Benzos improve many of my symptoms, including hyperacusis, tinnitus and my facial symptoms. I never had facial symptoms in the first year or so, though, they started after I tapered benzos in 2013, so it's possible they were initiated or caused by benzodiazepine withdrawal.
I went back on benzos in early 2014, and my facial symptoms went away. Now that I'm coming off of benzos again, they're returning.
I had significant facial tics following benzo withdrawal; the most prominent was around my left eye. Not the eye itself, but the supporting muscles would jump and twist and spasm a lot. Magnesium was moderately helpful; I think that a lot of the muscle symptoms from benzo w/d (and to some extent the psychiatric symptoms) can relate to magnesium depletion. It's not a miracle cure by any means; the two years following my last taper off benzos were some of the hardest in my life... but used properly it's pretty hard to damage yourself with magnesium.
threefirefour said:
How habituation-shills think
I'm not a habituation shill, I don't think, since I am not habituated; I also suffer from this condition, have for a long time, and will not downplay the serious, unpleasant consequences it has for my life and my family and friends. However, I stop well short of calling people liars when they claim to not be especially bothered by their tinnitus; I have a good friend who seems to have the same basic problem I do: a constant ~14khz whine that can be heard over all ambient noise, and can become physically painful following noise exposure. Not only does he not seem fazed by it, he had never googled it and didn't know there was a word for it until I brought it up one day.
More importantly, in the 20 years I've been dealing with this, my mind has changed around it, and I've had some long stretches of time where it's merely annoying instead of disabling. The basic nature of the sound itself does
not really change; it sounds the same as it ever does. But, it's the difference between a piercing foreground shriek, and a sort of static background noise. I believe this basic mechanism is probably how habituation works for people who, unlike me, are not particularly prone to obsessive monitoring of their internal state.
I think that's the fundamental thing which gets overlooked in these arguments: habituation is not a willful thing; it's a physiological process. Attention is not, mostly, a willful thing. It is also a physiological process. I have fairly severe visual snow/static, to a degree that it's nearly impossible for me to see stars at night, and even brightly lit rooms are basically a mess of afterimages and swirling red/green/black dots (onset was at the same time as my tinnitus) - for the first year, this drove me absolutely bonkers, I could not not see it, I could not sleep, I could not watch TV or look at screens (hard for a computer science major!) Somehow, something changed: the severity of my visual problems has not improved, if anything my vision has slowly declined over the last 20ish years. But, I consider myself completely habituated to the visual problems: they are my base state, and I can go days straight without having a single conscious thought of them. This is not 'attentional' in a willful sense; some physical process rewired my brain to default to ignoring the glitches instead of constantly noticing them. The tinnitus has been a tougher cross to bear, but here I am, bearing it usually with a grin.
You're welcome to think that this is all bullshit and continue to indulge your toxic mindstate; it makes little difference to me. However, I figured out a long time ago that if I was going to stay involved in my life and find a desire to stay on this planet, I needed to understand the machinations of my mind, and as much as possible, work with my mind instead of against it. I'm not particularly bright or motivated as a general rule, but I'm still here, and the life I've built, despite being marred by perceptual problems, is something I am quite attached to. (Ironically, the end game of the various meditative practices I play with is to extinguish all attachment -- but I've got a while yet to worry about that).
I realize that this is not likely to get through to you, because the counterargument is always "how can I be other than that which I am", and that's not something I can answer for you. But, I strongly believe that faced with serious chronic problems like tinnitus, people either
do figure it out, or they kill themselves or become addicted to heroin, and I believe the math that there are a lot more people who make a life of some kind for themselves despite these problems, than let them be their ticket to an early end.
If you still desire to find a functional and fulfilling life, I wish you all the luck in the world.
edit: note that I'm not really disputing a lot of what
@attheedgeofscience has said about self-deception and the sort of cult of habituation; a lot of that resonates with me. However, I have also come to believe that self-deception of one kind or another is the normal basic state of most human consciousness, and unless you're really trying for the full enchilada of enlightenment / actualization, that's fine and we should all just find whatever dream makes us the happiest. Actualization is probably the 'purest' goal for one self, but, I've got too much shit I enjoy doing to get too wrapped up in it.
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