Michael C.: EMDR & Memory Reconsolidation Therapy

Adeel [0:00]: Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, it's very freeform. Those are just kind of notes for me. We don't have to go in any kind of order. But first I'll say, Michael, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you here.

18050674 [0:11]: Thanks for having me.

Adeel [0:13]: Yeah, so we were just saying, we've, actually we've kind of talked a bit over the years about email, but actually, first of all, do you want to just tell us a little bit about where you're located, kind of maybe what you do or?

18050674 [0:26]: I'm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which is a northern suburb of Philadelphia. I'm a retired software engineer, so think we may have that in common. I mean, the software engineer part, yeah. And I've had Misophonia most of my life. I'm 70 years old, and I've had it for at least, I think, 60 years.

Adeel [0:37]: Yes, I'm not retired, but hopefully. Yeah. Did you... When did you find out it had a name?

18050674 [0:56]: It's funny, my sister knew I had this crazy reaction to sounds. So she was looking around Facebook a few years ago and found that it had a name and she sent it to me. And I said, other people actually have this? I thought this was something that just was my craziness. And... That's in fact, when I saw your podcast, was, was just doing searches, internet searches and there your podcast showed up. So relatively recent, probably within the past four five years, I would say.

Adeel [1:32]: Yeah, wow. Okay. That is pretty recent. And that's interesting. And you know, lot of there are a lot of engineers who have Missifonia. That's just interesting to someone who's been in the field for so long that well, you probably rubbed shoulders with other people who had it. Maybe they also didn't know what it was.

18050674 [1:50]: Yes, I had run into other people and they didn't know it had a name either. So I'd say, do you know this thing as a name? And they were just as surprised as I was.

Adeel [1:59]: Yeah. Well, do you want to go back, I guess, back to early? Can you kind tell us a little bit about where you grew up, what your family was like? You had one sister, it sounds like.

18050674 [2:10]: a brother and a sister. I grew up in a suburb of New York City and I would say, I would call it a dysfunctional kind of family. And I found out later, I mean, when we get to that, that there were some traumatic events in that family that I believe, and I'm not an expert in the area, but I believe led directly to my misophonia.

Adeel [2:11]: Mm-hmm. yeah, I mean, there's, there's, if you've heard, if you've heard the podcast a lot, you know, that there's a lot of things, from our childhood that could kind of make us hypervigilant. and so, I'm always interested in hearing about that. yeah, I guess, yeah. So do you want to tell us kind of what, when you first, start to have sensitivities to sounds, when you, maybe some of your first memories of experiencing this, if only.

18050674 [3:09]: So I've always been sensitive to what I would call sloppy eating habits. Slurping, burping, those are the two on the top of the list, but then that kind of extended into other areas like gum snapping would get to me. One of my first recollections of being... in the fight or flight area was during a college course where the girl sitting right behind me was snapping her gum. And I felt paralyzed. I remember feeling like I couldn't hear a word the professor was saying. And that was one of the first times I remember. In that case, thank God I've never fought anybody over this, but I've had the flight reaction a lot. And I learned there that I'm better off sitting in a corner somewhere, and especially toward the back, because then I don't have to worry about someone behind me making the sound. And that extended throughout my entire life. And I'll talk about how this

Adeel [4:13]: Yeah.

18050674 [4:22]: You know I had a recent change and how that's changed how I feel about, you know, where I need to sit. mostly reacting to, you know, the sloppy sounds. I'm very aware of when people are talking loud. I could be in a room with a hundred people and if one person's talking loud, it starts getting to me. Well, it did get to me.

Adeel [4:25]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

18050674 [4:53]: Yeah, so like I said, it came and it went, but it feels more sensitive. And I don't know why, sometimes in my life, I felt more sensitive than other times. But it's always been there as long as I can remember.

Adeel [5:08]: Yeah, yeah. What was kind of happening, I guess, in your home life around the time, maybe just before you started to notice misophonia? Do you remember what age kind of you were?

18050674 [5:21]: So if you don't mind, I'll tell you how I got to that point. So my brother's a therapist and several years ago I told him about this and he had never heard of it. And I told him, you know, what I learned basically from listening to your podcast that a lot of times these kinds of things are brought about by traumatic events.

Adeel [5:28]: Yeah, yeah,

18050674 [5:48]: And he said to me, you should really do some EMDR and maybe that'll help you recall these events. And I had done EMDR before. I had a bad traffic accident and I'd wake up in cold sweats seeing the car just before it hit me. And I did EMDR and it was very helpful for that. So I went back and did EMDR again. And.

Adeel [5:59]: Mmm.

