Sensational Moms: For Overstimulated Homeschool Moms

Auditory Processing Disorder & Sound Sensitivity: Pioneering Hope With Low-Gain Hearing Aids With Dr. Rae Stout

• Season 2 • Episode 16

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What does sound sensitivity and auditory processing disorder look like in real life for a family? Possibly melt-downs, hurting relationships, walking on eggshells, avoiding fun outings, attention struggles, social skill struggles, sleep difficulties, reading issues... the list goes on.

Wait! Before you say "My kid hears just fine" or "My hearing is ok..." This is often an unidentified source of defiance, conflict, reading, social & attention difficulties... and more. You really might be surprised!

Dr. Rae Stout joins me in this episode as we dive into APD & hearing sensitivites. 

  • she helps us understand what APD, misophonia, and hyperacusis are in the first place
  • we discuss the real impacts we've seen in the home
  • she shares how she's pioneering the effective use of low-gain hearing aids to make life-changing functional impacts that affect whole families
  • we talk about other treatment options and how they fit in

...and with an element of surprise and humor in the middle.

The impacts include academics but reach far beyond. Functional listening difficulties impact family dynamics and can make even normal daily tasks feel monumentally hard... whether it's a kid or a grown-up who struggles-- or both!

Dr. Rae Stout is a neurodivergent audiologist and mom of an AuDHD son, sharing both autism and ADHD diagnoses. She is a pioneer in the use of low-gain hearing aids for children and adults with normal or near-normal hearing who struggle with functional listening. Her specialties include auditory processing disorder, hyperacusis, tinnitus, and misophonia, with a focus on supporting children with autism, ADHD, and PDA profiles. Dr. Rae brings a neurodivergent-affirming approach to her work, combining clinical expertise with lived experience to help families create calmer, more accessible environments.

Connect with her here & learn more about her wonderful services & the community she's created:

Website: https://www.drraestout.com

APD Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1FFKPAfedd/

Watch this informative and heart-felt video about APD and LGHA's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea3XHUDIxIg

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 Today I have Dr. Rae with me. Welcome, Dr. Rae. Hi, so glad to be here. Dr. Rae Stout is a neurodivergent, audiologist and mom of an ADHD son sharing both autism and AuDHD diagnoses. She's a pioneer in the use of low gain hearing aids for children and adults with normal or near normal hearing who struggle with functional listening.

Her specialties include auditory processing disorder, hyperacusis, tinnitus, and ad misophonia with a focus on supporting children with autism, A DHD and PDA profiles. Dr. Rae brings a neurodivergent affirming approach to her work. Combining clinical expertise with lived experience to help families create calmer, more accessible environments.

And Dr. Rae, I can attest and I'm sure this will come up in our talk today, that that has been the case for our home as well. So when you hit accept on my podcast invitation, I was. Thrilled. I could say it's like probably one of the closest to those hero moments where you just are kind of like, wow, I can't believe this is happening because I, um, I learned about you through Amy Bodkins podcast and Oh, 

wow.

Yeah. And so the fact that I can bring that to my audience, I'm just really excited. I remember. Where I was listening to that, I was driving home. I, um, get to leave the house one evening to work and I look forward to that one evening. And I was on my way home, hit play on her podcast because the title looked interesting for your episode.

And, um, by the time I pulled into my driveway, I could hardly contain myself to send you an email or, um, or your office, I guess. And I just. Uh, it just, it resonated so clearly. The fact that you are speaking to, um, in our case, I have a child who with extremely sensitive hearing and how that was impacting, um, our whole family and also her learning.

So I, um, I'll stop myself from talking about that more right now. But, um, thank you so much for, for what you do. So. Um, let's just jump right in. How does auditory processing disorder or sensitive hearing affect home life? Because I feel like we have this conversation more about kids who are struggling in a classroom setting.

Mm-hmm. 

So it's, that's definitely an interesting question because it is the primary reason we hear about it. It's like the auditory processing issues kind of come to a head. When it comes to classroom situations and the parents worry more about academics than they worry about how it affects the rest of their life.

