Tinnitus Suffering as a Phobia

Are you saying suffering from pain is irrational? I'm not sure I follow your train of thought.

 

No... though it's not really rational either, it just is.

The act of rumination upon unchangeable physical realities is not rational, from the perspective of minimizing suffering.

 

Mild Tinntius is a picknick. If you are afraid of ants you can have your T as a phobia. But if you have severe T, it becomes a great life changer.

 

I can't understand that. If that is true, then my theory is just wrong.

In fact I believe that studies support my idea that there is no correlation between the mental fate of a person with tinnitus, and how loud their tinnitus is.

 

You are wrong.

I'm not scared of the ringing in my ears. It's not fear that causes irritation. It's the volume of my tinnitus.

 

It doesn't need to be "fear". "Aversion" is a good word for it.

And as I said, I believe studies back me up. Or at least Dr Nagler does.

Sometimes you need to consider what an alien would think of your predicament. Imagine trying to explain to the alien what your problem is. "One of my sensory inputs is always stuck to ON." How is that an objective problem? Once you know it's always stuck to ON for technical reasons, you have no reason to react to it.

Now of course in reality, we can't immediately align our emotions with our reason. But we can pull them closer together, bit by bit. One of the things I've noticed about this community is a tendency to think it's "obvious" that tinnitus is inherently distressing. Now if you believe this, you're in trouble. But luckily, it's false.

You can find small communities of people all over the internet that have tinnitus but have never encountered the medical industry for tinnitus. I look for them, as a hobby. They think it's caused by aliens, or God, or something. But only a small proportion of those people say it annoys them.

It really is a game of emotional association.

 

I understand, partially, the point you're making in this thread.

However, I would suggest that the reason this forum EXISTS is because ... tinnitus is inherently distressing.

 

Well, of course I have to say that this forum mostly functions as a group of people pulling themselves deeper and deeper into despair and losing perspective. With a lot of exceptions.

I've noticed that even a lot of positive stories on this forum contain within them ways of thinking that will probably result in sliding back after a while.

I would like to suggest that a lot of people get better after they decide to stop coming here, not the other way around.

 

I think it's a mix, like you say. There is, here, if you look for it, a TON of really helpful inspiring advice and ways of thinking. And, lots of good tips. It's best used as a resource, keeping your thinking cap on as you roam from post to post.

 

But in your subject line you called tinnitus suffering "a phobia" - ie. a fear of something. And aversion (ie. a strong dislike) and irritation (the state of feeling annoyed) are almost synonyms.

I think you'd very much like to believe your hypothesis. And you use a lot of rhetoric to try and justify your beliefs. But you're wrong when you claim that tinnitus is "really a game of emotional association."

It is, quite obviously, far more complex than that. And I think your attempts to try and prove the things you're writing come across as a little bit desperate.

But that's just my two cents.

 

You're right, I would. And that made me cautious about saying this stuff for a while.

It really is the strangest feeling when your thinking lines up perfectly with what you would like to be true, and you spend a lot of time checking whether you're just fooling yourself. I'm usually a cynic and a depressive, so I actually have a bias against things turning out how I would like.

But my view of tinnitus comes with a different sort of despair, which is the despair of considering how much time you have spent working yourself into a corner, and the amount of time it will take to get yourself back out of it.