18050674 [6:12]: It wasn't the first time we did it, but over time we did it enough times that I did have one very vivid memory that I had totally forgotten about until that point. And I must have been, I guess, 10 years old and I walked into my house, dysfunctional house, I walked around the corner and I saw my father hit my mother with a two by four. Hit her so hard that I put her into the hospital. Now, I'm the only one that saw this, but my brother and sister do remember that she was in the hospital. So we put two plus two together and we realized what happened there. And I guess it was such a traumatic event that my body just stored it away somewhere, never to be found again. Now, interestingly enough, my father had all of these sloppy eating habits. So I don't think it's an accident that he... you know, he hit her and then all of a sudden my young brain thought, okay, you know, he's a bad guy. So I guess what he does is bad. And that led, I remember, you know, after the EMTR event that right after this happened, I started reacting to my father slurping and burping. So there was a direct correlation there for me. But the interesting thing is this happened again, probably got. five or six years ago, knowing what the event was didn't help me at all. All I knew was, okay, this happened, but I still had the misophonia. It wouldn't go away until I was, it was, was, I just, I got to the point where I just accepted, I'm just this weird person and people think I'm crazy. People think I'm being overdramatic.

Adeel [7:54]: Well, it was in you for so long that it's not going to go overnight, I would think.

18050674 [8:08]: But what changed that was your podcast 218 where you had Sarah Barak on. And I think you know Sarah and I spoke. And that was life changing. When she said the words, I used to have misophonia, but now I'm cured. My ears perked up and that led to the next phase. I don't know if you're ready to go to the next phase, but.

Adeel [8:34]: Yeah, I like to jump around, let's do it.

18050674 [8:37]: So what got me to this point was I was in a two-year relationship with this person that I was really in love with. She knew that I had this issue and it came up and it became a point of contention between the two of us and about six months ago she used the words I've had it, I can't take it anymore and she ended the relationship. Now there were other... aspects to misophonia that I learned through therapy. So I went to therapy after the relationship grew up, grew up and I realized that I was becoming a very judgmental person. For example, if someone was slurping, I would immediately go into judgment mode. how could they slurp? How could they be such a person? And I didn't even know I was doing this. It took my ex-girlfriend, partner to point this out to me. So I've been doing a lot of work with my therapist. And then... I was avoiding certain things like travel because although I like to travel, traveling is the worst because people are always making noises. You're on an airplane, the guy sitting next to you is chewing gum. It makes it very difficult and uncomfortable. And that was an issue too. So in therapy, my therapist, again, she didn't know anything about misophonia. She had me do these SUDS tests. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It stands for subjective units of distress. And you rate from zero to 10, what your level of pain is. And she had me doing this exposure therapy. And I know there's mixed reviews on whether that helps with misophonia. So I would go on YouTube and find people slurping soup, find people talking loud, all of triggers and with suds what you do is you write down how you felt before during and after and pretty consistently my numbers were up in the eights and nines and in the very uncomfortable space and doing this I felt a little bit better but I didn't feel like I was being cured at any point in time so

Adeel [10:41]: sense.

18050674 [10:50]: Again, going to my therapist and thinking, you know, I need to deal with this because it's affecting my life and my relationship. I lost this person that I was really love with because of this. So I need to do something. I pointed out to her that I talked with, that I heard Sarah Barrack and this whole memory reconsolidation theory. And it made sense to me because, and look, I'm by no means an expert. about this and being a software engineer, seemed logical to me. Yes, it seemed logical that your body stores this terrible memories in your primitive brain, by the way, which is responsible for fight or flight.

Adeel [11:22]: Okay, yes, we're self-engineered, so we can break this.

18050674 [11:38]: And that every time the trigger happens, you go back to whatever your beliefs are. Like for me, the beliefs about my father hitting my mother is I'm unsafe. My mother's unsafe. And right away being unsafe goes straight to fight or flight. There was another incident right after the two by four incident where my parents were arguing and the room was right above mine. And I pictured this is after, you know, I had my whole body turning into an ear and listening and thinking, I need to protect my mother. I run up the stairs and ask them to stop doing it. So I went to my therapist and I said, look, can you learn how to do memory reconsolidation? Because according to Sarah Baric, it's life changing. And to her credit,

Adeel [12:06]: Yeah.

18050674 [12:28]: She went and did a whole bunch of research on it. She listened to your podcast. She listened to Sarah. Sarah's got some good stuff. And there are other folks on YouTube, by the way, that talk about memory reconsolidation. I talked to my brother. He said, yeah, sounds like a great idea. So we kind of learned how to do it together because the first few times we tried it, it was a little helpful, but I didn't have what I would call a breakthrough until we got it right. And then it was.

