triggers

Going to interview another shrink today. On the phone I mentioned my hypersensitivity to certain noises, particularly loud ones, and she mention a book called Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight.

But I think I'm going to stick to my guns here and follow my own path. I don't want to be 'fixed' about this - instead I want to listen to whatever message my psyche is giving me through these body signals, and see what I can learn.

For instance, it's occurred to me that the hearing sensitivity has to do with the number of events where someone's said something mean or otherwise expressed aggressive anger toward me with a loud sound, like a car horn blaring for a prolonged time from two feet away outside my open window, and I couldn't get my hands over my ears quick enough. And being a musician in a lot of unsatisfying situations where either the sound I was producing was unpleasant to me or the sounds everybody else was making were unpleasant to me - it all seems to have tangled together to produce a kind of indiscriminate reaction to all loud noises.

Like for instance my noisy neighbor with the horrible voice (very loud, very nasal, with a completely flat affect) who attacked me verbally for something that wasn't my fault: I just think he's an asshole and ignore him, basically, but the sound of his leaf-blower is like a giant, annoying mosquito that I want to kill, and I have to get out my ear protectors (the kind that target shooters use) and cover up my ears til he stops.

Same with weed eaters - that annoying whine is one of the most destructive sounds I can imagine - I can't tell you how many times I've seen some beautiful stretch of greenery decimated by the wielder whose sole goal in life is to reduce everything green within reach to a uniform height of one inch tall, regardless of whether said green thing is a weed, grass, or some fabulous flowering perennial that's been slowly, painstakingly growing its little shoots for the last 6 months and is now chopped down to nothing, to have to wait til the next growing cycle to try again. (Ooh, that image cuts a little too close to the bone).

So my amygdala? appears to lump loud whiny sounds - leaf blowers, weed-eaters, loud planes (I live under the flight path and I'm quite sure many of these asshole pilots are flying way lower than the regs allow), loud, aggressive-sounding voices (especially male ones) and insensitive music-playing together in one lump of 'this-is-scary-loud-destructive-dangerous and I will now ('I' meaning my amygdala or whatever other bits of my neurochemical system are responsible) pump large quantities of fear chemicals into this body, causing it to tense up and or freeze.

The 'freezing' happens, I'm convinced, because many of these 'triggers' are things over which I have no control - I can neither fight nor run away from them, so though my whole body system gets triggered, my ability to 'work out' the physiological reactions tends to have to be sublimated or indirect. I can cover my ears, but I can't stop the sounds from being made in the first place, and I can't escape them, either, not in any real sense. Men use loud, destructive tools and equipment everywhere you go; everywhere you go there are loud, aggressive men who want to dominate you (and sometimes women seem to, too); and the music thing - well, girl's gotta eat, right? I've already disconnected myself from the corporate money-generating world at large to escape intolerable situations; the music, while often frustrating and painful, is nowhere near this level of intolerability (yet, and I sure hope it doesnt' go there!)

My brother thinks I can just 'medicate' myself out of this; but why would I want to? My sensitivity is a large part of who I am. When I'm not around other people, being sensitive to sights, sounds, colors, touch, feelings is what makes the world really cool and fascinating! It's just that when other people are around, they're always creating this jarring, jangling fog of meaningless sensory stimulus that communicates nothing and at the same time blocks out or interferes with the stuff that I'm wanting to pay attention to. So I have to pay attention to their stupid, shallow, meaningless noise instead of the things I care about.

I don't want to spend my time and energy conforming, life is too short! I want to spend my time and energy being me.

(Another thought about the Too Loud etc. book: I think these books are written more for the families and friends of the atypicals than they are for the person who actually experiences the world this way. The so-called neurotypicals (NTs) want the atypical to conform to make the NTs experience more comfortable. In most cases the NT could care less about whether the atypical is comfortable or not. I think I could be ok with this if it didn't always feel like such a one-way street, where the NT is never the one doing any of the adjusting.)