Selfhelp from Skydancer. 28-4-2003  
I want to share a story and this is probably the best place here.
Yesterday, I have declared myself officially free of lowered sound
tolerance (hyperacusis, misophonia).

After a neck injury in february which increased my T and put me into a
state of anxiety/depression for a few weeks, I used to get very
uncomfortable painful sensations in my ears when people were talking.
In the first weeks this was very painful and I withdrew from social
life a bit, but I gradually built it up by putting the TV a notch
louder every day, not asking people to talk softly, and training
myself not to react to it. After about a month pain was only noticable
when people were talking loud or when sounds were sudden and sharp
(e.g. dishes, claxons, people laughing). I still disliked sound very
much and got all kinds of sensations when the sound level was
uncomfortable. At the same time I could bear nice music very well.

This was strange and reading a post by Elly (Jacks' post above) led me
to believe that perhaps I didn't have an abnormal activation of the
auditory system, but there was probably a different problem and the
stress, anxiety, fears in combination with listening to tinnitus had
installed some counterproductive "connections" in my brain.

For some reason by applying the strategy of calming myself and
especially engaging in medium-loud activities (around the level of
discomfort, but with not too much dynamics), the feelings of pain
slowly subsided. I discovered that something in my right ear has the
tendency to "twitch" at times, and I now know that this is probably
just a spastic muscle that gets a reflex due to sound whenever it is
tense (which seems fair considering the injury and how much tinnitus
upset me). It is most apparent when I have headache/jaw pain, and it
has slowly become a non-issue otherwise. Thinking/stressing about it
seems to evoke it and make it go on for some reason, so a bit "mind
power" was in order to keep it from happening and calming myself when
it happens.

Other people take valium with good results, but if I just try not to
focus on it and just massage my head/ear/neck a bit, it's not that
bad, it's annoying but it just goes away. (After reading Hazell's
publication about this, I now understand how these things can become a
huge problem for someone with tinnitus as your brain just worries a
lot more about the ears; a ticking muscle somewhere else in the body
would hardly be a problem to the same person! It happens a lot when
I'm lazy and tired, and I certainly wouldn't avoid sitting on the
couch as a result of it!)

Anyway, any time I felt pain, discomfort or the muscle spasm, I
reassured myself that the sensation had nothing to do with damage to
the cochlea, that the pain and the associated anxiety were unnecessary
and false, and this seems to have worked. It took me about two months
to go from pain to sometimes an annoying sensation which is becoming
less and less related to sound.

I know there are a lot of people with clinical hyperacusis and they
will not recover easily without extensive desensitizing. Ever since I
read Jastreboff's work on hyperacusis vs misophonia I felt I didn't
have "real" hyperacusis, but something else was going on. Now I can
hardly remember that I was really in pain, but I knew that two months
ago I left a meeting because the loud voices made me cry. On friday I
went to eat in a (fairly noisy) restaurant and yesterday I went to a
birthday party (very noisy, so I only stayed two hours to protect my
hearing - rational decision, not because I had pain or ear
sensations). While I experienced a lot of anxiety before going, I
turned out just fine. The party yesterday was a bit louder than I
hoped (although I did turn the volume down secretly at one point ) so
I will have to see if it affects my tinnitus. But I think I can say
(and will probably have to remind myself at times): I do not have
hyperacusis.

But two months ago I would have bashed anyone's face in if they'd told
me that it was in my head...

So there. Now on to tinnitus. LOL! Let's do some research so we can
wrap it all up in a good five, ten years. (At the other hand I seem to
be habituating to this level which I'd never expected - of course it
may go up later but I bet on science to win the battle, especially if
we give it a helping hand...)

Tinnitus is a pain in the neck
Elly's Tinnitus Resources
http://eebee.net/
http://meniere.eebee.net/

For email: elly at eebee.cjb.net