Where are you on your hearing loss journey?
I asked myself the same question – when did I morph from a self-described hard of hearing person who used hearing aids, to a person on a journey with her hearing loss?
I remember the exact moment because it was seismic in its revelation. It changed me.
In 1995, I attended a conference of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Associaion that I attended to get answers to a potential problem. I was expecting a baby, and I was worried about causing him harm. If, for example, I didn’t hear him crying. No one else in my world had hearing loss and my hearing care professional had never had a baby so she couldn’t speak from experience.
From the first moment of the first talk, I knew I had found ‘my people’. A cross-generational crowd of people sporting honking big hearing aids (this was 30 years ago) and who were walking around smiling! They had hearing loss, and they were happy! How could this be?
I wanted what they had – energy and thirst to learn more about hearing loss and to just do it better! They were in motion, while my only hearing loss activity was an occasional hearing assessment that led to new hearing aids.
Now, I felt potential. For change, for growth. I could get better at this hearing loss thing! And I did, because I was on a journey, I had a mission!
In writing our book Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss, Shari Eberts and I recalled our lives to date and that of thousands of people like us we’d met in our respective hearing loss advocacy work. All of us are unique individuals on unique life paths, yet we shared similar challenges of hearing loss, and we identified five broad stages of the hearing journey.
Stage 1: Debating with Yourself
It’s not me, it’s them, they mumble. I hear what I want to. I hear fine. I don’t need hearing aids. I’m not old enough. I’m still ‘with it’.
Everyone goes through this in some fashion – not just people with acquired hearing loss, but those of us with lifelong hearing loss when it’s clear that the hearing that we have, is worsening. This first stage can go on for years…and some people never move out of it.
Stage 2: Validating Your Hearing Loss
Something – or someone – finally pushes you to seek preliminary hearing help. An assessment by a professional gives you news that might not be what you want to hear (you’ve got hearing loss), but at least now you know. You have two choices. You can say thank you and leave the clinic, going back to Stage 1 for awhile, maybe forever. Or you can go forward.
Stage 3: Taking Charge
Now you are going to do something about it, which usually starts with a hearing aid and hopefully lots of information and support from your hearing care professional. You learn about other strategies that will support better communication, stuff like positive attitudes and new communication behaviors. Self-advocacy, how to manipulate the listening situation’s environment and maybe not bluffing so much. (You know what I mean by that, don’t pretend you don’t understand!)
Stage 4: Living Skillfully with Hearing Loss
The glorious part! You apply everything you’ve learned to every area of your life – your leisure games and sports, your workplace, and most importantly, your relationship of all types. You get better at doing this hearing loss thing, with a better handle on the emotions. You become skilled. Of course, it’s not all smooth sailing. The Hearing Husband and I, even after 35 years together, still have daily mini-snits related to hearing loss. But for the most part, we are committed to good communication,
Stage 5: Refreshing & Restarting
This isn’t so much a stage but an off-ramp to roundabout that leads to all the other stages. Things change in our hearing loss life – our hearing worsens, our technology needs replacing or we add to our technical repertoire with, say, a cochlear implant. Our overall health changes. Any of these can cause us to go back to an earlier stage, for a bit of do-over.
So, where are you on your hearing journey? Wherever you are, keep going forward and know that you’re not alone, millions of us are walking with you!
