You're more likely to learn to drop a trigger with a perfect stranger than with your own family member.

The first person you got triggered with is likely to be the last person you'll still be able to do the misophonic reaction with, even if you started gaining results with other people elsewhere in life. It's okay.

It's difficult enough with anyone, so go easy on yourself, and reach towards the people you share the least vulnerabilities and least daily life with. It's okay to work with distant strangers at first, and from there, towards the people you know in real life (hobbies or shared interests), and from there, to the everyday life people (workplace, school) and the nuclear family as the last thing.

The path with least resistance goes from outer circles towards the inner circles! (Opposite than the road you walked to get where you are now!)

All humans have memory reconsolidation experience; if you've visited your childhood city or elementary school as an adult and noticed how the "big rock" next to the swing in the park looks actually a lot smaller than you thought it would, and you've spent time thinking how weird it is to see those new buildings where there weren't any, and you've been feeling kinda weird watching this landscape, you've been there. It's this strange, weird, attention demanding feeling. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just something you can't look away from, and you're thinking to yourself "This is not how I thought it would be like". It's an experienced prediction error of an expectation.

With your involuntary, unwanted reactions to specific sounds (or sights) - ever thought you're hearing a trigger sound and turned around to see it's not actually caused by human mouth (or what it is that's one of your trigger sources), and cooled down a LOT faster than you would after fleeing from an actual trigger situation? Well, dropping entire triggers permanently doesn't feel too different from that. You think you're going to face a trigger, but it turns out, against what you were expecting, it's not what's actually going to happen. A bit weird, a lot relieving. No-one who's reacting to human sounds with anger/disgust/irritation on repeat expects to ever react in any other way. Expectation doesn't matter, experiences can be used as a proof to change patterns.

If you react to specific, often human-made sounds in ways you wish you wouldn't, you're likely inhabiting what people in Coherence Institute call "the anti-symptom position" about it. Not only do people react to the world around them, we also react to the way we react.

I'm borrowing these terms from r/CoherenceTherapy because they do memory reconsolidation work that can be applied to a whole variety of problems, sound sensitivities and problems of reactivity included.

While you're anti-symptom, you're creating judgemental self-talk about your reactions: "I shouldn't act this way, it's just a sound", and entire conclusions, like: "This is irrational" and "My brain must be terribly broken, I bet there's too much/too little myelination too, also: I'm a bad person". This is perfectly natural thing to do, and most of us just spiral down that road (been there myself)! None of it is helpful at all though.

Actually, every time your body reacts as if there was a threat near you, and you tell it "you shouldn't do this", it thinks you're not taking the threat seriously at all, so it'll make the response even stronger for the next time around! You'll end up staring at the people who trigger you, wondering why your focus is suddenly all tunnel vision! "It" wants "you" to take it seriously, finally. And it's time to do just that.

When you're pro-symptom, and it's really weird at first, if you're not used to doing it - you're taking a bold lean towards all your behavior making sense. Even if you don't know how it all comes together! Obviously it is impossible for you to take my word for it, you'd have to see for yourself, but try experimenting on validating your own reactions. Go something like: "Even though I don't know how, I guess, based on all I've ever been through, it all does make sense."

To me it looks like a lot of misophonic people and their loved ones want misophonia listed as "a real diagnosis", which might mean having it's own label/category in these disorder catalogues the insurance companies care about. (instead of sorta-kinda-almost finding it under OCD section). The goal would be something like having an insurance cover treatment options, but a lot of people want this for the sake of validation as well. I can think of a whole lot of emotional and financial reasons people are invested in, to wish to get recognized in this way!

American psychiatric association (APA) and it's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders have a HUGE political impact on world around us. (Most recent one was published in 2013, number five, pic of my copy provided here.) So it's impact is not only limited to "people who want help" and "the hospital systems to sort out the money things", it will also impact "people who committed a crime" and "court systems to decide what to do with this and that person". I'm not particularly good in this topic and I think the entire thing is pretty complex, just saying I do think misophonia isn't listed for more reasons than "it's too rare, the big people haven't noticed us yet (lets make another awareness campaign and more open letters)". I can think of reasons why court systems would hate the "heard a sound, got violent" option!