Adeel [12:39]: Mm-hmm.

18050674 [12:58]: life changing. So we were going back and forth between the ear, you know, feeling like the ear and the two by four incident. Finally, she got the formula right. And I think the big difference is first she had me relax, just sit there, breathe and relax and close my eyes. But then the whole retrieving the memory was so important. And as an engineer, My metaphor would be retrieving a file from a disk from non-volatile memory where it's there. And no matter what, it's going to be there persistent. But in order to work on it, you have to retrieve it. So that was an active process of what we did. So we retrieved that memory. And then I started having visions. And I'm not a dramatic person at all. I'm a very logical engineering process in person, but I started having intense visions. And for that one, for the ear, was have this ear getting pulled out of this cage.

Adeel [13:55]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

18050674 [14:06]: and then just sitting in front of me. And then she would ask me questions like, well, what do you associate with that? And to me, was, what I associated with it was this dysfunctional type of communication that I was experiencing with my parents. And they'd be screaming at each other. And then I had this belief that all communication is dysfunctional because of that. And then, you know, working through the whole process, we replaced that that memory with another memory, which is me just communicating with somebody in a very honest and special way. And then we had to take the ear memory and somehow make it feel good about being removed and just being integrated with the rest of my memories. And that took some time. And she walked me through that process. And when that was done, I felt like... I almost felt like my mind was a blank sheet of paper that something had just shifted inside of me. It took a whole session, that was an hour session doing that. The next week we did the two by four. We went back to three by four. And same process.

Adeel [15:18]: Wow, okay, yeah.

18050674 [15:22]: This time I saw a vision of a brain coming out of this cage, didn't want to come out. It was tied in with a bunch of strings. By the way, after this happened, I went on to AI and I had them draw some pictures of me. I have images of this if you'd like, I can share them. So.

Adeel [15:40]: Yeah.

18050674 [15:43]: I pulled the brain out and it was trembling in front of me. Again, I'm not a dramatic person. I'm an engineer. So for me to have these memories, it was really special. And it took a while for me to calm it down. I also had a vision of myself as a young boy, calming him down. And again, through same process, what I replaced it with is shortly after this incident, my mother was in the hospital. I visited her. And we bonded, we had such a good kind of normal time. So I replaced that memory with the bad memory, the two by four memory with being with my mom. And then it took the rest of the session again to take that memory and integrate it in with the rest of my memories, assuring that, you know, this was something horrible that happened to me, but it's okay for it to be. just part of every other memory that I have that didn't need to control my life. got the same kind of blank sheet of paper and here's my cat in case you're So it took one more session. decided, both of us decided that there's no need for this cage anymore.

Adeel [16:47]: Okay. Yeah.

18050674 [16:56]: that we needed to get rid of the cage. So we pulled both the memories out of the cage, me having conversation, and then me with my mother and pulled it into a really beautiful scene in a field with mountains in the background. And that was the last session we had with the reconsolidation. since then, Kat just jumped in case you see her on the screen. Since then,

Adeel [17:20]: Yeah.

18050674 [17:25]: I've had some incredible experiences. So I'll tell you the latest one. Yesterday in church, so I'm a churchgoer and for people with misophonia, church is the worst place you need because it's quiet and all you need is somebody sniffling, you know, three or four pews away from you and you've lost your concentration.

Adeel [17:31]: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

18050674 [17:50]: One of the things I don't think I've shared yet is that I found that taking the THC gummies very helpful because it kind of numbs your senses. So I would take like half of a gummy, which is a lot. I mean, enough that you're impaired that you can't drive, but... and me get through the service. And I would wear the Widex hearing aids because they had the little Zen thing going on and that helped. Well, this past Sunday, I sat in church with nothing. No gummies, no hearing aids, and I was fine. The interesting thing is, I think because my body has reacted to these sounds for so many years, going back to the computer metaphor, I still hear the trigger and I can kind of feel it trying to access the file. And nothing's, there's nothing for it to access. Now, I don't get a memory violation or what you would get in the real world, but what I've learned to do is replace that with that final picture, the two replacement memories in that beautiful setting. And although the trigger still does something it doesn't bring me to fight or flight it brings me to a totally different place now so the interesting thing is if i go back to suds remember suds you have before during and after

Adeel [19:23]: Yeah.

18050674 [19:25]: Just the anticipation of something possibly affecting me, like a church, I start with a two, which is a really low number for me, but then I end up with zeros because of no effect anymore. So I can't recommend it enough. Sarah is, and I know she didn't invent this, she talked about some other people, but I think she may be the first one that applied it to Misophonia.