And the reality is that a good deal of kids' lives happen at home, especially in the kids I work with, which are about 60% homeschoolers. Um, I do wanna mention, just as a quick aside. I work with former kids as well. About 30% of the people I work with are adults. I'd say the majority of them are neurodivergent, very often autistic, A, DH, D with, with, uh, sensitivities like misophonia, hyperacusis and auditory processing.

But lemme go back to your question. So in the home, it affects the, it definitely affects the kids. Um, in terms of, they'll be bothered by things like the television volume. They'll be bothered by not always being able to follow directions and getting in trouble because the parents think that the reason they're misbehaving supposedly is because of inattention.

And very often it'll be called a DHD by the, uh, family physician or a psychologist, when in reality they're only hearing an incomplete signal. So if you only hear part of what you are being told, it's very hard to remember and sequence tasks, it really impacts executive function. It impacts organization, it impacts memory because if you don't know what it is you're hearing, how do you put it into memory?

Memory is held in chunks, as you know, like when you memorize, you know? 8 6, 7 5, 3 0 9, right? You're remembering those pieces. 8, 6, 7 is one piece. Five, three, oh, and maybe nine are the second piece, and then the melodies holding it together, right? You have kids with auditory processing issues that could have problems with.

Um, gaps between the sounds. So the 8, 6, 7, if it's said too quick, they could hear it blurred together. Another kid might not be able to, or former kid of course, might not be able to hear the pitch change as I sing it so they can't hold onto the melody. That also means they miss out on sarcasm. Um, there's a book by Terry Beis called When the Brain Hears, I think is the name of it.

I might be getting it wrong, Dr. Bella. But it's something like that. And she has a whole passage, most of the book centers on her own life of having a brain injury and losing the ability to hear tone of speech. So a lot of these kids you might think have autism. Because they're missing out on these social skills.

But for all you know, what really is happening is they can't perceive changes of pitch. They miss questions, they miss sarcasm, they miss all sorts of small nuances that we have in there. And then if you add any visual things, they can be missing body language and facial expressions. Um, and, and then again, and then when you really look at this child directly, you go, wait a minute, is it autism?

Are we just calling it that? So auditory processing. You could have one child who desperately needs more volume on a television driving everybody else crazy. My father has a hearing loss. It's not very severe, but I moved back into town at 30 something and I came back and lived with my parents and they, he tortured me.

It was awful. The television was like at 34 and at about 22. Everybody else normal would listen to it. Mm. He won't wear hearing aids, of course, but he would blast the television. And this is back when commercials were more common. Oh yeah. And I couldn't take it finally. So I bought a townhouse. Oh man. But when you're the mom, when you're the mom in this family, you can't just buy another house and move out.

You know? You can't say, I can't take this anymore. And the real problem comes up is that issues with auditory processing. Are often hereditary. Sort of like you've heard that dyslexia tends to show up in the same families, but here's the real question. Is it actually dyslexia or is it dyslexia because of auditory processing causing a lack of access to phonological awareness, right?

You really need to get down to the roots, and then when we think we've gotten there, we still haven't always really gotten there 

yet. I mean, the label is just a label. It's a passcode. It gives you an ID card to get 5 0 4 and IEP accommodations and services. And there's problems with every label. I mean, you don't, you go to the pediatrician, they say your kid has a DHD based on hearing five minutes of case history.

But do they? So you're gonna see, um, you're gonna see effects in relationship because of that. Like what you're saying with the parent, we, we don't have the option of moving out into the town home when the child is seven. Right. Um, so you No. And relationship? No. 

And what if the parent themselves is the reason the child has this problem?

What if the parent has Eller Dono syndrome, which has caused them issues with fluctuating hearing, which caused them to develop auditory processing issues from auditory deprivation themselves? And they can't tell where sounds come from in space very well. They can't function in noise. They've developed dyslexia because of the auditory deprivation and now their child got the elders don lows from the parent, and they have the same problems.

Especially when you then have the parent being sensory avoidant and the kid being sensory seeking, all sorts of things can happen. 