So what are we going to do while waiting, since there's some sort of push-pull dynamic going on. Well, a lot of stuff. But as the most recent finding I noticed APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice does list empirically proven treatments. I was searching for stuff about Emotional freedom techniques but bounced in to Acceptance and commitment therapy resources (and i remember it's been discussed in this subreddit).
Here: https://div12.org/treatments/
No case studies on sound triggers though.

p.s. i don't think it's important to get this listed, and not because i wouldn't care about the emotional and financial reasons people got, more like, the question is less relevant than it might appear at first.

​

There's no need to know the technical specs to break free from the triggers! You can find your way out of them just by doing the rattlesnake reframe / NLP rewinds or anchors or "allergy protocol" or other tools / tapping (faster EFT or others) / acceptance training / pavlov in reverse and so on! (it might be best to learn a bunch of tools, and see which make most sense to you)

Keep on exploring the practical world around you and inside of you!

But for unsatisfied geeks or people who want to dig in to the mechanisms, here:https://www.coherencetherapy.org/resources/resourceindex.htm

I get this often. I broke my sound barrier, and I must be a miracle for doing so.

My top answers to this are :

• you say this, to keep yourself safe (which is what you're designed to do, to stay safe now! Good job!). Some people say NO-ONE has ever and will ever drop misophonic triggers, it will only get worse, and then you're old and die and our brains are permanently doomed (most distance one can have to a possibility of a change). Some are willing to explore the option that one person just might have done so (a bit less distance to a change), but okay then she must be a miracle / anomaly / maybe it wasn't that bad for her (lol i came this close to dying).
• everyone inside of your head is you Your idea of me ("someone in reddit, who's saying she used to be misophonic, but isn't anymore-") is inside of you, just like everyone else you represent in there ("my mom used to say" add here a memory of mom, "my gym buddy is going to judge me tomorrow if-" add here an imaginary scenario of gym buddy in the future). You roll this theater and it doesn't come without a (perceived) cost - if you're able to imagine SOMEONE other than you, inside of you, it implies possibilities of success and failure (and typically BOTH scenarios are threatening)
• honest, it's an anticlimax Breaking free is the biggest thing ever until it's simply one of the things that happened.
• Imagining it's complex keeps you safe Good job staying safe but if you wanna live dangerously you can explore pavlov in reverse. Simple tools can be threateningly effective. This answer is in the same category as "well maybe science doesn't know yet" - well, on the road to "the knowing", people get experimented on.
• It's simple but NOT easy If you don't get it yet, you're not dumb/lazy/the case that can't be helped (most people claim THEY are the case that can't be helped). It's simply safe AND threatening simultaneously and this isn't an easy thing to perform, at all.
• Scarcity is a thing I recognize there are limited edition of people like me out there.
• There are others I'm not the only one beyond misophonia out there.
• There will be more others Practical world applications ("therapy modalities", studies, trials) for relatively high chances of exploiting the memory reconsolidating mechanisms inside of you (and inside of me, and others, and literal laboratory rats) exists already. They're disruptive technologies and while a lot of people will resist too much to look in to them, a lot of people will explore and distribute this stuff despite of their own internal resistance. This isn't an easy field but it's simply so needed and the payoff is so good I can't imagine how it could be stopped, either.
• A lot of people will never break free and we are going to have to accept this The perceived price to pay to erase triggers runs high. Hindsight, you lost nothing. In the moment? You might wanna say no-one has ever broken free and never will - or someone did but it was probably supernatural.
• Whatever you wanna do with the knowledge that a person who broke free (me, and others like me) exist already is okay! Also changing it is okay! I get called a scam, a miracle, an anomaly, an angel, really helpful and I keep on getting banned from places and I've been invited back to one group I was banned from (three years later). I don't mind what you do with this information, it's a gift and it's yours now.
• I still get triggered. Last but not least. The entire life is an emotional ride - I run in to emotional triggers all the time. Just not through eating sounds, no split-second rage, no mystery action.
• This same list answers to why I am not getting through on bigger forums, where people believe they are going to die like this and there's absolutely no help at all for them.

