Misophonia: This is the most
important thing I’ve read in my life
Years ago I chanced
upon an article about synaesthesia, in which stimulation of
one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in
a second sensory or cognitive pathway. The most common form of it is where letters or numbers are
perceived as inherently coloured. So I discovered a) that not all people
see numbers and letters as colours, and b) once I began to pay attention to
this, I realized there were all sorts of other ways
in which I was synaesthetic – such as experiencing numbers as 3 dimensional
objects with colour, texture and movement. No wonder I struggled with doing
even the simplest arithmetic.
A few years later
I read the very excellent books of Dorothy Rowe, with her descriptions of
Introversion and Extroversion, and began to form a more positive self-concept
of myself as an introvert – and hence– well, basically a super-cool person –
heheh.
Here’s a bit
of basic info about this that I just cut and pasted from a website, for those
who don’t already know it: “Psychologist Dorothy Rowe,
author of The Successful Self, explains: ‘Either we
are “people persons”, who judge ourselves in terms of how others respond to us,
or we are “what have I achieved today?” people.’
These
definitions have been widely used by psychologists ever since, as a way of
dividing personality types. One of the most popular assessments, the
Myers-Briggs personality test, considers extroversion and introversion in terms
of where an individual gets his or her energy from. According to this approach,
an extrovert tends to draw energy from interactions with other people, while an
introvert is more self-sufficient, drawing on his or her internal world.
The next
useful bit of insight for why I am so weird and always feel I don’t fit it came
from reading Elaine Aron's 1996 book The Highly Sensitive Person, which I have already written about in this
blog.
So, that’s enough for one person, isn’t it? Highly sensitive, introvert and synaesthetic.
But there’s one other totally weird, off-the-scale bonkers thing about
me that I have lived with all my life and thought was unique and inexplicable.
No-one else in the world was like me. I have spent years trying to find some
kind of explanation for it, even considered having hypnosis to help me with
it. And now, today - by pure chance – I came
across an article giving it a name: misophonia.
Sometimes
called selective sound sensitivity syndrome, misophonia is a baffling and
bizarre disorder. Sufferers feel an instantaneous, overwhelming rage - often
accompanied by physiological responses such as sweaty palms or a racing heart —
to certain sounds.
These
triggers are often chewing and eating sounds, sometimes barely audible. Some people report visual triggers such as
fidgeting or foot-bobbing, or even olfactory or tactile triggers.
Here’s the article
I stumbled across:
The first
time I ever noticed I didn’t like the noises people make while eating, I was literally
about 2 and a half years old. I still remember the moment. We were still living in
Alberta, Canada, where I was born, and my 2 older brothers had gone outside
into the back yard to play, my younger brother had been put down for a nap, as he
was still a baby, and I was enjoying a moment of quiet with my Mum, sitting at the
dining table, after lunch. Mum was reading a book, and I was musing in my
quiet, odd way over important questions like “If I shout really, really loud, then
stand very, very quiet, will I be able to hear the sound come all the way back
round the world to me again?” And “Why did the clock stop, never to go again,
when the old man died?”
(I’m not
making that up. I remember this so vividly I can even remember what I was
thinking at the time, and I did tell you I was weird – or at least, an unusual
child)
Then, my
mother started to eat some grapes.
Now - I do
have to say, in mitigation, m’lud, that my mother has believed for her whole
adult life that every mouthful must be
chewed a minimum of 37 times. Not 36 and not 38. 37. And in order to achieve
this totally unnatural way of masticating, it is necessary to push the food
back to the front of the mouth once it has been chewed the normal number of
times, say 15 or 16, and re-chew it. So, even if you are not misophonic, this
is not actually a very agreeable thing to listen to. But that does not really explain my reaction.
It was like having the inside of my skin sandpapered. It was really annoying. I commented on it to
Mum by saying “You make lots of noises when you eat those grapes, Mummy.” To
which my mother responded by laughing and popping another grape in her mouth. I distinctly recall that it took 3 grapes and
I was out of there. I was so small I had to ask Mum to get me down from the table.
Since then,
I’ve just had to learn to live with it. I’m usually ok if there is plenty of
background noise. Partners are simply informed - not asked, told - that I will
never eat a meal in a silent room with them. TV, radio, buzz of background
chatter, all help to mask the noise. I had one partner who actually deliberately
set out to annoy me by insisting we turn off the telly, then opening a bag of
sweets to start slowly chewing on them while she sat right next to me on the
sofa. Relationship didn’t last long after that. At one time I was married to a person of the
male persuasion who used to eat just like my Mum – he would chew even
ice-cream, or porridge, for 37 times, AND clonk his teeth together while he did
it.
What I
noticed about that was that mostly it doesn’t bother me at first, providing people are reasonably normal in their eating habits, but the better
I get to know the person, the more tuned into it I become, and the harder it is
for me to cope with it – because I can’t screen it out of my awareness. As I’ve
known my mother all my life, she could be chewing with a DC10 revving up in the
background, and I’d still be able to hear her.
So, as a family, we’d all
be sitting at the meal-table and every time Mum started to chew a new mouthful I’d
get this surge of anger. It freaked me out really. I mean, disgust and
irritation at the bad manners of someone who can’t keep their lips together
while they chew, yes – but anger? It would just come and go while she was chewing,
switching on and off like a tap.
I’ve even
tried some kind of psychological explanation – like - Mum started that slow eating thing, and clonking
her teeth together, as a form of dumb insolence when she was a teenager,
because of the way she was silenced in her own family, and the anger is still
there, and as I am an empath, I’m just picking up on that. I still think there
may be something in my theory about her doing it as a reaction to her own
family dynamics, especially as the teeth clonking is akin to teeth grinding
during sleep, which is definitely associated with anger. But I was only 2 years
old when I first had this reaction! Sensitive and too perceptive for my years, yes,
but at 2 years old you believe everything your mother does is good and nice –
you don’t start getting angry because of the noises she makes when she eats. You’re
more likely to just eat the same way.
Since I
moved in with Mum she has stopped clonking her teeth while eating, so at least that is not so bad, but she's added in a whole range of other sounds that drive me crazy to do with her breathing.
At first, when she was still mobile, I decided the only way I could survive meals
was to eat my food as fast as I could and leave the table. I know Mum thinks
this is bad manners, but it’s what I need to do. I’d shoot into the kitchen and
start to wash up. Now I’ve been doing this for so long, I’ve forgotten how to
eat at a normal speed.
But now Mum
is making noises all the time because of her breathing problems. She fills up
with mucous towards the end of the day and makes this kind of continuous throat-clearing
sound. And she kind of smacks her lips in what I can only describe as a wet Velcro
type of sound, because her mouth is so dry. Even when she’s not doing that
there is this kind of gravelly breathing sound. She can’t help it of course. But
I also can’t help the way I react to it. It’s a physical reaction. I’d really
love to be able to just sit with her in the evenings, but I simply can’t do it.
Reading this
article, I did just sit and cry. I
never did that about the HSP thing, or the introvert thing or the synaesthesia
thing. But this just got to me. It was the thing about the anger, really. I’m
not an angry person. I hate being angry. I freak myself out with that. Reading this,
I realize that I am not alone in this. My anger is just a physiological
reaction and not a judgement on my mother. It’s not even really anger, in any
real sense.
And of
course. I never act out on it.
It’s my
problem and it’s up to me to find my own solutions, as I have done. I have kept silent about my distress all my
life, apart from to a few close friends, and family. I know I can keep coping. But
having a name for it and knowing it’s a recognized phenomenon, even though it
has no cure or anything, makes it just that little bit easier.
No comments:
Post a Comment