Misophonia has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It put a wedge between my core family and myself as they could not understand how painful and upsetting their sounds were to me. Many times my mother would get mad at me for showing disgust or my brother would enhance the sounds to deepen the wounds these sounds caused. My father would simply laugh in my face. I learned to avoid everyone and never…ever let on that a sound bothered me. I learned to disassociate during meal times as a child.
My Trigger List
nose whistle or hiss
Close breathing
Grunting
Slurping foods
Smacking lips
Licking of any kind by any creature
Sticky spit sound
Crunching
Gulping
The sound of the air in a persons mouth when they put a chip into their mouth and are about to crunch into it (weird I know)
Anything cracking or crackling including a fire
Clicking sounds
NAILS CLACKING ON A TABLE!!! (even the word clacking)
High Heels
Fat thighs in pantyhose rubbing together when a person walks
Any clothing sounds at all
Paper tearing
Breathing
Sighing
Sucking teeth
some keyboards
the sound of a plastic straw going in and out of a plastic lid
Straws sucking the last drop of something
Accents with my area accent being the most annoying
When I was a child I would react to hearing someone with a thick accent by becoming embarrassed even if the person talking wasn’t a part of the group I was in or talking to me or someone with me. Over the years this embarrassed reaction continued but now includes anger and a judgment about the persons intelligence. I try hard to deal with this, but instead found isolation to be safest. I kept my feelings to myself and never shared this part with anyone. What shocked me was overhearing 2 of my children talking about how much they loathed to hear accents. These same two children (Male and Female) also have misophonia. My daughter and her husband were chatting with my husband and myself exchanging stories. My daughter related a story of when her husband began eating a bowl of cereal next to her on the couch. She turned and looked at him like she wanted to kill him. My son in law said he got up and left the room to eat his cereal.My husband laughed and said he knew the exact look and does the same thing. It helped a lot to joke about it with people who got it and people who had empathy for my issues with sound. A last note is my son’s problem extends to the written word as well as audio sounds. He explained that he experiences the same type of anger over certain phrases being written as he does with someone smacking a piece of gum.
My reactions to trigger sounds is anger. In my mind I feel disgust, rage, contempt….I resist striking out to hurt the person causing the sound because I know I am the one with the issue (according to society). I’m not interested in going through desensitization or management treatments… isolation works best for me.