Oh yeah. Yeah. A lot of the families that I work with that is the cause of huge strife in the family, different, those different sensory needs. Um, and I think you've spoken before that you know, yes, there are ways to approach this, but also if, if at least you can know there's a name for the thing.

That you don't feel like you are the world's worst mom, or if you don't feel like you have totally lost your mind, then at least you know that it's not all in your head. You know, 

it's, I mean, it is all in your head literally, but it's not your imagination and you're not alone. Yeah. Auditory processing issues as the, the father of auditory processing disorder is named Dr.

Jack Katz. He's from Buffalo, New York, or he was from Buffalo, New York, and he and he developed a whole system called the Buffalo Method. He passed away about a week ago, and we are all in his debt. I would not be in this field if it weren't for Dr. Jack Katz's protege, who was a mentor of mine at Gallaudet in my postdoctorate.

And what he said was, hearing is in the ear, but processing is in the mind. That's not an exact quote, but that's basically what's going on is we're looking at not, can you hear a beep? Okay. Hearing a beep does not actually predict how well somebody's gonna do in any kind of understanding. It just predicts how well you can hear a beep.

Beeps are very simple sounds. You know, but can you understand it? Think about, you know, ai Okay. And think about way back when, when I was younger, 'cause I'm 50, and how we would have to give phone numbers and birthdays into the telephone and we would say all these things. And the phone would keep misunderstanding us.

This is just after the telephone operators didn't exist anymore and they were replacing them with a basic AI type sy, you know, a phone answering system. If the, if the signal was very, very limited, like it only has to hear between zero and nine, maybe it could understand all sorts of accents because they only have a very limited thing to choose from a closed set task.

The problem is, is that the human brain and our everyday social situations are not closed set. We're not predictable. Well, most of us aren't, and it's very hard to understand speech, especially when there are other complicating factors like background noise or spatial separation. You have to figure out where the sound is coming from.

Or reverberation or accents or rapid speech or soft speech. All of these things can make it much harder to understand. And looking at these beep tests, do you hear the beep? Raise your hand when you hear the beep or push the button. All it shows is a threshold of sensitivity for beeps. So when you send your kid to the cafeteria at the school to get a basic hearing screening for beeps, and they say, oh, your kid's hearing is fine, or When your newborn baby is given an otoacoustic emissions test that looks at the outer hair cells of the cochlea, and if the inner ear is responding to sound, that doesn't mean your baby can hear.

That just means their hair cells in their cochlea work. So the signal might not be going anywhere. 

So 

what, so you, 

you, uh, spoke a little bit about how, um, about how that background noise can be really impactful for kids being able to hear the speech in with all the other sounds. Right. Because we don't speak in those beeps, and I would say that is what I, as a homeschooling family have seen to be the most impactful for my kid who.

Before we had low gain hearing aids because we could never get the room quiet enough. I mean, um, I have fairly sensitive hearing, but this child takes it to a whole new level and you know, it got to a point to where the siblings had to be out of the house. I'm talking like if the weather is good, the other three are outside because.

Even in the house across the, across the house was too much for this child to be able to, even with the closed door. And, you know, before I really realized what was going on, I thought, oh my goodness. You know, are you trying to make my life miserable? And I knew she wasn't. I mean, I'm an occupational therapist.

I know it's a thing, but then when you experience it as a mother, it, it's next level when you, you could only turn down. The background noise so much. And I think in a home environment, um, you know, in some ways it's nice because yes, we do have a little bit more control over things than we do in a, in the, in a traditional classroom.

But at the same time, we don't because, um, things can be a little bit more chaotic than usual. There's someone in the kitchen using the microwave. There's the hum of the ac. There's, you know, all these other things that this child would notice without really being able to tell me that she was noticing.

Right? Because you don't know what you don't know. 

It is so easy to get fatigued from very small sounds and people aren't really aware of where they're struggling. So, uh, and then it's interesting to see how they react to technology and devices. So, uh, I had a, um, my clinical fellowship supervisor, um, is in California.

