My Hyperacusis, Ear Fullness, and Tinnitus Are All GONE

I experienced an acoustic shock during a loud concert in May of 2022. I left the concert with a significant feeling of ear fullness and tinnitus in my left ear. The tinnitus got worse over the course of a few days, sound really started to hurt, and my ear just constantly felt full. I visited an urgent care 2 weeks after the show, and the doctor told me I had a severe case of otitis media. When I told him this happened from a loud concert, he told me it was impossible.

Chasing doctors and searching for answers brought me to this forum. I began to learn a lot from other people’s experiences, so I decided to document my own on here every 6 months or so. I am so excited to report that I am feeling much better and am enjoying my life to the fullest. Allow me to explain to you what worked for me.

While this whole episode may or may not have started out as a physical injury, I am completely convinced that my experience with tinnitus and hyperacusis is exclusively attributed to poor mental health. It was time to deal with the unchecked anxiety I’ve felt my entire life and address the abuse I endured throughout my upbringing.

I found an incredible therapist who was extremely interested in helping me. She was particularly interested in chronic pain and how traumatic experiences over time can build up and manifest into physical experiences of pain. She suspected that’s what was happening with my ear - and she was 100% correct.

I was overwhelmed with anxiety and depression when I met my therapist. During our first couple of months together, we developed a rapport by going through my history. This was followed by another couple of months of learning about chronic pain through books and documentaries. I also started on a 50mg dose of Sertraline, which helped me immensely perform the mental work over the last few months. I am now almost done titrating off the drug.

However, it was the months of EMDR that absolutely brought me out of this funk. I want to stress that mostly all of this therapy focused on my abusive upbringing from classically narcissistic parents. I was in complete denial that I was abused and mistreated. As an adult who has moved away from that situation and established clear boundaries in those relationships, I can now accept that the emotional stress I was put under for all of that time was abuse.

I believe all of this mental work gave my body the capacity to understand, accept, and move on from my acoustic injury. I cannot describe to you the amount of ear fluttering i was experiencing throughout these EMDR sessions. I felt absolutely drained after every session, but also a greater and greater sense of relief. It felt like I was working out my brain and I just kept trudging along.

In my experience, traumatic memory is extremely confusing which is why it’s so hard to move on from. EMDR allowed me to really contextualize all of the major traumatic events throughout my life and FEEL them in a new way. My understanding of these events went from confusion to clarity. This includes my acoustic shock event.

My main message is this: there absolutely is hope. I tried to maintain a positive outlook throughout this entire process even though I was going through the hardest thing I’ve ever faced in my life. I know a lot of you here are in the same position. Please don’t give up.

I am so fucking proud of myself for getting through this, and I am even more proud to know that I have the knowledge and the tools to know that this will never happen again.

I want to urge everyone here to take into serious consideration prioritizing mental health. It cannot hurt. It helped me heal.

Good luck to you all. If I can do it, you can too.

 

So happy for you. Awesome. It sounds like you got your 2nd lease on life. Congrats! And thank you for updating us on your status and recovery.

But, frankly, the conflation of your acoustic trauma and some psychological trauma from childhood, honestly does not make a whole lot of sense. I have no opinion on EMDR, clearly it helped you to deal with the stress. But, as far as tinnitus/hyperacusis goes, seems like time and perhaps exposure helped there.

Could you elaborate on the progression of your tinnitus and hyperacusis over these months? How loud was your tinnitus? Was it getting better gradually? Any setbacks? You didn't elaborate on hyperacusis at all. Was it loudness hyperacusis only, or pain hyperacusis? What sounds did bother you? Was you tinnitus reactive?

You also don't mention any detectable hearing loss, so I guess none was diagnosed.

All these details would be really helpful. And where is your therapist located? Available remotely maybe?

 

If you want to hold on to that silence, avoid those concerts completely and protect your ears from loud noises, or your problem is highly likely to return as your hearing has already been compromised. For many of us, things just get worse over the many years of having this issue.

 

Congratulations on finding relief. I have done EMDR in the recent past and it was not helpful for me. However, I believe strongly that our unresolved childhood traumas are at the root of many mental and physical health problems.