Adeel [19:38]: Yeah, yeah. Tim Missifonia, yeah, yeah, yeah.

18050674 [19:56]: It works. It absolutely works.

Adeel [19:59]: So this is amazing and I'm really happy for you. Like I said, we've talked for a number of years on various things. I'm glad that, yeah, I'm glad this has worked out and it sounds amazing. Tactically, you want people who are obviously interested in kind of like learning a bit more about what the process was like? Like how long did it all take? It sounds like was EMDR that was actually what... brought up the initial memories and then you worked with the memory consolidation and replacing the memories later. Yeah.

18050674 [20:33]: For me, I'm no expert in the field. The reason I did EMDR, like I said, my brother is a therapist and when he heard the word trauma, he immediately said, you need to try EMDR. And that really was the gateway. I had no recollection of the two by four incident until the EMDR. And then,

Adeel [20:59]: Hmm.

18050674 [21:02]: I still was doubting myself until I talked to my siblings and they both said, well, that's about the same time she went to the hospital. And hospital part I remembered. And where he hit her, hit her in the leg, that was the reason why she went to the hospital because she had this blood clot in her leg. Well, how do you get that? Well, somebody hits you with a two by four, you're to get a blood clot.

Adeel [21:11]: Did you remember the hospital part though? Do you remember her being? Yeah. That will, yeah, yeah.

18050674 [21:30]: So the EMDR brought out the traumatic event. I don't think I ever would have remembered it without it. Now the ear, I did remember without the EMDR, but that wasn't as intense. The ear kind of like was a, to me the ear was just a symptom of the EMDR. And during the process, the one thing my therapist did a really good job of is when we were thinking of the traumatic event,

Adeel [21:39]: Amazing. Yes.

18050674 [22:00]: she would ask me specific questions like, what kind of beliefs do you have because of this? And with the two by four, was, I'm not safe. I'm not safe in this house. And as a little child not being safe in your own home, I don't know if it can get more traumatic, especially from your father. And then the second one, the communication part. Look, I have a ways to go when it comes to communication, but just... knowing that there was an event in my life that caused me to think that there was no such thing as real, honest, healthy communication, that all communication was dysfunctional and that eventually it would lead to bad things in my most recent case, you know, this breakup that I had. And just working on those two things alone, I mean, without even addressing the misophonia.

Adeel [22:50]: Yeah.

18050674 [22:59]: was just, you know, again, life changing, having someone that knows the process, knows what questions to ask, and walks you through it very patiently, and I got to give my therapist a lot of credit for spending, she spent a month doing research.

Adeel [23:15]: That's amazing. I would love to talk to her too. Because I think we need to get more, yeah, we need to get more therapists to have that kind of curiosity and willingness to learn.

18050674 [23:18]: I can share. unbelievable. She even told me that she thinks this can help her with all sorts of trauma, not just phonia. If you want, I can send you her info when I send you pictures. Okay. Yeah, I think you find the pictures fascinating. I mean, I don't know what we did before AI, but trying to draw a picture of a brain coming out of a cage with strings, AI just did an amazing job with it. So,

Adeel [23:34]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's talk offline. Yeah, let's talk offline about... Yeah. Yeah.

18050674 [23:57]: Yeah, I... There's no word I can use other than maracas. I haven't even told my kids about this because this happened just so recently.

Adeel [24:07]: Yeah, could you talk about, right? So I wanna, there's so many ways I can go. one thing, well, actually, yeah, let's talk about your kids in a little bit, because I'd love to hear about it, kind of like how, yeah, it was for you to be a dad, because, especially after, well, not knowing what you witnessed, it was in your body. So I'm kind of curious how life for you was as a father. But before I do that, I think an important thing is, I would love to hear about your take on. mean, I and I'm sure so I mean, there are a of people with misophonia who look back and they're like, oh, I don't remember anything bad. I don't remember anything that happened or whatever. This just sounds like it just kind of came out of nowhere. Even me, who's been to kind of like an IFS kind of trauma informed therapy, it's hard for me because like you said, I'm not a super dramatic person. It's hard for me to like. come up with memories and I feel sometimes kind of like under the gun and forced to kind of like think of something. What helped you like find that memory? Like, loosen it up. Yeah. Okay.

18050674 [25:13]: I can't take any credit for that. have to it all to the therapist. And like I said, it didn't happen the first time. We went, we did EMDR for months until one day. I wish I could give you more detail because one of the reasons I agreed to come on your podcast is if there's anything I could do to help other people with this, cause I know.

Adeel [25:29]: Gotcha. Okay.