His name is Brit. And Brit told me a story about growing up. With very, very bad vision. And he didn't know. He had no idea his vision was bad 'cause nobody ever had ever tested it. And because he'd always sit in the front of the classroom. 'cause that seemed natural to him. And he was very gregarious and he learned to read very quickly.

'cause he probably was autistic. And in any case, he was a big fan of baseball. And his favorite thing about baseball was the fact that the ball would flash into focus right before he should hit it. Oh wow. '

cause 

he was that nearsighted. It had to be almost at the bat. So one day they figured out that he was nearsighted, so they fit him for glasses, for the astigmatism and nearsightedness, and suddenly he couldn't hit the ball anymore because he wasn't used to not having that focus.

Everything around him came into his life suddenly, where before it was all a blur, unless it was right in front of him. And he said it took like six or eight months for his body to acclimate and his brain to get used to the increased amount of access and learn how to hit a ball again. He had to start from scratch.

Wow. That's a pretty powerful story right there. So in some ways. You know how your special programming for hearing aids, the low gain hearing aids, could be compared to those glasses. So could you kind of explain that for me? I know we're jumping ahead a little bit here, but we'll backtrack in a minute. 

So when I work with Logan and hearing aids, there's basically three groups of kids and adults that I work with, and they can overlap or not.

So it, it can really change things. One is the group that have auditory processing difficulties or functional listening difficulties, whatever you'd like to call it. Basically, it's the bottleneck between hearing and understanding. Okay. Whatever you wanna call it. The second group are sensitive kids and there's two kinds of sensitivity.

One I would call more of a selective sound sensitivity. So like misophonia or misophonia, depending how you pronounce it. I say misophonia 'cause I think mis like against 

something. Yeah. 

Or a dislike. Right? But these are kids and adults who have a very hard time, often with hyper empathy. And with the difficulty of drawing boundaries between themselves and other people, they're bothered by people chewing.

They're bothered by the dog's, nails tapping. They're bothered by people breathing. I had a little boy who was isolated in a hallway for a year. After he would touch classmates if they, if they sniffed, and if they did it more than once, he'd progressively hit them harder and harder. The teachers put him in the hall and left him unsupervised with worksheets for a year, and he taught himself to hallucinate the white noise in the air conditioning sound.

Oh. For example, misophonia. It can be, I'd say the worst of the things I deal with. It's very hard to deal with because to get rid of soft sounds, you don't wanna cut out speech. So that group takes a very different kind of programming. Hyperacusis. I'm gonna break into two areas. This is the sensitivity to loud sounds.

One group is more like what you see with A DHD and autism. It's like overload. They're bothered by too many people talking at one time. They're bothered by really loud sounds, but when you test them, they, they test within typical of tolerance of tones, okay? It's only when they're, the rest of their systems are overloaded or they're tired that they fall apart.

Those are who I see the most in combination with a PD. The other group are the ones who are in actual pain and have gotten actually phobic. They're more like obsessive compulsive level panic attack, you know, traumatic issues. I don't often do quite as well with that group, but I can still give them a lot of protection.

But in terms of just auditory processing, um, low hearing aids are a way to stabilize. There're a way to stabilize the sound from day to day. So the child has, or the adult has, um, control over their auditory soundscape. I set it up with a very flat response. It's based on some research from 2009 from Francis Cook at Yx, and I've seen somewhere north of 3000 patients.

Um, I put them through a six to eight week treatment trial to see if it'll help. You know, it's like a DHD. You give them Ritalin, see what happens. Oh, it seems to help. Must be dopamine related. Similar idea, although that's simplified. So by giving them access to this type of thing, it's actually an amazing way to test, uh, whether the condition is there.

And it's not to say if they don't benefit, they're not having these issues, but if they do benefit, there's clearly a problem. Because if you put it on a kid who had no other issues or an adult, it wouldn't make a difference. It would just annoy them. They wouldn't wanna feel it in their ears. They wouldn't get a benefit.

But when they do, you see things like, I, I'm a, I'm a total storyteller. I apologize. I had a girl with Ellers Don, low syndrome. That was, um, actually identified while I was working with her. She was 16 when I started with her and dyslexic good student, but had to work a ton. I mean, this is the kid who tries hard in everything.