 

Hi @gameover, I am more than happy to answer all of your questions. Please understand that I’m just recounting my experience and what I believe worked for me. I very much understand how frustrating all of this is, and I don’t mean to offend you with anything from my account. I come in good faith.

The conflation of pain perception from my acoustic shock and experience from psychological trauma made no sense to me either! At first I was skeptical, but then I started looking into the work of Dr. Howard Schubiner (who built off work from Dr. Sarnos). I also read “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel van der Kolk. There seems to be a vast wealth of research on the relationship between chronic pain anywhere in the body and previous traumatic experience - especially from early in childhood and adolescence.

You can read through all of the posts I’ve made on my profile, but I’ll summarize it here. The tinnitus uptick didn’t really bother me too much, I’ve had tinnitus my entire life. The ear fullness and pain due to sound was the scary part. An ENT said I had hyperacusis, but it was described more as a symptom than a diagnosis. I felt everything was a bit too loud and sound physically hurt.

The first 3 months were brutal, especially not knowing if I was ever really going to feel better. It felt like the inflammation of my Eustachian tube was gone by 6 months, but the pain caused by sound was still very present. I didn’t really start feeling true relief until I fully bought into fixing my mental health.

I have absolutely experienced setbacks, but I no longer do because I feel like I have regained control of my emotional state. I remember one time having to leave work because my coworker was banging a portafilter against a coffee grinder aggressively for like 30 minutes. I left with a severe migraine and almost fainted. I felt I needed to go to the ER, but decided against it because no other doctor helped me prior. I believe this was about 7 or 8 months after the acoustic event. I’ve had anxiety attacks before, and every setback I experienced always correlated with heighten anxiety.

If I look for my tinnitus, I can find it. If I try to feel the sensations of ear fullness and hyperacusis, I can find them. Im not sure if this is just habituation or not, but I don’t think it is because I’m not actively just ignoring or living with these sensations. They truly are no longer there until I think about feeling them again.

There’s research that suggests this is the body’s way of remembering that something has hurt you before and is trying to prevent you from putting yourself in that position again. My heightened sense of awareness needed to be turned down. Processing and physically understanding that these sensations were from a painful memory that my body was not able to process because I was not at capacity was the key. EMDR gave my body the capacity to heal.

I got my hearing tested 10 months after the event. Astonishingly, I have no hearing loss up to 14 kHz. I got this hearing test at an acoustically treated lab in NYC.

My therapist is also located in NYC. She is available virtually, but I attend in person sessions.

I am a musician. There’s no way I’m avoiding loud environments. Also, I don’t want to avoid those environments. I want my body to feel comfortable in them.

All the best.

 

@CJCP, how are you doing now? Have you been able to work as a musician normally and how long did it take you to get back to it? I’m also a musician and your story is really interesting to me. I’ve had ear fullness and mild hyperacusis for 3 months now from loud music and I’m slowly trying to get back to making music.

Do you have any tips for recovery? I’ve tried acupuncture and I’ve rested my ears a lot but I can’t live completely without music.

 

Do you have any tips for how to find/vet for a therapist who'd understand and be empathetic to these issues? I feel like so many of us have experienced really unempathetic responses from various healthcare providers, I'd like to consider therapy (for tinnitus and also probably other underlying factors) but honestly the idea of finding a "good one" is so daunting that I don't even want to start.

And yeah, like yourself I'd prefer to go in-person and sadly do not reside in NYC haha. If anyone knows a good therapist in LA tho!!!

 

Hello @CJCP, who is your therapist?

 

Were you ever actually diagnosed with tinnitus?

You have no hearing loss, you visit loud environments. I'm not doubting you had an acoustic trauma which may have exacerbated an ear infection, it just doesn't sound like you actually had tinnitus.

 

@CJCP, I healed as you did, by working on my nervous system and emotional state. I consider myself fully healed from hyperacusis and tinnitus and my entire life has improved from the experience. Congrats to you!

 

@CJCP I’m in NYC and very interested in trying EMDR. Would you mind sharing the name of your therapist? Thanks so much!

 

@OnlyUP - how did you heal your nervous system? I feel like that’s worse than the H&T itself- the feeling like my nervous system is just totally shot.

 

Do you still hear the tinnitus?