18050674 [25:43]: I know what it's like. know people who thought, you know, he's just being dramatic or it can't be that bad that they don't understand that it's painful when you get triggered and you have misophonia, it's really painful. We were in a session. She somehow and I wish I remembered more. And this was five or more years ago. I wish I remember what led up to it. But when it happened, it was as plain as day that the traumatic event that really shaped me over the past 60 years was my father hitting my mother with that two by four. When it came out, I knew, I just intuitively knew that was it. And I feel bad because I listen to your podcast too. And I hear so many people talk about the symptoms and not have any idea how they got there.

Adeel [26:42]: Yes. Sorry, I'm nodding real hard because I'm trying to really bring this up where we're focusing too much on the post onset misophonia and the symptoms and not thinking about that. There's an 800 pound gorilla that we're not looking at. It's that period before.

18050674 [26:56]: Yeah. No, and maybe if this podcast gets more people to start looking into it, I think that would be wonderful. I can only tell you what worked for me was, again, the EMDR followed by the memory reconsolidation. And I don't know if everyone can afford, I happen to be on Medicare, they're pretty good about paying for these kinds of things. I can just encourage you to sit with a professional and try to get to that triggering event. I feel for everybody that's out there, including you, that experiences this and just can't remember it. I lived 50 years of my life or more in that state that I had this thing, I have no idea how I got here. Most people think I'm being too dramatic. up and including this woman I was just dating I think she looked at me like you know why are you being so you know sensitive to these things they just don't get how really debilitating it is but again that was only half of the equation knowing the event helped me in no way deal with misophonia It was the combination of knowing the event and memory reconsolidation to replace that horrible memory with one that's much more pleasant and then finally shutting down that piece of memory and having the pleasant memories live in a really nice and encouraging place. In fact, I go to these events, like I go to this Bible study, which has a lot of potential for being triggering. And I have this picture on the note sitting in front of me. Just in case I do get a trigger, I'm not going to have fire or flight, but I just look at that picture and it's like, OK, we're good.

Adeel [29:04]: Yeah. Which picture is it? picture that the AI picture that? Yeah.

18050674 [29:07]: That's the final picture, the one where we got rid of the cage. I'll send these to you, but it's basically the two visions, me and my mother and me talking in an open field with mountains in the background. I tried to pick the most calming, pleasant, and this actually came up during one of my sessions with my therapist. But then I just went to AI and had it drawn for me.

Adeel [29:12]: Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. And just to go back, thanks for sharing the process. think the lesson is, one of the lessons is, it's an open-ended process. It was very insightful to hear from you that it didn't happen right away. It took a long time. It took months to get to that point. Too much, I think too often in our current, our therapy modalities are very focused on short-term. solutions. so we don't really, and insurance won't pay for long-term open-ended exploration. But I think that's what we need because our bodies weren't designed for an eight session beginning and end. And so I think that's a huge insight that we need to bring back because we've lost that over the last 40 years.

18050674 [30:23]: So. Also, going back to the relationship, that was so painful for me that I made a commitment to myself that I need to learn something from this. need no matter what it takes, I need to learn something from this. So don't repeat this mistake again. And both times with EMDR months and this past one. I started seeing her, my therapist, in April, and this just happened in September, this past September. So it took, now, to be fair, we didn't learn about the memory reconciliation, probably till, I would say, I forget when your podcast was, but I think it was in the July timeframe. Yeah, that's when I first learned about it and told my therapist, and it took her a month, or it took her from that point to...

Adeel [31:11]: July, yeah.

18050674 [31:21]: probably the beginning of September. And then it took her to give her credit, you know, many sessions before we got it right. And I knew we got it right because as soon as she did it, the time where it had the maximum effect, I felt this sense of relief. And all I saw was this blank sheet of paper, it's time, new life, time to start over again. And I had the exact same experience the second time we did it with the second memory.

Adeel [31:53]: Wow, your cat agrees. Your cat's applauding you. Amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm so happy for you. Do you want to talk, I guess, about your family, your kids? What was that like when you, yeah.

18050674 [32:07]: Yeah. So obviously I'm divorced. Growing up, you know, we had a good life. I've only been very close to my kids. My ex regrettably does not have a relationship with them. I'm not going to get into that here, but because of that, pretty much.

Adeel [32:15]: Yeah. Mm.

18050674 [32:35]: I've been like a single parent for a long time for both of them. They've both been understanding, but they also both kind of, I'll give you an example. We went to a funeral a couple of years ago, obviously before I made this breakthrough. And they said, all right, dad, where do you have to sit? Because.

Adeel [32:56]: Okay.

