My Journey with Tinnitus — A List of My Videos on YouTube

[Autumnly]

Dr. Gans said people who are bothered by tinnitus have a certain type of personality, they're just needlessly "holding onto something". She goes on to say it can be pushed in the background - which just isn't possible for everyone. Throughout the video, she implies that everyone can reach a point where they're okaying with having tinnitus if they truly let go of it.

At some point, she says that to people with bothersome it can feel like an insult when they hear other people say that they only hear their tinnitus when they focus on it. But instead of talking about different severity levels, she goes back to implying that people with bothersome tinnitus just haven't reached that point yet where they can truly let go.

I know you both mean well (and it's nice to see that she's apparently open to having discussions with other people with tinnitus) but this is why people with severe tinnitus feel constantly ignored and misrepresented.

But nonetheless, you're clearly putting effort into creating content meant to help others and I hope that it'll give someone hope.

 

[Bartoli]

Thanks man! Can you maybe link to that cricket track you mentioned?

 

[DaveFromChicago]

Thanks so very much, Sean. That woman is a very talented therapist who is constructing the best mental buttressing that I imagine is possible in the face of no real treatments.

She was so accessible that I found myself as an imaginary client proposing various issues. I am 66, and earlier in my life for about 14 years I had physical dysfunctions that made me feel as imprisoned as tinnitus does; these created circumstances that were constant, unremitting, and with no available treatment (and once again, physicians bluntly told me to "just learn to live with them"). Medical technology advanced such that these dysfunctions were finally alleviated, but this resultant psychological undermining made me exhausted such that I no longer possessed the mental capability to fortify myself against tinnitus. Or, I regarded myself as having been mentally in prison for 14 years, and I just did not have it in me to challenge the new imprisoning life sentence imposed by tinnitus. Dr. Jennifer should ( and I believe she has) take into consideration that prior long term PTSD will deplete actionable reserves and take such a toll that a second requirement for "distancing" and mindfulness may be infeasible.

Her conclusions about Viktor Frankl's theory of inner freedom (who was compelled to develop this to survive Auschwitz) is essentially that no totalitarian regime, however brutal, can deprive the individual of the capacity to decide how to react to and/or define an approach to any internal or external phenomena. Simply put, this is easier said than done, and for reasons that psychotherapy finds utterly mysterious, some of us are far stronger and more capable of this than others.