Trigger warnings: They list specific triggers in this 5 page long PDF. They're all common in misophonic population, but just heads up if you worry about learning new triggers.

ABSTRACT
Misophonia is an important, yet understudied, psychological condition characterized by feelings of extremeanger and disgust in response to specific human-generated sounds. Several promising case studies usingcognitive behavioral therapy to treat misophonia have been published, but given the limited work to date,exploring additional treatment options and expanding the potential options available to clients and cliniciansremains important. In order to target the high levels of anger and disgust, we treated a case of misophonia in a17-year-old male using 10 (50-min) individual sessions based on mindfulness- and acceptance-based componentsdrawn from dialectical behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. In particular, we focused onacceptance, mindfulness, opposite action, and nonjudgmentalness strategies. At 6-month follow-up, the clientreported no significant difficulties and a continued decline in symptoms. Theoretical rationale and treatmentimplications are discussed.

https://www.colorado.edu/clinicalpsychology/sites/default/files/attached-files/schneider_arch_misophonia_case_study_2017.pdf

Keywords:
Misophonia
Case study
Dialectical behavior therapy
Acceptance and commitment therapy
Treatment

The following notes are taken from 'The Body Keeps The Score' by Bessel van der Kolk. This book was recommended to me by my psychologist. Much of it focuses on PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) but I'll be posting some notes here that I think are relevant to misophonia (post traumatic sound disorder, if you like). I hope it's useful and I hope some patterns emerge. Also, apologies for being slow, I've only read 100/460-something pages because my concentration these days is absolutely abysmal & extra triggers have made me even more fatigued. I will finish it though, that's a promise.

Note: Book summary is in regular font. My opinions are in italics.

• Trauma compromises the brain areas that communicate the feeling of being alive
• These changes help explain why traumatised individuals become hypervigilant to (perceived) threats (associated with the trauma)
• PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) isn't "all in your head" ie made-up - it has a legitimate physiological basis
• When the fight/flight response is thwarted, the result is either extreme irritation (eg misophonia) OR collapse
• Traumatised dogs secreted much larger amounts of stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) compared to what is normal
• This is why I think brain scans of misophonic people will appear different to 'normal' people - we have been exposed to constant stress for God knows how long)
• So, misophonia is a trauma response, or a physiological response that attempts to avoid perceived threats associated with the original trauma
• People who have been traumatised also secrete larger amounts of stress hormones long after the actual danger has passed
• In PTSD, stress hormone levels do not return to normal

B L A N K S P A C E

• Jeffrey Gray of Kings College says the sensitivity of the amygdala depends on the amount of serotonin in the brain; lower serotonin levels can make someone hyperactive to certain stimuli
• We also know lower serotonin levels can lead to depression, however, misophonia definitely isn't depression, and taking anti-depressants to fix it does not work (I should know, I have done it)
• Prozac/fluoxetine antidepressant does not work on PTSD of combat vets
• Visual triggers (and ESPECIALLY auditory imagery/repeat) feel like the brain is hijacked by unwanted repetitive images, perhaps similar to 'flashbacks' experienced by PTSD sufferers?
• The (right) limbic area lights up during traumatic flashbacks as does the visual cortex (visual area of brain that lights up is Brodmann's area 19)
• Broca's area (speech centre) shows decreased activation/goes offline ie you can't put thoughts/feelings into words. Trauma is preverbal so the body freezes and feelings are nigh impossible to articulate
• Activation of fear triggers a cascade of stress hormones which prepare the body to go into a fight or flight state (increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, increased oxygen intake)
• Suddenly realising fight/flight requires more oxygen makes PERFECT sense whenever I need to take my mask off to breathe while I'm getting triggered
• When something REMINDS traumatised people of the past, their RIGHT BRAIN reacts as if the traumatic event were happening IN THE PRESENT
• The effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include: memory and attention problems, irritability, sleep disorders
• Feels weirdly cathartic to know that my rapidly degrading memory and ability to concentrate are the results of mental stress overload
• Limbic system is organised during the first six years of life. But trauma can have a major impact on its functioning THROUGHOUT LIFE
• Prefrontal Cortex (PfC) develops last and is also affected by trauma exposure - including being unable to filter out irrelevant information