You know, this is the, the one who ends up the valedictorian, but she had to stay up every night and do nothing else except for schoolwork. 'cause that was all she had the mental energy to handle. And she was a very hard worker. So she was a competitive swimmer. And her shoulders started going out of joint and I had already been treating her.

One of the things the parents noticed, one of the first things they noticed was that she had been falling asleep in the car every single day after school, and within the first week with the hearing aids. First, she was more tired, just like Britt got more overwhelmed by seeing everything in the periphery.

But first she was more tired, but within a week she no longer needed to nap. And the reason I I focus on this is because by having the hearing aids take care of some of the background noise and emphasize what you're trying to hear, it helps you focus in on that ball. You understand? Yeah. So she wasn't having to do it herself.

It's like having AI looking for things for you. The reason I mention LERs Don Lewis is I'm seeing more and more and more people. I don't think there's more of them. Just like, I don't know that there's more autistic children out there. I just think they're finding me. 

Yes, yes. 

So I'm seeing it more often.

But what happens with them is they have issues with eustachian tube dysfunction, where the ear, uh, middle ear tends to have pressure problems. They tend to get ear infections. They tend to have issues with scar tissue. They have problems with the ossicles and the acoustic, uh, reflex, and they also get hearing loss.

So that particular population, it doesn't surprise me in retrospect, I'd never seen it before her. In retrospect, it's, it is not at all surprising that her shoulders were popping outta joint and she had auditory processing issues. Right. Because the EDS can cause them 

in our home. You know, some of those effects functionally that we've seen with our child.

You know, one of the main selling points for trying it, honestly, Dr. Rae, was the sleep. I wasn't, um, initially most interested in that, but after our conversation or my conversation with Tanya talking about sleep, I thought, well, I've gotta try this. Because sleep in our home has been, um, a, a huge stressor. I mean, I'm talking since toddler years, probably before then, but I just don't remember because I was sleep deprived for a long time.

But, um, you should get your own townhouse. Yeah, she. She, um, after having the hearing aids for, I would say a couple of weeks at the most, um, it was the falling asleep part, right? Like it was, it was the anxiety from just being ramped up and like we talked about the water balloon just being so full all day and then at night, just not being able to come down off of that.

Mm-hmm. And I didn't realize I had not put together. The auditory piece in with that and how that was feeding into that, just generalized anxiety. We had actually just started a, um, a medication with the doctor's recommendation for her sleep that a very low dose just to kind of help her go to sleep, and within a month of being with the hearing aid, she hasn't needed that anymore.

In fact, every once in a while when she does need it. She is, she's able to self-regulate. She's able to realize that she's having a hard time falling asleep, and she'll ask for it to help her if she's worried about something in particular and just needs to kind of down ramp a little bit. But just the fact that she can realize that because now she understands what it's like to not take.

Hours to fall asleep is huge growth for her. 

It's, it's huge in terms of, uh, self-advocacy. I mean, the ability to have that extra bit of room and that water balloon gives you the ability to learn. And not just learning academics, but learning self-regulation. So one of the, uh, I wrote a blog article that got a lot of attention actually, that I put into the deaf and hard of hearing Facebook groups.

And what I was writing about was about my dislike of FM systems, which is the primary thing that people use for auditory processing disorder, apart from auditory training. And I have feelings on both, so of course I do. So the FM system basically is, if it's just a standalone FM system, you stick a microphone on the teacher and the kid or adult and the kid has, um, ear pieces in their ears with usually no ability to control them.

Uh, there's some other issues like the sound quality's not quite as good. They're not as customized, but the main issue is they can't control it. Okay. And when they're not listening to the teacher, they get no help with anyone else in the room unless you hand around another microphone. Mm-hmm. So they're, they're tethered, they're trapped.

And it also takes away their ability to tell where sounds come from in space. Or if the teacher goes to another area and they talk to them. It's going to and they're talking to a different group. That kid has it piped right in their ears. If they go to the bathroom, they hear the whole conversation. So my point in writing that blog was it's about the self-advocacy and self-control.

