Tag: misophonia

Patterns in misophonia & sound sensitivity: humans vs nature

moe Leave a comment

Since I was little, I have had misophonia and sensitivity to sounds. The misophonia is mostly triggered by chewing and paper and plastic rustling, and the sound sensitivity mostly to loud sounds and noise.

GENERAL PATTERNS

I have noticed some general patterns.

My system is more sensitive when I am exhausted or stressed, and it’s much easier if I am rested and relaxed.

The misophonia and sound sensitivity is triggered more easily when the sound is ongoing. The reaction builds up over time.

And I get more stressed if I think I am unable to do something about it. If I cannot do anything about the source, if I don’t have anything to put in my ears (often tight earbuds with music), or if I cannot remove myself from the sound. (That’s why traveling with others in a car, bus, train, or plane can be stressful for me.)

If I am more resourced, the sound doesn’t last too long, and I can do something about it, it’s much easier to deal with.

THE SOURCE OF THE SOUND

And there is also a difference depending on the source of the sound.

If the source of the sound (for instance, chewing sound) is a non-human being or a baby, it’s usually completely fine with me. I may notice a small reaction far in the background, but it’s OK.

If the source is a human that’s not a baby, that’s when the misophonia is triggered.

And it’s the same with noise sensitivity. If the source is humans, it can feel overwhelming. If the source is nature, it’s typically fine.

For instance, I am currently in the countryside in the Andes mountains (El Caucho outside of Barichara). Yesterday, there was construction noise nearby which I noticed bothered me. This morning, a neighbor had the radio on loud, which bothered me. (Especially since it’s Sunday at 5:30 am), while the guacharacas loudly crowing much earlier didn’t bother me at all.

WHAT THIS SUGGESTS

This suggests that my reaction is mediated by my mental field.

If the source is “innocent” as my mind sees it, there is less reaction.

And if I have stressful thoughts about the source, the reaction is stronger. Some of the thoughts I have identified and explored are “they should know better”, “the sound is aggressive” and “this is a symptom of our destructive civilization” (loud machines, chain saws, leaf blowers), “he is inconsiderate”, and so on.

WHAT I CAN DO ABOUT IT

These patterns give me several cues for what I can do about it.

I can continue to support my system to rest and build up energy. (I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome so this is important for me in general.) I can make sure to get good sleep. Eat well. Rest before, during, and after any activity, and extra. Take my vitamins and herbs. (Vitamin D, Siberian Ginseng, and Echinacea seem especially helpful.) Receive energization with Vortex Healing. (Amazingly helpful.)

I can continue to find ways to manage the situation when it happens. I have earbuds with me. For longer travels, I bring noise-canceling earphones. If I am about to travel with people in a car, let them know in advance. If I am in a public space and people close to me are loud, I go somewhere else. And so on.

I have found it helpful to ask myself some questions. Is this too the voice of the divine? (I notice it directly so it’s not a “trick” and I’ll still do the other things.) How I would respond if the source was a baby or non-human being? Are not humans and human civilization also nature?

I can also explore mental representations triggered by these sounds, what they mean to me (underlying assumptions, associations), how I relate to them, and what’s more true for me. I have already done this with The Work of Byron Katie and the Kiloby Inuiries, and it has helped a lot, and there is more to discover.

WHAT’S THE CAUSE?

What’s the cause of misophonia and sound sensitivity?

I am not sure. It’s likely a combination of several things:

My stressful thoughts about the sounds and what they mean.

How resourced my system is.

We evolved in a generally much more quiet environment than many of us live in today, and this likely puts a lot of stress on our system. It’s not surprising if some of us are extra sensitive to sounds and noise.

And it doesn’t matter so much. I have some ways to work with it anyway.

Image by me and Midjourney. And, no, I won’t keep going on with black-and-white woodcuts forever! It’s just what I am drawn to right now.

tagged: autobiography, chronic fatigue, currently, evolution, evolutionary psychology, inquiry, living inquiries / kiloby inquiries, misophonia, noise, sensitivity, sound, the work of byron katie   

The voice of God

moe Leave a comment

Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound”, was proposed in 2000 as a condition in which negative emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions are triggered by specific sounds.

