An Open Letter to Myself

I’ve always wondered why so many people who post on this site when they initially start having issues with Tinnitus seem to abruptly stop posting and never come back. When I first started suffering from Tinnitus I found this very disturbing and thought there might be a dire reason that so many disappear, but when I started feeling better I also didn’t post about my success and just disappeared.

I came to believe that Tinnitus was so unique to each person that I wasn’t sure my own story could help someone else and I think that could be the reason that many other people stop posting also. With that in mind I’ve decided to frame this post as an open letter to myself when I first started experiencing Tinnitus. What worked for me may not work for everyone, maybe this can help someone in the same situation I was in.

Dear me,

So there you are sitting in the front of a flickering screen in the middle of the night unable to sleep. You’ve begun to notice a ringing in your ears. At first you only noticed it at night, or when it was quiet, but now you’ve come to notice it when the TV is on, or in the car before you start the engine. What’s worse is that now that you’ve noticed it, you can’t stop thinking about it even when you’re not hearing it. You’re mind swarms with questions:

“Am I going crazy?”
“Would it go away if I could just stop thinking about it?”
“Is this getting worse? Am I going to hear this sound all the time?”
“What if this is just the beginning?”

To make matters worse what you’re reading online isn’t helping – it’s scaring the shit out of you. There doesn’t seem to be a magic pill that will take the sound away, nobody is talking about some trick that worked for them that caused the sound to vanish without a trace. Instead the people that are talking about ‘beating’ Tinnitus are really just talking about coping with it.

“Ignore it, it will go away.”
“It doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“I only even notice it when I talk about it.”

Let me give you some tips from the future that might ease your mind and speed up your recovery.

First of all:

The path is forward, not backward.

For the longest time my goal was to get back to the point I was at before I noticed the ringing. I thought if I could only go back to that moment and distract myself, find another track of thought, never go down that road, maybe I would have never even noticed the ringing in the first place. I wanted a prescription or a gadget that would just take it away completely. I wanted to be able to listen for the ringing sound as hard as I could and hear absolutely nothing. I wanted to go back to the moment before this happened. The first step to getting better is to accept that the path is forward, not backward. This happened. You can’t go back to the before Tinnitus. Although you may not believe it now you can get to a point where you have it, but it simply doesn’t matter.

Second:

Your mind is not the enemy – So many people talk about ignoring it, distracting yourself from it, getting to a point where it doesn’t bother you anymore. This is the long term goal, but focusing on it will cause short term suffering if you’re not careful. It’s not your fault, it’s perfectly natural to want immediate results, and why not? The problem, came on fast, why can’t it be over just as fast? Everyone is saying ignore it and I won’t notice it as much. What does it say about me that I can’t ignore it? What does it say about me that even when I’m not hearing the sound I can’t stop thinking about it? Am I bringing this on myself? Am I at war with my own subconscious?

The answer is no – you are not losing your mind and your subconscious is not the enemy. Tinnitus can be a vicious circle in which the sound leads to thoughts, thoughts lead to fears and anxiety, fear and anxiety can make the sound seem louder and the pattern continues. The reason for this is that your mind is the most powerful problem solving tool the human being has in its arsenal. It would be great if you could just shut off a thought process when you’ve concluded there isn’t a solution, but your mind doesn’t work that way, it wants to find an answer to the problem. Accepting this led me to an epiphany which truly helped me to get better.

Finally:

Accept the sound. Accept the thoughts about the sound.

Accepting the sound really wasn’t all that hard for me. Initially there were a lot of fears; particularly that the sound was getting louder and would eventually consume every aspect of my life. Everyone told me to try to ignore it, but what this lead to was feeling like a loser every time I realized that my thoughts had been drawn back to it. Every single time I noticed that I hadn’t noticed the sound I noticed it. Hooray for me I’m not noticing it! Every time I realized I couldn’t shut out the thoughts was a demoralizing defeat. This cycle dragged on for months and I felt crushed and defeated to admit that there wasn’t any real improvement and I certainly wasn’t getting to a point where “I barely noticed it,” like other people. It made me feel like a feeble minded loser. I was someone who had a problem which wasn’t even really a problem for most people, but for me it was a cycle of minor reliefs and major failures. Until the day I decided to not only accept the sound, but to also accept the thoughts about the sound.

That’s it in a nutshell. That’s what finally broke the circle for me. Periods of not noticing the sound were no longer victories, and noticing it was no longer a defeat. I talked about what was going on with friends and loved-ones, but most importantly I explored the subconscious I had been attempting to suppress. I put pen to paper and thereby gave my subconscious a podium and a microphone and things got better. When I stopped fighting against my own thoughts I found out what peace of mind really meant, and that was my turning point.

Yours truly,

Me.

 

Wonderful post Duncan! For people new to Tinnitus this is very valuable information. This made me feel much better about the future and how I'm going to fight this thing.

 

Thanks for you story. What you write is so true.

 

This post is awesome. You have encapsulated the continuous thought processes that go on in someone with T perfectly!

Out of interest, does yours have a specific cause or was it an 'out of the blue' occurrence?

 

Awesome success story, everything you said sounds very similar.

 

For me I just kind of noticed it one day, although I believe I've always had a touch of it and just always assumed it was normal, but once I had tuned it in I found I just couldn't tune it out again. For me the sound hasn't really gone away, but like many of the other success stories, I don't really notice it very much anymore.