The Negativity Thread

This was a really thoughtful post, Vaba. I appreciate your perspective.

Well -- for starters, this isn't what "objective" means -- you're seeing things inherently from your own perspective, which makes it subjective. That is, to the extent there's an objective reality underlaying everything, no one really interacts with it, we're all locked in the little boxes of our brains, seeing things through our own bias.

Just because this is the experience you've had to date doesn't mean it's going to be forever. Point of view constantly
changes, people do often eventually escape the cognitive traps that hold them back for a long time.

Radical, fundamental transformations of consciousness are possible, and I'm not talking about drugs or intense Vipassana retreats or anything dangerous like that. But, change comes easier when there is a conscious willingness and openness to change.

You believe this about yourself. You may have your whole identity wrapped up in this thought to some extent, and it's not easy to let go of such things. However... "change, or die". It's that simple.

From everything you have said here, you're suffering, the beliefs you have about your suffering are compounding it or making it harder to accept, and that lack of acceptance is making you suffer more. So, hold on to those beliefs and continue to suffer for them, or find a way to let go of them and suffer less. It's that simple, but very, very difficult to put in practice.

 

We are all trapped in the retarded medical science of the early 21st century. I do not expect any cure for tinnitus within the next fifty years and for my own and selfish reasons that means "never". If I want to live for a few more years on this planet there is no other choice but adapting to the current circumstances. Resistance is futile...

 

You know what? I'm mostly a negative, pessimistic guy. Realistic above everything, but with a tendency to pessimism. This in the daily life.

However, this tinnitus shit is serious. I'm new to this insane volume of tinnitus but I can understand how it can drive people crazy. And when it comes to serious things as this, we've got no other choice than to be positive and optimistic. We can allow ourselves to be negative in the insignificancies of daily life, but against a threat that can ruin our lives in such a way we've got to be positive, because being negative would almost mean giving up on our lives.

BTW, @Sebastians , at least the causes of your tinnitus were some noble ones (except maybe the guns).

 

I don't know how long I've had my current level of tinnitus. All I know is that I woke up with it at the age of 19 once I abandoned antidepressants completely. My tinnitus is chronic and progressive. The first encounter I had with head noise was when I was 15 - I noticed "normal" tinnitus, which is a quiet buzz in a silent room. I thought nothing of it, and I put it to the back of my mind for 4 years.

I have used headphones regularly (daily? probably not) since I was 12, but they were over-the-ear headphones (not earbuds) 90% of the time, played QUIETLY. All of my headphones were always used within (supposedly) safe limits of sound exposure (below orange "danger" range on android, or, if played above safe range, sound exposure was limited to a few minutes at a time, for instance, to and from class at college, with long recovery periods.) I have never attended a concert in my life - nor have I been exposed to power tools, explosions, guns, or any sources of potential loud noise other than headphones - which everyone my age uses constantly.

I wound up with uneven tinnitus in both ears. I would assume that if it was from noise from the headphones, then the tinnitus and hearing problems would be nearly identical in both ears. However, this is not the case. I suffer from tonal somatic T in my left ear (the hearing in this ear is worse) and unexplained, loud, fluctuating T in my right ear, which has near-perfect (0dB up to 16kHz) hearing... The left ear feels full, and the left side of my face from my chin to my ear feel numb constantly. I feel like I have a severe hearing loss, when in reality, I don't have any hearing loss at all. I guess my brain is so intensely attentive to hearing that it notices when even one hair cell is damaged, and freaks out.

This is no rut in my life. This is a canyon. I need a doctor to provide me with the right tools to escape the hellish pit I'm in - or at least to explain why I'm in this pit to begin with. To this day, my tinnitus and facial numbness remain unexplained.

 

I am also not sure if my tinnitus is related to loud music or using drugs that may have precipitated the problem.

I also have no hearing loss at all. I can hear a pin drop...literally.

A mosquito in the room, a hiss when a lightbulb has a problem. Stuff my wife says she can't even hear.

My father-in-law says I have dog ears haha.

So at least I'm not going deaf I suppose.

 

When it started I have extremely bad migraines and kinda a spasm on my eyelid. That all faded over a month except the T.

My right leg felt numb.

I had overdone it with very unhealthy drugs. So I don't know if my ear developed the problem because of that or noise exposure.

I have had every test you can imagine. I am a very healthy, strong athletic guy with no health problems.

The doctors just wave their hands and say they have no idea.

So anyway f@ck it man. You have it you have it. Nothing can be done.

