Misophonia, Parenting, and Guilt

One of my earliest introductions to Misophonia was the 20/20 story about a mother and teen daughter who cannot be in the same room together, and who have to communicate by writing. It appears these two love each other and have a very close relationship, but misophonia does not allow them to have the most basic parent-child contact – a conversation.

At the time, knowing nothing at all about Misophonia/4S (but knowing quite a bit about the brain, and a lot about families), I had two thoughts:

1. This looks like a neurological disorder of some sort, in which the survival part of the brain is triggered, as if one’s life is in danger, even though the current situation is not actually life-threatening. At the time, I thought it looked a little like PTSD, where the sound of a car back-firing throws a war vet into instant alert, as if he is back in the warzone.

2. Regardless of the cause, this also looks like a family problem. Clearly, it goes beyond the individual sufferer and is causing distress for the entire family.

My many years as an elementary school teacher and then as a counselor in schools at all levels taught me that it is usually very hard to discuss children’s behavior with parents. Because even when we as parents acknowledge there is a problem, we also tend to get very defensive. We take it personally, as if we are being accused of bad parenting. That makes it very hard on us as parents – we have put ourselves into a double-bind of sorts. We know there is a problem, we also know that in some ways, we must have been part of the problem, and yet we take it so personally as an attack that we have trouble being open to seeing what we might need to do differently to make changes in the situation.

So about that, let’s get clear on a few things:

• No parent intends for anything bad to happen with his or her child.
• No parent is looking for ways to mess up.
• None of us wants our child to be damaged by something we have said or done.

And yet, we have to all admit that there have been times when we said to ourselves:

• I wish I had handled that differently.
• Why did I say that to my kid?
• How can I take that back?
• I was doing what seemed right at the time – how could I have known it would backfire?

Specifically in terms of dealing with Misophonia, it makes complete sense that when a child suddenly starts getting obnoxious at the dinner table (for example, yelling at others to shut up or stop chewing), any reasonably competent parent would attempt to stop or modify that behavior. It also makes sense that when this behavior continues and even escalates, the parent will be frustrated and probably also angry, and will create or attempt to enforce rules about dinner table behavior. Months or years later, when the parent finds information to indicate this reactive behavior is outside of the child’s control, it is quite understandable that the parent will feel terrible guilt for having added to the child’s distress by making demands that now appear to have been unreasonable.

Please allow me – a family therapist with many, many years of helping families sort out difficulties – to offer these words of comfort:

• You did nothing wrong (and if you did do some things wrong, they were probably no worse than any other parent has done).
• You did the best you could with the information you had at the time, which was, as we now see, very limited.
• If you had known more then, you would have done something differently sooner.

Those of you who are adult misophones, you also know that your parents did not know what was wrong, and they made plenty of mistakes with you. All those errors only added to your deep distress about a situation over which you had no control.

Misophonia appears to be a very mean condition that has the capacity to wreck a lot of lives and relationships. Because there has been so little actual scientific research yet, most of what we know about it comes from anecdotal information, from the adults who have it, and the families who are currently dealing with it. But there has been research on parenting in general that shows that we do not have to be perfect at the job. In fact, it is impossible to be a perfect parent. Furthermore, it is actually damaging to try to be perfect (an inhuman prospect) because that puts added pressure on any child to try to live up to impossible standards of perfection.

A dear friend and colleague used to teach a parenting class. At the end, she issued to each attending Mom a GEM Certificate: Good Enough Mother. Research indicates that we need to be good parents about 70-75% of the time. What makes a really good parent is what we do after the times when we have messed up, fallen short, or made mistakes. The ability to:

• acknowledge errors
• apologize for mistakes, and
• repair damage

are by far the most important aspects of good parenting.

You dear, good parents of misophonic children have probably already apologized for not knowing, and for therefore unwittingly adding to your child’s distress. (If you have not, then please consider doing so.) And then what? Here is where I believe good parenting will include some of those very rules and guidelines you formerly demanded, but with the added knowledge you now have.

More about that in the next piece.