inside me to stew. My anger

at mealtimes was damaging to my family and started to multiply my feelings of

self loathing and despair from an early age. " what is wrong with me? " These

feelings have bled out into the rest of my life in major ways.

When I went to college, I more or less ceased to think about this problem

entirely. I considered myself absolved of these involuntary reactions.

It wasn't until I moved to New York City at the age of 23 that things took a

horrific turn for the worse. I don't know how many of you live in New York, but

if any of you do, you will certainly already know that gum chewing is some kind

of god damn national sport there. For my first few months riding the subway I

started to notice that everyone was chewing gum. Somehow I managed to stay calm,

to discipline my reactions to it. However, my control over the situation

dissolved gradually. The same old heart pounding feelings of rage and sweat and

complete and total revulsion swooped in and once again took a happy stranglehold

on my everyday life, triggered by something as benign, unavoidable and

widespread as gum chewers. I was also working a very stressful job and living in

an extremely loud environment (a house full of 13 full time jazz musicians), so

my overall vulnerability to my own mind's involuntary reactions was increased

quite a lot. I started to LOATHE gum chewers. The visual element became enormous

as well. The flagrant, ostentatious way that people smack gum with wide open

mouths pushed me to such extreme rage… I really got the feeling that they were

trying to offend me, irrationally. I started out glaring directly into their

eyes and later upgraded to growling " CLOSE YOUR MOUTH " in the ears of strangers,

punching walls, screaming out loud… feeling like no less than a completely

deranged psychopath. I apologize for being upfront/graphic, but the rage was at

the point where I really wanted to smash their heads into the cement. I would

have florid visions of violence and feel raw surging hatred deep in my bones for

the majority of every day. I started to tell EVERYONE about my problem because I

couldn't explain why I was so angry otherwise. My depression was hugely

overwhelming and I couldn't help but indulge in some death fantasies.

I moved out of new york because of misophonia alone. My first step was to try

out a Vipassana meditation retreat, with the desperate hope that it would help

me deal with this thing. Also, a free silent meditation retreat in the distant

woods where the rule was to shut up sounded like a dream to me. I failed to

account for one major issue: that I had just signed up for 8 hours a day of

sitting in a room full of 200 people with no sounds whatsoever except for the

disgusting little biological mouth sounds that I hated more than anything in the

world. In fact, at night times after I had spent the entire day simply digesting

myself with complete and total rage, I would continue to HALLUCINATE the sounds

in bed. And I would wake up with the sounds in my mind. And I regret to say that

this continues today, and that this meditation retreat (although I really

resonated with its philosophy and had high hopes for its ability to help ANYONE

master their own involuntary reactions to ANYTHING) ultimately exacerbated the

intensity of my reactions.

At this point I feel more out of control than I ever have before. I am more or

less homeless, traveling from sound job to sound job, severely depressed and

glaring with hatred at just about every stranger I come across without ANY

REASON WHATSOEVER, anticipating the gum chewing reaction. I am absolutely

desperate for a new way to think about this issue which my life has really been

revolving around for the last couple of years. I am traditionally highly opposed

to anti-depressants (I value my emotional range and creativity) but I am very,

very sick of spending my youth wading through this swamp of rage and severe self

hatred. This is a compromised way to live and I'm sick of it. I have been unable

to hold relationships, unable to feel content anywhere, unable to feel

enthusiastic about anything. I wake up miserable and go to sleep more miserable.

And I can't shake this feeling that this disorder is MENTAL and therefore highly

malleable.

I really see misophonia as being similar to a phobia, and amazingly when I

confront the sounds head on I can train myself not to hate them. It's when they

are in my periphery, when I have an INDIRECT relationship that it is the worst….

or when I am already raging about it. The worst is actually my imagination,

creating the reaction even when there is nothing around.

Thanks and nice to meet you