18050674 [32:57]: You you think about these things, where are you going to sit? Where is the least amount of chance that you're going to get triggered, right? So it would always have to be at the back, at the end, you know, along the side. And so they were understanding, but I don't think they really realized how debilitating it can be. But, you know, they've been very supportive throughout this whole thing. And like I said, this is so new.

Adeel [33:00]: yeah.

18050674 [33:24]: And I'm still kind of pinching myself. I mean, yesterday at church when I had no reaction at all, I really convinced myself when I walked out that, yeah, this is real. This is different. This is different. So I do need to tell them, hopefully before, when does this go live?

Adeel [33:44]: probably, probably later this month. Yeah, later this month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

18050674 [33:48]: Okay, so I have some time to tell them. I don't want them to learn through this. But yeah, we have a great relationship. a son and a daughter. My son has two kids, I two grandchildren. And they're the best thing that ever happened to me.

Adeel [34:08]: Well, that's great that at least they're aware and they think about you when you're in situations and asking how things work. yeah, I'm sure they're going to be happy to hear the breakthroughs that you've made. Do you want to, I guess, now switching, like to jump around, going back to obviously we talked about the big memory growing up. I mean, was...

18050674 [34:16]: Thank you.

Adeel [34:36]: I guess what else was, I would like to hear what else was going on. there, I mean, was it, I don't want to say typical, but was there a lot of domestic disturbance at home? Was that the kind of like, basically turbulent stuff's happening that you were talking about.

18050674 [34:55]: Yeah, there was a lot of turbulence. And I'm sure there's some memories that I talked about that are still hidden. But I don't think anything at the scale of the two by four incident. But in fact, my brother told me about one incident he had where he caught my parents fighting in front of all his friends and how embarrassing that was. But there are many.

Adeel [34:57]: Yeah. are still kind of hidden. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mmm.

18050674 [35:20]: It was dysfunctional. Just to get a little background, my father grew up in Sicily and when he was three years old, his father committed suicide and mother never remarried. And so he had some issues where he reacted to a lot of situations like a three-year-old would. He'd have temper tantrums, he'd have separation anxiety, all, you know.

Adeel [35:32]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

18050674 [35:48]: So that stuff would come out all the time. He'd start screaming at my mother or screaming at anybody who was walking by. It was hard for me to have normal relationships after that because my notion of a relationship is this crazy person arguing and screaming at everybody. My mother died when I was 18 years old, so I was very young. That was tough on me too, but I'm sure all these horrible things that happened to her didn't help. yeah, dysfunctional is the only word I can think of to describe my growing up.

Adeel [36:18]: okay. Yeah, I was going to ask you, I mean, I was going to ask like, was your parents childhood like? I think you, wow, you painted a tough picture right there. And that makes a lot of sense. lot of times there's, the dysfunction doesn't just start automatically. It usually kind of comes from somewhere. Usually there's a cycle that is being repeated.

18050674 [36:56]: Yeah. So again, my brother's a therapist and his theory is that my father stopped growing emotionally at three when his father committed suicide. By the way, his father had some kind of disease that he thought, like a grandfather thought, was incurable. That's why he shot himself. But my father never recovered from that. You know, he'd go through like some times where he just seemed normal, but other times he was anything but normal. And, you know, for me, it all culminated in that one event. By the way, neither one of them knew I was standing there. I don't think a two by four incident would have happened if either one of them looked and saw me standing there. And I'm the only one that saw it. And my brother and sister grew up in that same environment. Neither of them has misophonia. The only thing that was different was that event. And we talked about this a thousand times and we all agree that if you're looking for a traumatic event that could trigger something else, that was it.

Adeel [38:09]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, okay. And then I guess growing, well, that was around 10, like, how about did friends at school trigger you? You mentioned something about a lecture hall, obviously. But yeah, what was life like? Like, how did you start to experience misophony outside the home?

18050674 [38:33]: it came and it went. spent three years in the army and in the first six months of that, you're in basic training and you're in a barrack with 50 guys sleeping like feet from each other snoring. I don't remember it affecting me at all because well, I was afraid to drill sergeant come and kill me or something. It was other motivations, but.

Adeel [38:49]: Yeah. Yeah.

18050674 [38:59]: I remember always being sensitive to slurping, burping kind of things and dealing with it mostly by just avoiding the situation. It wasn't till, as long as I could avoid it, I felt like, okay, this isn't so bad, I can deal with it. It was in the cases where like sitting in that classroom with the girl snapping behind me where you can't do anything, sitting on an airplane with the person next to you making some annoying sound. Then I remember those, I remember a lot of those. And thank God for noise canceling headphones, right? I would put them on planes. I remember being at work, working in a cubicle environment, headphones. I mean, there's no way I could sit there. Even just the sound of typing next to me, I just couldn't handle that. But it was also, I also noticed the more stress I had in my life, the more sensitive I became.