It's their ears. How dare you 

trap somebody like this? It almost sounds traumatizing to me. Yes. If I were someone in that situation. I don't know if, I may not rather just not have that and just stay the, but 

there's a better way, right? If you hook it in through the low gain hearing aids, we can customize it to your preferences so it doesn't hurt.

We can make sure you have volume control and you can turn the teacher on and off yourself. That I'm okay with. I have no issues with that at all. It's an additional tool and preferably the kid has the, has the mic themselves and they can point it like you point a flashlight. And don't give it to the teacher at all unless you want to.

Right. And also just the social growth that I've seen with this child. I kind of always, um, I mean, honestly, borderline, I don't know. You've, you've seen so many kids, even, I remember this particular kiddo, but I mean, borderline, like selective mutism, I mean with, with her engagement with other people and I.

Um, since having the low gain hearing aids, you know, I can imagine in a, like, in a group setting like that, you know, sure you can hear one person better, but with the low gain hearing aids, she's able to interact, you know, dare I say, normally with other kids at her choosing because she doesn't feel bombarded by her environment all the time.

Hmm. 



You know, you're saying that, um, well, you're referencing my, my, uh, my person who does intake and inventory, and you're talking about your child like. It's somebody I've seen before and your last name is looking for it more familiar. And we had a little bit of a conversation offline and I am actually really surprised because I didn't realize I was being pulled on with a parent of a kid that I have seen that's Yes, that's just too cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I had to share you with the world, that's for sure because it's, it's impacted our, our whole family in fact. If you've got any, if you wanna just omit name, do you have any, any, uh, documentation of all her progress? You can give us a summary of just, 'cause I think sometimes as a parent, when we're in the middle of it, it's hard to see.

Oh, no, I'm definitely recognizing exactly and recognizing your face. And I'm not a good face person. I'm not a great name person, but I know exactly who this is. So I wrote in the customization appointment when I took the settings from kind of over the counter averages that I use, uh, based on my previous patients.

I brought it from that she'd had them for about a week and I customized with, uh, with her hearing levels and the size and shape of her ears on that day, and. Here's what I wrote. 'cause this was a weird, a weird situation because this child was not willing to be on screen with me while I was working with her.

That's right. So we were working by video of all you know, which is fine. I'm used to it. I do it all the time. But I was doing it in the dark basically. Yeah. And she was still being pretty consistent. And I said, daughter having a hard day. She's been doing well with the hearing aids. She doesn't wanna see Dr.

Race. We turned off the screens. She does want to wear them. She's in homeschooling group settings with high anxiety. She's worn hearing aids twice in co-ops and seems to play more. She tried the remote microphone, but she didn't like it probably because it was beaming people's voices right into her ears.

The co-op teacher say she's participating more. She likes the TV connector, and she's more aware of her own voice, and then I saw her, so that was in. The fall, early fall. A little later, about a month later, I saw her again with mom being in contact by email, and it said that her daughter is having a good day.

Mom says she's been wearing the hearing aids without complaint. She's sleeping better. Sleep has been a problem before at the co-op with the homeschooling, uh, she did her chores and she kept going and typically she would've wanted to go home immediately. She's been answering questions in classes and this is a quasi selective mute kind of kid.

Very sensitive kid. Yeah. She was also talking more in class. She has a less short fuse with her siblings and doesn't get as frustrated. Her mom said that she could carry conversations in the van. Um, even with people in the front seat and before she would say she was tired and there haven't been any complaints recently of being fatigued.

She said she's hearing voices better and that everything's fine and there's no issues, and that she had been taking an antihistamine at night, as you mentioned, to help with sleeping, and her mom was in the process of weaning her off the medication at that time. 

Yeah, so, 

oh yeah. And I, I remember that session so well that burned into my head as it's, you know, I, I had a, I had a patient with a misophonia in a teenager who couldn't tolerate the sound of other people's voices, and I conducted probably eight sessions with her via texting, like typing.

