Coping with misophonia can often mean living your life in a way that you didn’t expect. This can impact individuals with misophonia, or their entire family. Family dinners are one example: For many families, this is the pivotal part of family time, but with misophonia, these dinners can lead to frustration, distress, and a dysfunctional family unit. This can be painful for the person with misophonia and their loved ones.
There are numerous ways that living with misophonia can mean doing things differently—for example, wearing earphones and earbuds in public, work, or school; choosing not to attend events that are too stressful; and even managing and organizing your life in a way that challenges your own expectations of the “right” way to do things.
My book Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for Misophonia focuses on using cognitive behavioral therapy to manage these expectations and ideas. The emotional aftermath of living your life in a way that may not be congruent with your ideals and values can be its own form of grief. Through grief work, reframing, and having a compassionate approach to one’s own needs, this can be mitigated.
Unlike CBT for cognitive disorders, CBT for misophonia does not aim to mitigate the distress entirely. Unfortunately, since misophonia is neurophysiological this reaction cannot be completely alleviated. Instead, CBT for misophonia aims to reduce distress over living with the condition and mediate one’s sense of self with the condition. In a recent Substack piece on misophonia, I described my own discomfort with choosing an alternative path.
I have a confession to make… my misophonia is bad enough that I’ve planned to run away for the summer. It’s hard being an advocate for misophonia, a clinician, and the director of The International Misophonia Foundation and facing that despite coping skills, despite an understanding of my nervous system, and despite my best efforts, I’ve chosen to go home to my parents’ house in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Where I live now is cramped and loud. It’s army housing so we are basically in shoe boxes tacked together—or row houses as they call them. There are constant dogs barking, lawnmowers, basketballs bouncing, and screeching sounds from morning until night. For somebody with misophonia this has become too much for me. I’ve adjusted to spending time in other areas of the house while triggers are present outside my window, and I’ve reminded myself with reframing that I won’t live here forever and they aren’t doing it to hurt me. And yet, the power of those triggers against my nervous system is still so strong that I’d rather take a 6 hour drive with 4 cats and spend time wedged between mountains in a quiet valley.
It can be important for those with misophonia to recognize that it’s OK to live their life in a way that isn’t the “ideal.” In fact, it is often important to recognize where these ideals have come from and whether or not they were realistic in the first place. For some, this might mean separate bedrooms from their spouse, eating in different rooms, or choosing activities together as alternatives to triggering environments, such as going for walks instead of eating together.
Accepting our limitations and differences is often one of the most difficult parts of coping with misophonia, but it can lead to outcomes that are more reasonable than trying to conform to a world that doesn’t meet our sensory needs. Instead, people with misophonia can focus on their adaptability and resilience, and take pride in choosing alternatives that are better for their own mental and neurophysiological health.