 

Can't accept that, man. Never will. My father, who has the same personality type as me (high-strung, very literal, problem-solver) has exposed himself to more noise than any of us would ever dream to - 40+ Metallica and Iron Maiden concerts, front row for most of them, up against the speaker stacks with no hearing protection. He has no tinnitus. He also uses power tools for several hours straight on a weekly basis, in addition to quietly coding computers.

My grandfather works in construction and is a heavy smoker, exposing himself to noise and ototoxic chemicals constantly every day. No tinnitus. My little brother uses headphones constantly, just like I did. No tinnitus. Many of my relatives are mechanics who work in VERY loud shops day in and day out. None of them have hearing issues. My great grandfather was in the Italian army in WWII. He was captured as a P.O.W. Despite the daily bomb explosions, engine noise, gunfire, and carnage, he retained his hearing until his death at the age of 90 - he could hear you whisper across the house. The man was healthy as a horse, and nothing could stop him - he looked like a literal movie star.

Not one person in my immediate family's entire history has ever had the slightest issue with their hearing. It's like my entire Italian lineage is genetically immune to hearing loss. This leads me to believe that there is some element I am missing. It makes no sense to me that I was somehow magically born with some genetic aberration that made my ears weak as hell and prone to tinnitus, especially when my entire family appears to be freakishly immune to noise and hearing problems in general.

But me? The one person in our family who LOVES (and needs) silence, always speaks softly, never seeks conflict, and prefers solitary activities like reading, drawing, and playing video games? The child who has been misophonic since birth, always avoiding noise? The only one who covers his ears when an ambulance goes by, or a bus screeches as it drops its handicap ramp? I am the one who gets tinnitus. It is a sick cosmic injustice I will never come to terms with and MUST fight, in order to retain my last shreds of sanity. To submit to this meaningless, causeless disease is to forfeit my entire identity - a task that is impossible.

 

Its that feeling the world has just taken a dump on you.

I remember it well....

You have a long way to go man.

 

Maybe your family members didn't take mind altering drugs like it sounds like you did? Why are you speaking about noise damage as if that is what causes all tinnitus and hearing loss? My tinnitus was not noise induced at all. I have been to hundreds of metal concerts, thousands of nights out at clubs. i had perfect hearing (at the age of 39) until barotrauma followed by a cocktail drugs to treat the ear injury including antibiotic ear drops. I think noise can be a trigger, but you have to look a little deeper than this as a cause in most instances.

Also, your family my have had a lot of hearing loss, you can whisper to me across the room and I will hear you just fine and my ears are screwed. You can not tell by talking to me that I have had close to all my hearing destroyed above 7khz, no would know this but me.

Do you not have perfect hearing? You are speaking as if you have hearing problems, why are you doing that? From your past posts it sounds like you have next to perfect hearing. Why are you embellishing? And how bad is your tinnitus with no hearing loss? Are you just nitpicking and trying to find things to bother you? You have perfect hearing, throw some soft music on to easily mask your T, do your math, reading, or whatever it is you say you like to do, I'm sure you will be fine.

You probably have better hearing than 80-90 percent of the population, yet you speak as if you've gone deaf, it's a very, very strange thing to do.

 

One thing in this post in partcular makes me think you have some sensitive ear issues. Covering your ears when you hear a siren for example i mean, i never used to do that but i have always been scared of the noise of fireworks all my life, makes me jump like crazy. I wonder if i have just had very sensitive hearing and thats a prerequsite to getting tinnitus, like you with the sirens.

 

I wasn't "sensitive" to sounds prior to T at all, noise never bothered me and I have raging T and H now.

 

I believe that Vaba wants to awaken consciousness, does not want be heard by only 20 participants of this thread. He wants the same that all you, be heard by everyone in the world, and that the people in the world come together to find a cure or medicament for tinnitus. We can not wait 100 years more for a cure, nor discourage those who wish to do something telling them that tinnitus no annoying us.

 

First off, I'm not trying to speak like I'm deaf. I do have next to perfect hearing (or so I'm told) and I don't know if you noticed, but I did mention drugs as a risk factor for tinnitus in my previous post. You are definitely correct when you say that there are many, many causes of this disease, and that it is normal to be able to hear a whisper from that distance. I just don't know what kind of damage it is, or even if I have any damage at all, and there seems to be no way to definitively find out. I literally cannot get one single investigative lead on my tinnitus - which is highly somatic and highly responsive to air/blood pressure increases, and originally started off as misophonia (fear/hatred of noise) which gradually turned into a warbling ring.