Wikipedia entry for misophonia

I have a history of misophonia. Predictably, it’s stronger when I am very tired or stressed, and less so when my energy reservoirs are fuller and I am more content. And I have found it very helpful to explore stressful beliefs around it (The Work), stressful sensation-thought connections in my mind (Living Inquiries), enemy images (inquiry, heart-centered practices), and undoing the energy and consciousness components creating it (Vortex Healing). Reducing the overall stress level of my nervous system with therapeutic tremoring (TRE) also helps.

Perhaps because of this work, there is now space for making use of a simple pointer or shortcut.

I hear the neighbor making noise (using bandsaw and chain saw to cut wood). And I either remind myself this is the voice of God and then take time to notice. Or I ask myself is this the voice of God? which also helps me notice.

What does it help me notice? It has to happen here and now, for myself, and it’s always new, so putting it into words can be a sidetrack. And it can also be a pointer for own exploration. Right now, what I notice is that the noise happens within and as consciousness. It happens within and as this awake, alive space. In a sense, it happens within and as what’s capacity for any content of experience, including this alive consciousness. To me, the noise and everything else that happens in my sense fields happens within and as awake consciousness. Even the “me” happens within the sense fields and within and as this consciousness.

That’s really all I can say about it. Although if I take it one step further, which many spiritual traditions do, I can say that everything is the divine, Spirit or God. It gives it a little extra oomph.

So when I ask myself is that sound also the divine? I notice that the sound too happens within and as awake and alive consciousness. As a side-effect, it helps me notice that any reactions in me to the sound – thoughts combined with sensations – also happens within and as the same consciousness. So my “center of gravity” shifts out of this a bit and a little more into what I already am, which is this consciousness all happens within and as.

Aside from that, I get to notice that the noise helps me see what’s left in me of beliefs, identifications, and emotional issues. (This is endless but at least it shows me what to explore next.) And it’s a reminder for myself that all is God’s will. Everything that happens are movements within the whole and has infinite causes stretching back to beginningless time and out into endless space. And, in yet another way, it’s all life expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself. When I am distressed by the noise, the noise, the distress, and the idea of it happening to someone separate, is all part of this exploration (Lila).

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tagged: inquiry, living inquiries / kiloby inquiries, misophonia, natural rest   

Resolving misophonia: my case

moe Leave a comment

Misophonia is a bit of a mystery. At least in the mainstream, and when it comes to explaining what causes it and how to best resolve it.

I have had it for as long as I can remember. Certain sounds – especially chewing and turning newspaper pages – create a good deal of discomfort in me. And, perhaps related, I also have sensitivity to certain forms of noise. Especially loud talking and machines, and especially machine sound I experience as aggressive.

It’s clearly selective. The sounds of children and animals are OK and even enjoyable. I can listen to animals eat loudly and be completely fine with it. I can listen to a loud waterfall or a storm and enjoy it very much. And there is a clue right there. Most likely, there is something about my thoughts about and associations with certain sounds that create the distress in me.

When I first encountered The Work about fifteen years ago, I used it on my reactivity to certain sounds. I found my thoughts about it (she is loud, she disrespectful, she is mindless, he is crude, he is inconsiderate, he takes her anger out through being noisy etc.), questioned these thoughts, and found what is more true for me. That helped. But it didn’t completely resolve it.

Now that I have Vortex Healing, I have begun exploring how to best resolve it through this (very efficient and thorough) healing modality. Since it’s a long-standing issue for me, I need to address it from several different angles to be more thorough.

The obvious is the surface examples of sound irritability. I am addressing specific themes and instances, for instance, chewing, newspaper rustling, loud talking, loud machines (lawn movers, construction near my house etc.). Addressing this takes care of the surface layer.

Then, I asked myself, what’s my earliest memory / memories of being annoyed or distressed by sound? Or – when I feel distressed by certain sounds today, what’s an early memory of feeling like that? The answer is, not surprisingly to me, the sound of my mother nagging my father. I remember this from early in on life, and it was quite distressing to me as a kid (and later). So this is another one to address as a theme and through specific instances.

And even deeper is not just the sound of my mother nagging my father, but my own emotional issue around her nagging my father. This is an even deeper root of my sound sensitivity. And it’s an issue that, most likely, influences me and my life in a lot more ways than just reactivity to certain sounds.

