It’s pretty much guaranteed that everyone has something they must face and overcome. For me hearing loss has been a challenge: that’s the deck of cards life dealt me. Like many people who face a major change in their lives, I’ve gone through so much denial while learning so much in the process. I am always trying to build awareness about hearing loss because it’s becoming a bigger problem for millions of Americans. Even if you don’t have hearing loss, chances are you know someone (or will know someone), young or old, with it.
What people misunderstand about hearing loss
In my personal experience a lot of people see hearing loss as black or white: either you can hear or you can’t. Hearing loss isn’t an easily visible disability and this compounds the fact that people take it for granted. I can tell you this is far from the truth. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between completely hearing and completely deaf. In other words you can have anything from mild hearing loss to profound hearing loss.
Having some hearing simply isn’t as good as having perfect or near-perfect hearing. Think of someone who has less than 20/20 vision but isn’t completely blind, like a lot of people. They may still have a good amount of vision but this doesn’t make it as good as 20/20 vision. The visual clarity is severely compromised without some kind of assistance. Fortunately for most people with vision problems, glasses and contacts do a very good job at correcting vision problems back to 20/20 if not very close. It isn’t so simple with hearing loss, depending on the type of loss.
How denial starts
For people who become diagnosed with hearing loss or for those who notice their hearing is going bad, it can come as a delayed shock. When I was first diagnosed with hearing loss in both ears I didn’t think it was a big deal at first. I thought to myself: ”Well I still have some of my hearing, so that means I still can hear as good as anyone else.” I didn’t know why my audiologist was making such a big deal or why I even had to wear hearing aids. At the time my hearing loss was still in the mild stages so I didn’t feel like I had a problem hearing although my parents noticed it. Do you see the thought process here? The fact that I had hearing loss didn’t even register with me and basically I set the stage for years of denial.
I don’t personally know too many people who have the same type of hearing loss that I do in the same way I did. But I suspect that most people who are diagnosed with hearing loss start out with mild hearing loss which slowly starts to get worse. I also suspect that many of these people also begin to deny it early on and attempt to ignore the situation as long as they can in hope that it will somehow go away or correct itself. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t work. I have years of proof under my belt.
Excuses help fuel the denial
Eventually your hearing starts to get much worse and by now you KNOW your hearing isn’t the same as other people. But it’s much easier to keep denying it to yourself and also to other people. It’s much easier to find ways to convince yourself and others that you’re just fine. You might blast up the tv because you have a hard time catching the words. And when someone else complains about the noise level, you tell them something like “Well, I like to catch every single thing” or “When it’s louder it feels much more like a movie theater, anyway.” You might even find yourself avoiding the phone, much like I do, and you’ll have ‘reasons’ as to why you don’t use the phone such as: “Using the phone give me headaches” or the like. And you keep coming up with excuses like that for nearly every situation.
I know because I used all those excuses before. There’s absolutely nothing wrong if you don’t like to use the phone or you really can’t hear the TV so you have to turn the volume up a notch. A lot of hearing people also hate using the phone and also like to leave the TV on loud. The point is when you’re in denial you don’t attribute those behaviors to your hearing loss. Instead you should be saying, “Well I don’t feel comfortable using the phone because I have hearing loss.” See the difference? But when you’re in the denial stage you don’t feel comfortable saying that because it makes the hearing loss seem much more real. And that’s not what you want at that point. You don’t want to acknowledge that.
You can understand the denial if you understand the thought process.
It’s understandable why this happens. When you are used to being in the hearing world, you can connect with hearing people and the hearing world very well. Then you are told that you are losing your hearing and gradually you start noticing you can’t catch everything as well as you used to. You desperately cling on to the life you had as a hearing person by lying to yourself because that’s all you know. Because you don’t relate to the Deaf world at all. You’re not even deaf so you’ve had no reason to expose yourself to Deaf culture. You may even get offended if someone calls you deaf. Maybe you even saw Deaf people as completely different from you. Maybe you saw them as freaks. You don’t know sign language so you can’t really communicate with many Deaf people well, if you know any.