Telis, trust me, I'm not searching for things to get upset about. I would MUCH rather not have to be here and be able to get on with my life - but my quality of life, between the combination eye and ear problems, is effectively zero, so here I am, spending 15 minutes of my life crafting a response on a support forum to defend myself.

Since you asked about the severity and level of hearing loss, here you go: all my tests come back negative, my very worst hearing threshold below 16kHz is 15 (or 10, we're not sure) dB, which is basically nothing. My hearing between 8kHz and 16kHz is actually better than my hearing below 8kHz. But, my left ear feels terribly "off." The ear definitely doesn't hear like it used to. It feels tight and constricted, like it's been physically injured. To explain exactly how it feels, the sensation feels almost like my left cheek was slapped a minute ago, but constantly, and it never recovers from the slap - it's a sort of buzzing numbness that you'd expect from shocked nerves. The right ear, which has perfect hearing even though its ringing is worse for some reason, detects every little detail there is, and feels physically fine.

I feel like I perceive maybe 50% of the input and sound detail I should be able to detect. The sensations in my face are almost harder to deal with than the tinnitus itself - which is inexplicably loud for my apparent degree of hearing loss, audible in the vast majority of environments. It's not even masked by an AC 5 feet away, (which can peak 65dB due to the acoustics of my room) That side of my face is tingly and quite numb. I also don't have just one tone - both of my ears feel and sound different, and the imbalance confuses and distracts me constantly.

I've always hated noise. However, my tinnitus was gradual, and I had habituated to it very easily when it was mild (just one tone, audible only in quiet situations, with no accompanying pain). Maybe misophonia does mean that we are predisposed to developing tinnitus, because the parts of our brain that process sound are more active than they should be, and are more easily stimulated by sound.

 

@Vaba like I said, "change, or die". Those are your choices.

Hearing damage is lifetime cumulative, and the result of blasting your ears apart in your 20s often doesn't show up until your 30s or 40s. So, it's possible (probably likely) that all that stuff you did when you were younger paved the way for stuff to really explode on you after your trauma/drugs/further noise trauma.

Sucks.

 

Change what, linearb. Change... what? What part of this situation can I change, to get a life that I really enjoy, rather than a life that I simply endure?

 

vaba , if you no longer care about anything, as you say, why not consider the surgery deep brain stimulation for tinnitus (DBS)?

 

I wish I could tell you. It seems really clear from your posts that you have a lot of extremely strong beliefs about yourself that are not working to your advantage anymore. So, if you're going to move forward, it seems to me like you're going to have to find a way to confront and break that stuff down.

That runs pretty deep, though; after 15 years I have some ideas about how I've been able to do these things to some extent in my own life, but I'm not a doctor or therapist and certainly have no idea what others need to do to change, only a strong inkling that change itself is often more possible than it might seem.

I assume you've already tried meditating for ~15-30 mins a day for a few months straight? For me that started to make a bunch of things clear, but, again, everyone has to find their own way through this maze, and the things that are helpful to me might not be to anyone else.

 

this isn't actually a thing you can get done, even if your pockets are really deep. There's an extremely small sample size study underway now; if that goes anywhere, maybe in 5 years you'd be able to get this done if you can pay out of pocket ($100,000-ish).

It's not a silver bullet; in fact, there's been some research indicating that DBS implants actually cause tinnitus in a substantial number of people.

 

you summarized the tinnitus almost as I, this is a maze a labyrinth. Almost, because really is a no exit.

 

Dr. De Ridder did electrode implants on a couple of patients here in Belgium, about 4 of them saw no improvements. The others experienced a max improvement of 50% ( which i admit is substantial, but still).
One guys battery ran out after a few years, back to 80 db T for this dude..
At St Antonius hospital in Antwerp, they offer cochlear implants to patients with unbearable T. Recently a guy with no hearing loss but 80 db T after sustaining head injury got one after 3 years of suffering. Apparently it helps him.

 

Seems to me like a lot of the things that are touted to provide relief from tinnitus almost always also cause it... Also, meditating for even a minute just makes me very angry. VERY angry. Furious even.

 

I would take that as a sign that you're headed in the right direction, honestly. Though, if you want to go that route, it would probably be helpful to have some guidance from someone who knows a lot about meditation, and also about chronic conditions.

I say it's a sign you're headed in the right direction because nothing about this is easy, so the path forward is going to be tough as nails. You feel like you're in hell. You're miserable all the time. Meditation is likely to make you more aware of these things, not less. But, you can't work through things and actually solve them without being completely aware of them, and allowing yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling, fully.