Adeel [40:00]: Yep.

18050674 [40:01]: that suds rating would have definitely gone up being stressed. I remember when my dad passed away, I was so sensitive, I couldn't even go to work. I just told my boss, every single sound is triggering me. And so I spent like a week at home just trying to get over that. And then I'd go back to my normal level of sensitivity. So. For the most of my part, most of my life, whenever I got triggered, I would just find a place I could always sit in a corner. People always knew, like when they were seating assignments made, yeah, he, Michael needs to be in the corner. And I just understood. They didn't really know why, but they understood. And people were...

Adeel [40:38]: Mm-hmm.

18050674 [40:44]: kind to me that way that they knew that there was some issue. They didn't know what it was. I didn't even know what it was until my sister told me a few years ago. So. I don't remember a lot of specific things. I do remember with woman I was dating, there were some very specific times when I was triggered. One time we were at this pickleball event and people started screaming. I remember...

Adeel [41:15]: Yeah.

18050674 [41:16]: Like this and not even thinking about why I was doing it and she noticed there was some other times or she had some friends talking loud or tapping a pen and And I would react Most of the time what I would do is remove myself from the situation. I'd go for a walk outside One time when that woman was tapping the pen I asked her nicely if she could stop tapping the pen, but I think those things know, got to her after a while. She thought that, you know, this wasn't normal and, you know, like I said, it ended the relationship, unfortunately.

Adeel [41:57]: Yeah, yeah. How was your relationship with your dad after your mom passed away and everything?

18050674 [42:06]: it was, it was, how do I say this? I guess as normal as that could be under the circumstances, we, she, had separation anxiety, like I said. And when I, when I went into the army, he was living.

Adeel [42:15]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

18050674 [42:26]: in the same house where I grew up. And when I got out, he wanted me to move back in. And here I was, I was 23 years old, lived all over the world, very independent. When you're in the army, you gotta do everything yourself. You do the laundry. I learned how to be very independent. The last thing I wanted to do was go live, he remarried. I didn't wanna live in that house. And... I remember him, I said to him, look, I need to move. And he said, if you move, I'm going to die. So I said, oh, wow. He said, use those words. So I ended up building a house right next to his. And I got married and it got real contentious because he would walk into the house and here's my newlywed wife. And he would just be standing there in the middle of the house. And I had a big argument with him over that.

Adeel [43:00]: He said that? Wow. Okay.

18050674 [43:21]: that he couldn't do that kind of thing. That led to this really intense situation where we were sitting in front of the house in a snowstorm. I was trying to shovel. He grabbed a shovel from me and tried to hit me with it. Actually nicked my ear. My ears started bleeding. My wife calls the police. The police said, want to press charges? And I said, no, because I don't want my father going to jail. But that... That led to me saying, that's it. I'm putting the house on the market and moving. Sure enough, soon as I did that, he died. If you move, I die. Yeah, it actually happened.

Adeel [43:59]: Wow, okay. That's heavy. Yeah, a lot of symbolism there with the ear, but I won't belabor that point. That's, Wow, fascinating. I yeah, mean, sorry to hear that. That's, And you're, so you're now ex-wife?

18050674 [44:10]: didn't even thought of that, but yeah, the ear comes back.

Adeel [44:28]: What did she think about the Miss Fornia? I know you don't want to get into what happened to that relationship, but I'm just kind of curious if she was, yeah.

18050674 [44:34]: know this funny had nothing to do with that relationship. I, I don't remember and I don't know if this is intentional or not. don't, for example, I told you these certain situations that specific situations that just happened with this woman I was dating.

Adeel [44:54]: Mm-hmm.

18050674 [44:55]: We called each other life partners. We weren't married, but we dated for a couple of years. I don't remember those kind of situations with her, although I'm sure they happened, and I'm sure the way I dealt with it was just to remove myself from the situation, but there were other issues there that led to the divorce. you know, her siblings both passed away recently, and I went to both funerals. And so we have kind of a civil relationship.

Adeel [45:03]: Yeah. Gotcha, gotcha, okay. Yeah, wow, okay. And so are you, now that you've had, it's been kind of recent that you've felt some freedom from misophonia. Are you doing anything day to day, any kind of daily practice to kind of like make sure that this stays? kind of curious. Or is it the therapy session, then you come out and you have that blank slate feeling?