I couldn't talk to her. I had to type every message 'cause she couldn't tolerate voices. But she said at the end of, you know, working with this, she hadn't been able to eat with her family. She hadn't been able to go to restaurants. She hadn't been able to deal with classmates eating in class, and she said it was 70% better by the time we were done.

And misophonia is one of those things. It's really hard to address auditory processing. I'm not saying it's old hat, but I've gotten so used to it that it's. I'm almost seeking out these combination kids because no one, no one seems to know what to do with them. They're more interesting to me. 

You know, I'll say, you touched a little bit on auditory training and you know, coming from the background of an ot.

There are certain, like therapeutic listening, for example, there's programs like Safe and Sound Protocol. There's different takes on, you know, understanding these and how they play into, um, but I, you know, I'm a therapist who's trained in these things, and yet I was at such a point with our family and with my child that I had no time.

If I'm being honest with you, like I, I knew that even if those things could help her, I. I, I could say I was at wit's end, but really I was like, you know, hose hanging off the edge of wit's end. You know, I, of, you know, what are we going to do this? This has to get better. Does she need to go to school? Like what?

Something has to change. Um, and so when I learned about the low gain hearing aids and kind of understanding, okay, well I don't understand all of this, but I do understand that it's kind of like glasses. For her ears. And this can help us, you know, get to where we need to be, to where we could, even if we wanted to think about those other things, we could think about it later.

Like, we need something to help. Now, you know when, 

when you go to, let's say you shatter your leg, okay. And, and in that case, there's somebody in trauma, just like you guys were in trauma with all the things going on, there's an immediate acute need for a bandaid right now, or a cast or a medical intervention, a physiological response to a physiological need.

I'm all for physical therapy, for example, you know, but not until the leg is healed enough that you can actually exercise the muscles. Right. And this is a similar situation in many cases. There is so much trauma that the most important thing is to bring the kid or adult to a baseline where they are safe enough to grow.

If there is not any space in that water balloon, you cannot learn. 

Right? And if 

she was that traumatized between the sleep deprivation. And the selective mutism and the anxiety and the social issues along with the reading delays, et cetera, and the sound sensitivity, fixing those areas to the point that she could learn to trust her own body and calm down enough.

Then you can look at things like safe and sound, which can help with, um, the vagal sys, the vagal nerve, and the whole, you know, um, anxiety related things or the therapeutic listening system. Uh, the research is mixed and honestly, a lot of it is about application. There's some better people at dealing with these things, and then there's people who put kids into milking stalls with a computer and say, push the button and here's your coin insert.

You know? Mm-hmm. It really depends on how it's done. Honestly. Logan hearing aids are the same thing. They're not a commodity. Let me just tell you. I just saw, I'm sure you want another story. Yeah, I do. I just saw a kid. In another place, we're not gonna talk about where far, far away from places where I should be working.

Anyway, I saw this kid in this mythical land and I helped her and she did very well. And then she decided to go local and I encouraged her to go ahead and do that. And she went looking and I was totally fine with this because she got help. And honestly, I'd rather people use their local people if there is somebody who can do it well.

Unfortunately that is not what happened. Hmm. So the people who fit her with some decent hearing aids, 'cause they were the same ones I used in the trial, mis programmed them based off of hearing loss even though she didn't have one. And they essentially caused her auditory deprivation and discomfort. And then they closed because, or they gave up that part of the department.

I'm not really sure. But whatever happened, she got kicked out. And she found another audiologist who contacted me at the mother's request because she'd done so much better with me, and I talked to the other provider and I said, sure, I'm happy to teach you what I'm doing because I'm one person and it's important to be transparent with other providers, and it's important to share our knowledge.

This should be like grand rounds. This should not be territoriality. Right? I haven't heard back on how she's doing, but my guess is she's doing just fine. Because that provider's gonna copy my methods, and she promised me she'd be in touch as soon as she had an idea of what was going on. 

Well, we certainly need more people doing what you're doing and doing it well.