This is an example of how addressing underlying causes of something that, on the surface, can seem quite trivial, can bring healing to many areas of life, and sometimes in surprising ways. I assume that when I have resolved these issues in me in a deeper way, some of the ways this healing shows up in my life may be quite unexpected.

I’ll report on how this goes later, when I have worked on it a bit more and have had opportunity to test it in a variety of real life situations.

Is misophonia completely, or in all cases, rooted in early sound-related distress? I don’t know. I assume there may be a genetic predisposition, as there is with most things. And some epigenetics at work. And perhaps something else. But I am pretty sure that addressing it through, for instance, a combination of inquiry and energetic healing can be quite helpful and effective in most cases.

Note: When I use Vortex Healing on this, I use – among other things – denetworking (to denetwork the issue from related, intertwined issues), clearing the energetic blueprints, and generally clearing the conditioning around it.

Update: As I have explored this in smaller chunks over a few days, I notice another branch of what may be behind the misophonia. I have a reaction to younger men who speak loudly and with (false) bravado. As a teenager, I strongly disliked teenage boys who behaved with this false bravado. I had value-laden judgments about them. I didn’t want to be like them. I didn’t want to be around it. And even now, I notice a reaction in me to hearing loud people with this kind of (apparently false) bravado. So that’s another branch to explore and invite to resolve. And it’s an example of an issue that is directly related to my reactivity to certain sounds, and probably impacts my life in other areas as well. So I get double benefit from working on it, and it may help my life in people I don’t expect. (Also, I will probably be less of a bother to others in these situations.)

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tagged: autobiography, healing, inquiry, misophonia, the work of byron katie, vortex healing   

Misophonia: Rustling of newspaper in a coffee shop

moe Leave a comment

Last fall, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop, feeling the familiar stress from someone reading the newspaper nearby, and taking it to inquiry. I asked one of my favorite mining questions: What’s my earliest memory of feeling like this?

I was brought right back to elementary school. Sitting in the classroom with my classmates. Feeling stress from taking a test. Hearing the rustling of paper. The stress I experienced now, sitting in a room with several other people, hearing the rustling of paper, mirrored the stress I felt back then. I experienced the situation as threatening then, and I did the same now. The rustling of paper, which to most would be a completely neutral or even comforting sound, to me was a threat. At a deeper neurological level, it even felt like a life and death situation. Seeing this, and doing more inquiry on it, greatly reduced the stress I experienced in those situations. (There is still more to look at.)

I can’t help wonder if not misophonia – in many or most cases – have these type of origins. Early in life, we experience threat and stress, a particular sound is associated with the situation, and whenever we hear that sound later in life, it triggers the original sense of threat and stress.

I should mention that feeling stress and a sense of threat from the sound of rustling paper wasn’t limited to coffee shops. The stress I experienced – and partly still am experiencing – came up whenever I heard the rustling of paper, or I was sitting down in a confined space with people (train, bus, airplane), and especially when the two were combined.

tagged: inquiry, misophonia   

Misophonia

moe Leave a comment

I have had misophonia since I was quite small.

I remember visiting my aunt and cousin, and having to eat at a separate table because I could stand listening to my cousin (whom I liked and like very much) eating with her mouth open….!

It’s only recently that I learned it even had a name, and I just downloaded Joey Lott’s book How I solved my Sound Sensitivity Problem. (Haven’t read it yet.)

Here are some things that I have found helped, and I am still exploring these…..

Using the Living Inquiries to see if I can find…..

A boundary between me and the sound (or the source of the sound). F.ex. look at the image of a boundary. Can it separate anything?  Feel the sensations associated with the boundary. Can those sensations separate anything? Are they a real boundary?

A threat. A threatened one.

Sound. Annoyance. Discomfort. Misophonia.

Also, with the help of inquiry, feel sensations as sensations, when they come up apparently triggered by a sound.

Find love for the part of me that’s distressed. Seeing it’s here to protect the imagined self. It comes from love.

Releasing tension around it through neurogenic tremors, while bringing stressful sound-related situations to mind. (Tension and Trauma Release Exercises.)

tagged: misophonia, sound