I began experiencing misophonia around the age of 8, triggered by my mom’s constant burping. To cope with this I would mimick her burps or create my own noise to cover up her burping. When she caught on to what I was doing, she thought I was being rude and trying to disrespect her in some way. Being 8 years old I had no idea that I had a condition called misophonia, I thought it was just normal to be irritated by everyday sounds people made. Over the years, my intolerance to the sounds worsened when my mom stopped burping constantly and instead started coughing. The coughing triggers me so much more than the burping, but the burping still does trigger me when it occurs. I’m also triggered by her clearing her throat, but by far the coughing is the worst. My mom coughs approximately every 5 minutes or less, I’m worried she has some kind of chronic allergy or sickness of the sort, and my father and I have tried telling her for months to go to the doctor to get it checked out but she is very stubborn and refuses to listen to us. She’s had this cough for about 15 years but it has gotten worse the past 3 years or so. The coughing used to be very long and drawn out a few months ago and I used to be able to guess when it was coming by the sound of her intake of breath. This helped me because I was able to cover my ears and hum really loudly before she coughed so I wouldn’t have to hear it. Recently though her coughing has become more abrupt and I have no warning signal to when it’s coming, so it’s much harder to cope and block it out. In addition, she frequently clears her throat to prevent coughs sometimes (I suppose to relieve the itchiness felt in her throat). This clearing throat noise also triggers me a lot, as I’ve stated earlier. It’s not like a normal clearing of the throat, it’s more throaty and disgusting. To cope with this I usually clear my throat right when I hear her start to do it, so as to block out the sound. Of course, the past few years she’s noticed what I’ve been doing and she is not happy about it. She thinks I’m being disrespectful and that I’m doing it to spite her. I tried to explain to her that it’s misophonia (at this point I had discovered about it online) but she shrugged it off and forgot about it. She has always made fun of me or provoked me by faking coughs just to see how I would react. When I cover my ears she laughs at me. And recently when my dad had a really bad cold I would also cover my ears when he coughed and he has also started making fun of me for it. It really hurts that they’re not trying to understand why I feel this way. Because of them making fun of me and trying to provoke me, I’ve begun to feel ashamed and embarrassed. When my younger sister coughs I don’t have a reaction to it and she’s always making me feel guilty and questioning why I don’t have the same reaction to her coughs as I do with my mom. It really sucks to not have support. I try explaining it but they refuse to understand or take me seriously. When I visit home from college, I have to lock myself in my room and blast music because I cannot stand to be in the same room with my mom for long, or the noise will drive me crazy. It frustrates me to no end and makes me cry. If I’m not blasting music in my room on the second floor of the house, I can hear the coughing no matter where my mom is in the house. If she’s in the kitchen, the garage, the living room, the front yard, the backyard, her room, her bathroom, I can hear it wherever she goes. Because I have to isolate myself, this has affected my relationship with my family. I feel like my mom thinks I resent her or don’t like her, even though I’ve tried explaining that it’s not her but it’s the disgusting noise that comes out of her mouth. I don’t hang out with my family as much as I used to it, and I wish I could do something about it, but I feel so powerless about this situation. When I’m around my family I always have my guard up, waiting for that sound. I really hate living like this.