Misophonia
By: Lm Botha
Tags: Sarcasm, Personal Essay, Auditory Hallucinations, Life Lessons, Humor

Do certain sounds drive you crazy?

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If some sounds literally make you feel anxious, uncomfortable, or like you want to run away you may have mild misophonia. If the sounds cause you to feel rage, anger, hatred, panic or fear you may have severe misophonia. Or you may simply be grumpy and like your peace and silence.

Misophonia is not recognized as a disorder in the DSM-IV and it is not classified as either a hearing or psychiatric disorder. It does appear to have some parallels with anxiety disorders though. The sounds that are triggering differ from person to person but some of the most common offenders are loud chewing, any mouth sounds, pencil tapping. It is thought that the constant repetition of the sound is what causes the distress of the person with Misophonia. Speaking about the sound of people eating, for some people it is so bad that they can’t stand the sound of themselves eating. Considering that fact my misophonia seems insignificant.

The sound that drives me to distraction, actually it drives me right out of the house, is the vacuum cleaner. I must leave when the domestic helper vacuums the house, so my weekly shopping takes place when the vacuuming gets done. Sometimes, just the sight of the vacuum cleaner out of its cupboard is enough for me to get agitated. The thing is my hatred of the vacuum cleaner noise is so intense that I can’t do the vacuuming myself. This means I must sweep instead and with three cats in the house sweeping isn’t nearly as effective as I need it to be. I sweep (thank goodness we have tiles throughout) and then I use the cordless handheld vacuum to suck up the pile of dirt and the broom bristles. While the sound is still grating, I can stand it as long as I’m the one doing it. I know it doesn’t make sense and I know many people think that if I can use the handheld vacuum then I should be able to use the big vacuum cleaner. Hell, I think so myself and I have tried but it just results in tears and rage. It is a ridiculous situation, and I would love to know why this is, maybe the vacuum cleaners have a different pitch in their sounds, or maybe it’s merely control issues.

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That reminds me of one of the jobs I had where we used to have coffee at our desks, and it was an open-plan office. There was one lady who stirred her coffee for what felt like 10 minutes with the teaspoon clinking against the cup the entire time! That was infuriating and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t very well ask her not to stir her coffee so noisily, could I? That would be pretty weird and offensive. Every time the lady in question got coffee, I would wait until the stirring started then go for a walk around the office, or to the bathroom, really anything that would get me away from the clinking teaspoon before I lived out my fantasy and dug her heart out with the teaspoon.

I don’t know if animals can have misophonia but I’m sure we can agree that they do react differently to certain sounds. My one cat, Baron, absolutely detests the sound of a chair being dragged on the tile floor. He will rush from wherever he is and bite the person making the noise. It’s not an attack, it’s a very controlled bite, firm so you know he means business but not hard enough to break the skin or cause pain. And he knows who made the noise, no mistake about that! On occasion, we forget to lift the chair instead of dragging it, but Baron reminds us of it quickly. Once, I noticed that the bed had moved away from the wall a little, so I pushed it up, flush against the wall. Obviously, the wooden legs scraped on the tiles and Baron came out of the bathroom and bit me on the calf. It happened so fast I didn’t even notice him until I felt the bite.

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Another interesting trick your hearing and mind can play on you is auditory pareidolia. However, auditory pareidolia and auditory hallucinations are not the same things. Many people experience auditory pareidolia and think that they are hearing things and go to the doctor thinking that they have schizophrenia because visual and/or auditory hallucinations are one of the symptoms. Auditory pareidolia is when a person hears a random noise (such as a fan) and perceives voices or words from or in the random noise (the fan noise).

The first time it happened to me I honestly thought I was going insane. I do have Bipolar and I thought that my cheese had permanently parted from my cracker. We had a fairly old window/wall air conditioner and every time I turned it on, I could swear it sounded like an old radio was playing very faintly inside the air con. The sound was indistinct, it was just, just too soft for me to make out the words. I fiddled with the air con, bashed the side a bit as one does with electronics that are being flaky. My husband walked in to see me with my ear pressed against the air conditioner turning it on and off. He thought I was nuts and you can’t blame him. I asked if he could hear the voices, he said no and asked if I had taken my medication that day. I eventually phoned my mother to tell her about this craziness and that’s when I found out that this is a real thing, and I wasn’t losing it after all. My husband did ask me not to stab him in his sleep that night.

Remarkable what your mind can get up to on occasion.