I may have mentioned that I work in a school , I don’t know what you might call the school I work in , in your country , here we call it a primary school , Americans amongst you might call it an Elementary school. It’s a noisy place , full of life and frankly loud boisterous children . I love it , the sounds of children playing don’t bother me a bit , sometimes I feel like an electric car , when I get to school I get re generated , my batteries fill up with the energy of these young people.
I mention noise as I went out for a coffee today to get a bit of work done , coffee shops don’t generally annoy me either, but this morning a young teenager , Im sure a nice young person sat in the next set of seats put up his hood and turned on the music on his phone , this tinny , awful noise like cats fighting with a squealing fox filled the air and it was just impossible to ignore , I asked him nicely to turn it down and he did , for a bit anyway. My neighbours , are self building and do it at all sorts of times during the day or evenings , my wife has a super-humane ability to focus on what she is doing , me ? my mind just re focuses on the banging of nails coming form next door . To get to the point….eventually Im really bothered by a certain type of unpredictable noise and Im wondering if it’s a symptom of Trauma.
Well unsurprisingly there is yet another wonderful thing that affects those with a history of childhood trauma ( in case you wanted more ?)and that is we can be on guard all the time and the term for this and sudden noise is ” Increased startle Reactivity in adulthood”. Its is evidentially a subcortical reflex modulated by trauma , no I don’t know what that means either, however it may be another side effect of our old friend the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal pathway, although as many things within this discipline further research is desperately needed.
Some scientists believe that a condition linked to anxiety and trauma is Misophonia ( Im going to sound clever in a minute …here goes), Miso comes from the greek word to describe something that is hated and phona is the word for sound , therefore a hatred of certain sounds although its not listed in the classifications of disorders. None of this helps me though , I can cope with all sorts of sounds , but some , perhaps those that we might all find a bit annoying effect me more than others , so I don’t think that condition describes me. Perhaps it’s just GOMS ………Grumpy Old Man Syndrome .