You grew up with spoken language but now even that’s starting to get difficult to use. You can’t hear spoken word so well and people start noticing your speech is a little different. You have one foot in and one foot out of both worlds, hearing and deaf. You are essentially in limbo and you feel like no one really gets it. Heck, YOU don’t get it sometimes! You don’t even understand why this is happening to you in the first place!
When I was younger I would look all over the internet for people who are in the same situation as me. Mostly I found articles from people who are completely deaf and had their own community or I would find articles written by hearing people who did research on people with hearing loss and summarized the findings. My audiologist knew what to expect with me being noncompliant and in denial because she sees people with hearing loss all day. But she never had to live with it personally. At the end of the day she can go home and continue her life in the hearing world as normal. It’s very easy to get resentful when you feel like there is nowhere to turn. One of my goals is to create a community for people going through this so they don’t feel trapped the same way I did back then.
It’s absolutely normal to go through denial or be resentful. When someone loses a loved one, whether through death or separation, they go through a similar process. In essence, a person diagnosed with hearing loss or who is going blind would be going through the same thing. They are losing something important to them. Even if they didn’t realize how important it was until it’s too late. Just like people tend to take others for granted, people also take their senses for granted. When you’re losing it you don’t know what hits you, so you find comfort by pretending it’s not really happening. And you hope maybe the world will buy into your game.
Denial won’t go away until you acknowledge it.
I think the first step towards acceptance is to recognize you’re in denial. The feelings and actions of denial will not go away overnight. But if you’re conscious of what you’re thinking and what you’re doing, you can ask yourself why you’re doing it. You can ask yourself what about hearing loss (or whatever challenge you’re facing) is bothering you so much.
Maybe you’re afraid of what other people think? You’d be surprised how accommodating people can be if they know of your situation. Most people won’t hold it against you as long as you don’t use it as a crutch. In the case of “disability,” when you start to see your “disability” as normal other people will as well. Because it is normal. You can pretty much do anything anyone else can, maybe in different ways. There is no such thing as “normal” in the global sense, after all. Everyone has their own way of doing many things.
Maybe you’re afraid of being lonely because no one understands what you’re going through? Well, you should find a support group. It could be close friends, close family members, or even finding other people in your situation. If you tried to hide your hearing loss there are probably many people in the same situation as you who have also been through the denial. Seek them out because I’m sure they’d love to connect with someone who finally understands.
The breaking point
Denial is a normal process. I think it’s a necessary step and can’t be avoided. Denial is necessary because it helps build tension. In order for things to get better, often the person needs to reach a boiling point. At that point they are better able to see the situation for what it is.
In my case I eventually got fed up with my self-imposed limitations. I got fed up with being in denial because it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was finally able to face the situation for what it is. I slowly began to realize that my hearing loss isn’t the problem, I am. Being diagnosed with hearing loss was out of my control, but I did have control of how I reacted to it. At that point I decided to change my reaction to my hearing loss, since the hearing part is still out of my control (and will continue to be). Instead of allowing my hearing loss to be in control of me, I was gaining control of my life back. I began to see many different possibilities and life started looking a lot better.
Hellen Keller once said that “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” Hearing loss can also isolate you from people but only if you let it. If you don’t eventually face it, it can really limit how far you go in life. Ms. Keller was blind AND deaf and she didn’t let it stop her. She was still able to adapt without all the resources we have today. She was able to get involved politically, travel, and write. People like Helen Keller proves to the world that nothing and no one can stop you from doing what you want to do but yourself.
It’s definitely not easy to face your denial about anything and it won’t happen overnight. In a way, I’m glad I went through all those years of isolation and denial. Because now that I’m finally coming out if it I can really appreciate life so much more. I am able to see how much attitude sets the tone for my life. I can now take comfort in the fact that life is what I make it to be, and only I. Not my hearing loss, not other people, nothing.
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