It has been several months since I started working on an experimental treatment to tackle my Misophonia. The treatment has been hit-and-miss, with my reaction to some trigger noises diminishing. For other trigger noises, the treatment has not been effective so far.

Last fall, I was contacted by behavioral scientist Tom Dozier, who offered me the treatment free of charge, assuming I would chronicle my journey on this blog. I told him I would be giving an honest account of how the treatment worked.

Dozier developed a smart phone app called the Trigger Tamer that allows patients to record the sounds that trigger them, and then expose themselves to just a few seconds of the sound at a time, as to only trigger themselves a small amount. After experiencing the minor Misophonia reaction, they work to immediately calm themselves.

The premise of the app is that the reaction people with Misophonia have is actually an unwanted reflex that has somehow been programmed in a primal part of our brain, the medulla oblongata. This treatment method also assumes that people with Misophonia experience a physical reaction to trigger sounds in addition to the emotional response. This physical response could be a jerking of the shoulders, a tightening of the chest, a clenching of other muscles, or any other physical reaction.

For the Trigger Tamer app to work effectively, a patient must identify their physical responses to Misophonia sounds, then find a way to extinguish those physical responses in a matter of a couple of seconds. If the physical response is a tightening of shoulder muscles, for example, then the patient could have someone massage their shoulders immediately after they are triggered by a noise, or they could use muscle relaxation techniques to relax their shoulders by themselves.

That’s how this treatment works. A patient listens to a snippet of their trigger sound on the app until they experience a mild amount of that physical trigger, then they immediately perform the act (such as muscle relaxation) that will wipe out that physical reaction.This process retrains the brain to stop reacting negatively to trigger sounds, according to Dozier.

Dozier has estimated that patients using this method for about 30 minutes a day can see their triggers diminish in a matter of weeks. The app isn’t a huge investment (about $40), but Dozier prefers patients using the app schedule regular check-in appointments with him.

Did this treatment work for me? Yes and no.

One of the biggest challenges for me is that my physical reaction to sounds is sexual arousal, and not in a good way. Hearing a trigger sound doesn’t make me want to have sex; it makes me feel sexually aroused and angry at the same time. It’s very confusing and upsetting.

I had to experiment a lot to find something that could make my sexual arousal go away quickly. I tried making myself sad, muscle tightening and muscle relaxation, but those didn’t work. I tried having a partner tickle me aggressively. That seemed to work, but it wasn’t very practical, or enjoyable. I tried yoga stretches, and some of them worked, particularly stretching out my hips (half-lotus and head-of-knee poses).

A couple times a week, I began using hip stretches while listening to the Trigger Tamer.

The first trigger sound I tried to tackle was the sound of a spoon clanking on a bowl. I listened to one particular sound and over time, I stopped triggering to that one specific sound of a spoon hitting a bowl. But, it only helped me slightly out in the real world. I think that’s because there are several different types of clanking and scraping noises that trigger me when I hear someone eat out of a bowl, and for this treatment to truly work, I would have to record each of those many sounds and work with them one at a time with the app.

I gave up on that for a while and decided to take on the sound of typing, which was really starting to eat at me while I was at work. I had serious concerns that I would have to quit my job because I’m surrounded at work by people typing constantly. This is a trigger I developed just in the past year or two, and I wanted to nip it in the bud. I worked with a 10-second recording of a person typing aggressively. At first I listened to a second or two at a time, but eventually was able to listen to the whole 10 seconds without triggering. It wasn’t long before I could listen to the recording for a half hour without triggering.

The typing sounds at work are now manageable. I can go days and weeks without being triggered, and if the Misophonia reaction begins to crop up again, I do a quick stretch at my desk to eliminate the trigger feeling as fast as I can. That seems to send my Misophonia reaction into dormancy for a while longer.

During the past few months, I have developed two new triggers: the sound of snoring, and feeling my partner breathing when we are lying in bed. This means we no longer sleep in the same bed, and I have to sleep in another room while listening to pink noise, because my partner’s snoring sounds reverberate throughout our home.

I’ve been working with my partner to have him tickle me while we are lying down to fight the reaction I have to feeling my partner breathe. That remains a work in progress.

I recorded the snoring sounds and am now able to listen to the recording without being triggered, but for some reason that hasn’t made it any easier for me when I hear the actual sounds of my partner snoring. Dozier suggested that when I use the Trigger Tamer I try to make the recording seem more real, by lying down while listening to the recording and really imagining my partner snoring. That should trigger me more and allow me to fight that Misophonia reaction more effectively.

It’s a time-consuming treatment and can be difficult to stick to, especially if you need another person to help you wipe out your trigger responses while using the Trigger Tamer app.

Since first writing about this treatment, I’ve heard a couple of concerns from readers of this blog. They include:

Don’t you know exposure therapy doesn’t work?

Yes, traditional exposure therapy hasn’t worked to combat my Misophonia. In this case, though, trigger taming “exposes” patients to a mild trigger and allows them to kill a small physical reaction to the trigger before they become too distressed. With traditional exposure therapy, the goal is to distress the patient and allow them to get used to those feelings of distress until their anxiety eventually diminishes and they get used to the object they are being exposed to. That type of traditional exposure therapy has not been shown to help Misophonia patients whatsoever, and can actually be a very horrible experience.

There’s no good evidence that the Misophonia treatments out there work, and we should be cautious of so-called experts trying to sell us things to fight Misophonia.

I completely agree with this statement. Because Misophonia research is still in its infancy, it’s impossible to have reliable, hard data the prove which treatments work. It’s also possible that something could work for one Misophonia sufferer but not another. We’re still very much in an experimental phase, and everyone should proceed with caution.

The bottom line: Only you can decide when trying an experimental treatment for your Misophonia is worth it.