18050674 [45:52]: So I still go into therapy. One of the things Sarah suggested is I work on that initial SUDS number that because my body is so used to reacting to these triggers, I have this anxiety that triggers are gonna bother me. So she said that would be a good thing for me to work on. So I'm gonna work on that with her.

Adeel [45:55]: Mm-hmm.

18050674 [46:21]: Other than that, mean, I'm retired. like, I get involved with different groups. Like right now I'm leading a divorce recovery group. So I try to do things to kind of be normal. And by the way, That would have been a real issue because during these groups people cry and when they cry they're sniffling, sniffling was absolutely a trigger for me. So being able to sit in that class and hear people sniffle and not react to it is, it's been very helpful.

Adeel [46:48]: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. mean, yeah, it's kind of the gift that keeps on giving is once you've kind of healed yourself, you can help heal others because you can be there. Fascinating. And so have you met other people with Missifornia, especially now that it's had a name? Have you been able to kind of talk to people in real life?

18050674 [47:09]: That's a good way to look at it, yeah. Well, virtually, I've met a lot through your podcast. In real life, I've known some people who say they have sensitivity to sounds, and I'm sure you're familiar with the So Quiet group.

Adeel [47:28]: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

18050674 [47:45]: They have these little like business cards you can pass out that say, you know, I have reaction to sounds and that you can hand people. And I've given a few of those out to people because, they explained to me, you know, I've got this real sensitivity. I don't know what to do with it. said, here, here's a card, you know, check it out. I told them about you, tell them about your podcast too. But, very few, very few. mean, most of the people with misophonia I'm aware with, aware of. I've learned through your podcast.

Adeel [48:17]: Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, well, mean, yeah, Michael, we're getting close to an hour here. It's already been very heavy and I think impactful. think a lot of people are gonna hear this and kind of hopefully change the way they think about Misophonia and themselves and their backgrounds. so I think, hopefully, I hope all these episodes cause a lot of self-reflection. in the understanding that this is not an overnight solution, that it is a process.

18050674 [48:50]: No, I encourage everybody to go back and listen to episode 218 with Sarah Barrack. Sarah interviewed me and she's got her own demystifying misophonia work that she's doing. Fascinating book, Fascinating person. I encourage everybody follow Sarah. Just...

Adeel [49:05]: And a book that came out, yep.

18050674 [49:14]: type in memory reconsolidation on YouTube and all these experts will show up including Sarah did give me the name of a guy who Bruce Ecker and then there's coherence therapy she mentioned just watching those really encouraged me because then I thought yes there is something I can do besides the gummies like I said

Adeel [49:19]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

18050674 [49:44]: They kind of work, but I couldn't drive anywhere. I was in Paris. But all it was doing was kind of like a band-aid. It didn't really help as much as the memory reconsolidation. So definitely encourage people that, you know, if you need to do some work, EMDR is an amazing tool to try to recover the trauma.

Adeel [49:49]: All right.

18050674 [50:10]: EMDR is all about trauma. I had PTSD when I had that car accident and it cured me of it. I mean, it took a while. It took a few months, but it cured me of it. And that's why when my brother said, go back, was more than willing to, but you got to stick to it and got to be serious about wanting to have a positive change. This recent breakup, if that hadn't happened, this wouldn't have happened for me. as painful as that was, it led me to this and hopefully I won't have to go through that again.

Adeel [50:48]: Yeah, well, mean, yeah, one thing leads to another. mean, that painful thing, you decided to turn it into a lesson or using it as motivation to solve, well, you don't know it's gonna solve this phonia, to actually explore it and fix it. And that in turn is helping you help others by leading these groups. And so I think there are many ripple effects and... I think in many ways, misophonia is kind of a signal. Like it was when you were a child, it was a signal to something that you need to be vigilant about. And that's all our bodies can do at that age because we don't have the words or the understanding to make sense of what's going around. But you need to protect yourself somehow. And if misophonia develops as a way to signal that.

18050674 [51:36]: That's what my body was doing. It was taking that memory, which was too awful to remember and storing it in a place where I wouldn't have to remember it. But in the process of doing that, turned everything my father was doing into a trigger, which affected me the rest of my life until a few weeks ago.

Adeel [52:02]: Wow. Amazing. Well, yeah, Michael, thanks for coming on and sharing this story. think it's going to hopefully it's going to inspire a lot of people. So I appreciate it.

18050674 [52:10]: I hope so, Adil, and I commend you for your work. And like I said, if it wasn't for meeting Sarah in one of your podcasts, I never would have gotten here. So I really thank you for that.

Adeel [52:24]: Alright, and cut.