Hearing Loss
Lesson 1: Emotional Trauma of Hearing Loss
Acceptance
Accepting our hearing loss is what we're striving for. It's the only way we'll be able to move on with our lives and get back to living them fully.
Acceptance means you realize that you have a hearing problem, but you haven’t changed and can still live a normal life. Once you’ve accepted your hearing loss, you can start to really deal with it. Unfortunately, psychologists have found that most people who suffer hearing loss have to go through the other stages to get here.
In Coping with Hearing Loss, the author says: Acceptance comes after the depression has lifted, and involves the realization that "there is something wrong with my hearing, not with me."
I remember exactly when I accepted my hearing loss. I was in my car and saw a young, blind woman crossing the street. (I will mention that in more detail in Lesson 2 under "Things Can Always be Worse".) As I watched her making her way across the street, I thought about the dangers she couldn’t see. At that moment, I accepted that my hearing loss wasn’t the worst thing that could happen in the world.
I also realized that I thought about helping someone else and I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I decided right then and there that if I had to be deaf, I’d be the best darn deaf there is. From that day on, I stopped seeing my hearing loss as a disability and started thinking of it as an inconvenience - even a challenge.
Most of us have in the past, been in a relationship that ended. If you have, then you know that it hurt at first. You probably felt pain, anger, loneliness, sense of loss, even a sense of fear. You may have isolated yourself for awhile, afraid to get hurt again. You may have even been depressed. But eventually you got over it and you moved on. You accepted that it was over.
Losing your hearing is very similar in that you have to go through the pain to get to the point where you can accept it and move on.
Optional Reading
Please refer to:
- Coping with Hearing Loss, pages 16 – 20 and/or
- Hearing Loss & Hearing Aids, page 33
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