This isn't some day spa trip; when your life has run completely off the rails, there is no "easy" way to find a different path forward. Even for people who think they are happy and not outwardly distressed, meditative effort often triggers dysphoria, anxiety, etc. When someone's day-to-day life is just totally stuck in dysphoria, the needle is buried in the red... of course meditation is going to make them feel worse at first.

I'm no spiritual guru, and my own meditative practice is not that diligent, but I have come to accept the idea that when mediation brings negative emotions to the surface, it means things are going in the "correct" direction.

I think you might like Jed McKenna.
https://books.google.com/books?id=IOksQv4dreMC&pg=PT65&lpg=PT65#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

This reveals that you always thought negatively . What happens is you have double standards like everyone else, and that makes all the time you oscillate between negativism and positivism.

linearb, are you an specialized or ad-hoc counselor from tinnitustalk ? your work is advising here?

 

I mean I get so angry and uncomfortable that it is worthless to do it. It's blind, meaningless, incomprehensible rage, purely about the unfairness of life and how hopeless the situation is and how powerless I am to stop the endless pain. The first and only thought that surfaces when I even attempt to meditate is "This won't help you." I ask myself, "how do you know?" and my ever-diligent rational mind responds immediately and completely correctly, "You think that thought or faith will repair bodily damage? Where is your proof?" So, I go to google. "Tinnitus meditation success." "Cancer meditation success." "Chronic illness meditation success."

End result - tinnitus patient still has tinnitus, cancer patient died, chronic illness victims still in pain. Meditation did nothing to help them.

¿¿¿where is the value in doing this??? It just makes me angry and uncomfortable, and at the end of the meditation session, I remain just as ill as I was before, but more miserable than I was before. Meditation just drags my problems into the limelight, while doing nothing to resolve them in either the short or long term.

 

I'd suggest to read up on some buddhist teachings such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tibetan_Book_of_Living_and_Dying

 

Well, first, this doesn't really sound too much like what I do when I meditate, because as soon as I realize I'm thinking in words I stop doing it. Over and over.

I don't know wtf you've been reading, but there's been a lot of mostly positive research indicating that long-term meditation does things and that they are good things, and this has been demonstrated in people with very shitty conditions. Actually the thing that led me to meditation to begin with was some fMRI work that showed that people with high tinnitus distress show structural brain problems (thinning of gray matter) in a particular region (right anterior insula), and other fMRI studies showing that people with 10,000 hours of meditation practice showed thicker cortical density in that area.

What you're calling "completely correctly" sounds wrong to me; there is a lot of research indicating that people who have the most negative outlooks on their predicaments have the worst outcomes. This does not mean you will cure your cancer with meditation, only that given two people with the same cancer and in otherwise identical condition, the person with the shitty outlook is more likely to end up worse off.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23186556
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21567655
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27445929
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27261986
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27252075

If that was what you reported after some reasonable effort, maybe even as little as 100 hours total over 200 days, then I would be inclined to think "huh, he had a very different experience than I did, interesting, sucks for him." However -- it sounds to me like you are bumping into the very basic difficulties which generally come up when anyone starts meditating, and using it as an excuse to be lazy and not push it any further.

And, again, this probably isn't something you want to attempt on your own with zero guidance, and "guidance" is tricky because there are a lot of woo-woo charlatans out there (anyone who asks for money in exchange for "meditation help" is absolutely untrustworthy).

 

Option 1: kill yourself
Option 2: Stop whining about it, deal with it

In time, you will notice that over increasing periods, you will be able to blend it out when you are distracted or busy.

In times where you will suffer again, go out, run, work out, go climb a mountain, fucking break something.

In times where neither of the above help, take drugs, blow your mind out of space, so you won't give a fuck.

That's it, that's all. You are not the first, you won't be the last.

Good luck.

 

I think that tinnitus is as an intermediate state between life and death, neither live nor die either .

 

Sorry I made you feel like you had to defend yourself man. And I'm sorry you are suffering. I have eye floaters as well, I don't know if they came on after my tinnitus, or they have been there all along. The only reason that I now realize that I have them is because I read about them here at TT. I can see flashing blue dots, and clear worms all over the place, I'm thankful that this doesn't bother me in the least. Having to think about both my eyes and ears would be hard so I feel for you mate. Hope you can some day get some relief in some way.

 

I guess anything is possible but my hearing died in like one week with the ear injury and drugs. Wouldn't I of had some hearing loss prior to this from all those years of loud clubs? I mean at 39 years old I could hear a pin drop and could still hear well up to 18khz easily. It all pretty much disappeared at once with the ear injury and ototoxic meds. I have lost more gradually over the last 3 years since T but I had no loss prior to the trauma And poisoning.