 

Very, very rarely. When I do, it's always related to anxiety. For example, a while back I was asked to step into a role at work that I was apprehensive about, and it flared up until I gained some stability there. If it were to pop up today, I would slow down and think about why. There's *always* an emotional/anxiety component for me that brings it on.

 

My therapist is very into the relationship between chronic pain and PTSD. She did a good job steering me away from thinking my ears were the problem and helped me to focus on my mental state overall. She nailed the diagnosis. The hyperacusis was just the way my body was feeling the chronic pain. Once that link was established, the treatment plan was pretty straightforward. I'd say to go to a therapist with the angle of getting help for chronic pain, they are probably more open to that concept. Hyperacusis and tinnitus are too specific.

Tinnitus and hyperacusis are not diagnoses - they are symptoms. The ENT I went to did document that I was experiencing both of these symptoms. She diagnosed me with ETD, which was incorrect.

My biggest tip for recovery is therapy and working on your mental health. I am 100% back to working full-time in the studio as a musician, and I am starting to gig again. It would have taken me a shorter amount of time had I realized and fully believed this was all due to mental health/nervous system imbalance.

 

Can you share the therapist name? While I am skeptical, this could be perhaps a lifesaver for someone, just like it was for you.

 

What a totally bullshit, convolted and meaningless statement!

ENTs, doctors and audiologists LOVE using convolution to misdirect sufferers of their inabilty to help or treat.

It doesn't help when we start sprouting that same bullshit too!

 

I specifically asked my therapist if I could share her name on Tinnitus Talk, and she said she wasn’t comfortable with that. My apologies.

Not sure what you’re saying here. My statement is objectively true. My experience of hyperacusis and tinnitus did have a causal event, but they were perpetuated through anxiety disorder and overall poor mental health.

From a medical angle, you really can’t treat hyperacusis or tinnitus by itself - you have to treat what’s causing it. By definition, they are symptoms. Hyperacusis and tinnitus are not diseases or disorders themselves.

All the best.

 

That's too bad. Can you share privately? Mods could facilitate that, I think.

You mean well, and you go by your experience, but your statement is absolutely not universally true. Tinnitus or hyperacusis are not symptoms. This is outdated, obsolete thinking. It is not surprising you and many repeat it, because that's what professionals tell us. It appears uncontested now that the vast majority, if not all of the cases are caused by overexcited fusiform cells in the dorsal cochlear nucleus part of the brainstem, usually in response to hearing loss or acoustic trauma. It is not a necessary symptom of hearing loss - many people are deaf or hard of hearing without a hint of tinnitus. There is less consensus about hyperacusis, but there is a good evidence it also originates in the brainstem (bushy cells of ventral cochlear nucleus).

If caused by hearing loss - which is virtually not treatable at present - so isn't tinnitus. And certainly no amount of psychological therapy will reduce its volume. Remission of tinnitus can happen, especially without or limited cochlear damage (like your case, which also means you may be confused about causation and correlation with your treatment). We can hope Susan Shore's device will help reduce the fusiform activity, which appears to be the first and only actually promising treatment for tinnitus.

Congrats on the life you regained, but please do not do us disservice and perpetuate the outdated information of tinnitus being "a symptom". It isn't. It is a brain disease (or maladaptation), that can range from mild to debilitating and suicidal.

 

What does this sentence mean?

 

Sorry, maybe poorly written. I am saying hearing loss is not treatable at present. There are aids, like hearing aids, or even cochlear implants, but these are not really treatments (much less cures) - just aids. Just like glasses or contact lenses are not treatment for myopia.

There is not treatment for tinnitus, either. The theory would be, if there was a treatment for hearing loss, then tinnitus induced by hearing loss, would also naturally go in remission (not guaranteed, we don't really know, until we reliably treat hearing loss, if ever).

 

I'm sorry, you're not allowed an opinion on here, or to express your experience. @gameover and @Jupiterman won't like it.

 

Thanks! I’ve been able to work on lower volumes now, and I’ve protected and rested my ears a lot lately. How long did it take for you to get back to working full-time, and did you first take it easy? Do you think it’s a good idea to keep working on lower volumes while still having ear fullness and sensitivity?

I’m struggling to find the right balance on how much I can work without causing setbacks. I can relate a lot to your story, and I want to believe that my chronic symptoms were also caused by prolonged stress and anxiety about my noise trauma.