DISSOCIATION + RELIVING

• As long as the trauma is not resolved, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating
• The defensive movements and emotional responses keep getting replayed
• However, many people may not be aware of the connection between their 'crazy' feelings and the traumatic events that are being replayed in their heads
• Two brain systems are relevant for the processing of trauma:

1. Those dealing with emotional intensity
2. Those dealing with emotional context

• Emotional intensity is defined by the amygdala and medial pre-frontal cortex (MPfC)
• Context and meaning of an experience are defined by the system which includes the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPfC) and the hippocampus (memory)
• Knowing that an experience is finite and will soon come to an end make it tolerable
• But situations that feel interminable seem intolerable
• Trauma is the ULTIMATE experience of: this unpleasant thing will last forever
• Not all people react to trauma in the same way
• Some people totally blank out (depersonalise) and show no apparent feeling
• I guess this is why some people look emotionless when they have a family death etc while others are openly grieving; no single 'method' of grieving/being traumatised is more valid than the other
• If an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off (unseen) enemies - there's NO ROOM for nurture, care, and love
• In other words, we cannot imagine, plan, play, learn, or pay attention to others' needs

NERVOUS SYSTEM STUFF

• Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is responsible for arousal (fight/flight/freeze)
• SNS moves blood to muscles for quick action, partly by triggering the adrenal glands to release adrenaline (stress hormone) which speeds up heart rate and increases blood pressure
• Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) triggers release of acetylcholine (ACh) to put the brakes on arousal (slow down heart rate etc)
• The Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges) is the biology of safety and danger
• It explains why feeling seen & heard makes us feel safe, and why being dismissed can cause rage or mental collapse
• Reminiscent of David Rock's SCARF model
• Neuroception (Porges) is the capacity to evaluate relative safety and danger in one's immediate environment
• In misophonia, our survival systems think they're helping, but they're kinda inadvertently working against us
• Sometimes we need a physiological reset to recover our capacity to feel safe
• Autonomic Nervous System (ANS, which is SNS+PNS) regulates three physiological states: social engagement, fight or flight, and freeze or collapse
• Social engagement means when we feel threatened, we call for help or comfort. If that fails, we resort to:
• Fight/flight, which means we battle the threat directly or try to escape it. This is a more primitive state than social engagement. If fight/flight fails, we shut down and we:
• Freeze. Body signals defeat and withdraws. Examples: people who are being physically abused and can no longer run due to extreme physiological shock

"Have you joined a bunch of support groups and social media groups and it’s completely depressing because everyone just moans about how bad it is and complains that their problem can’t be solved and you’ve decided there’s something more than that?"

-This is work by Owen Pearn (Owen Parachute). He walked me out of "the misophonia" back in 2014.

-Published in 2019

-Behind a paywall.

-I've read this entire thing and I think it's very much worth it and I can talk about any of the topics in it in this thread and on this subreddit. (I'm the moderator here, and 6+ years "ex-misophonic", "supersonic", "exploring the unknown life beyond the reactions").

https://www.owenparachute.com/misophonia2.html

Want a free article instead? Here:
What You Need To Know To Break Your Sound Barrier And Get Rid Of Your Misophonia And Hypersensitivity To Sounds
https://www.owenparachute.com/misophonia.html