Um, because there is a huge need, there's a huge need for, for, for people who do it well, 

you know, I agree. But the problem is how do you determine. That it's working. How do you know if somebody's doing it well, and I don't wanna go into huge depth 'cause the detail's gonna bore people, but I will say that real ear, which is sticking a tube down to the eardrum and measuring how much power is at the eardrum, does not work well for people with fluctuating hearing loss does not work well when they have scarring at the eardrum because you can't measure what's at the brain if what's at the eardrum doesn't match.

And doesn't work well with a lot of neurodivergent people because their preferences for power are so different. And when you use, when you see an audiologist who doesn't know what they're doing with this, they will use prescriptive techniques based on hearing loss that are totally inappropriate for this kind of fitting.

And they'll justify it by measuring with real ear and saying that it was a good fit based on the target for hearing loss. 

Hmm. 

I'm really getting sick of it because what happens is people will blame the hearing aids for not working, just like they've had so many other things out there, you know, like and 

hopeless.

And then 

you have your hopes up and then have them dashed, right? 

They'll say the treatment doesn't work and then the parent thinks, well, there's no hope this will work. And they won't look anywhere else because they think it was the treatment when really it was the application. 

Yeah. Yeah. I felt similarly just about my profession in general because you know, if you get, if you get in with a therapist that you know, because O OT is such a huge field, you are like, could I technically treat a hand injury?

Yes. You know, should I treat a hand injury? No, I shouldn't. So you might have an OT and have a bad experience and then all of a sudden, nope. OT didn't help us. Right. 

I'm sure you could give examples from almost every field. I, I'm sure I could, but we're not going to. The point is this, if you're going to see somebody who's working with Logan and hearing aids, they better have had a couple hundred people before you, or you're the Guinea pig.

You don't wanna be that. You can develop further trauma and actual hearing loss, right? Mm-hmm. 

So I, I try to train people whenever I can and hopefully more people will come to me and, and truthfully, I learned from them. I'm always. Trying to adjust what I'm doing. Like my techniques with working with misophonia have a lot to do with teaching a kid to use the hearing aids as a safe place.

I give them settings with no sound at all, and with pink noise and with Bluetooth streaming, and I teach them how to layer different things like headphones and stuff on top of the hearing aids, and have total control over what they hear rather than exposure therapy. You know, exposure therapy is used for obsessive compulsive disorder, and if you take a kid who's traumatized by soft sound triggers because of hyper empathy, and you basically chase them around with sounds that bother them, they will get more and more traumatized.

Mm-hmm. With the way I work, I'm giving them permission to be vulnerable. I'm giving them permission to self-advocate. I'm telling them it's okay if you need to retreat. And then they get more strong and more brave about coming out when they want to. And over time they get less scared and less triggered.

It's a much better method in my opinion, but I can tell you that the kids I have worked with and the adults with misophonia are much more confident. They don't, they don't feel traumatized. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and that's something I've only learned in the last two or three years, you know, I mean, I'd worked with it before, but remember that boy, the one in the hall that would hallucinate his triggers?

Oh yeah. Mm-hmm. I 

could not treat him. I didn't know how I ended up sending him to psychiatry 'cause there was nothing else I could do. 

So, but if I 

had had him a few years before as well as more recently in my own career, like if I'd seen him two years ago to now and I caught him when he was younger, I think I could have helped him.

So you work with people of all ages it sounds like, and as you said, you work with grown kids too. Um, how can people reach out to you because. I can't believe this. You're licensed in every state. Every state. I mean, that's how much, that's how passionate you are about making this available to anyone who needs it.

So how do people find out more about what you do? I. 

So the easiest way, I'm just thinking about how I went to Las Vegas to try to try to go to Nevada to get one of my licensure of many, and most people have only one or two states, and how we almost died in a uh, snowstorm in Texas and how much the locals helped us there.

And it was horrible. We were out on the highway with trucks just crashing. 

Ugh. 

So many stories about getting these licensure, but it's worth it because I can be available to people in their home. It means I can make adjustments when I make a bad adjustment, which happens the next day, as opposed to you having to wait two weeks to come back and drive two hours to see me, and I can go to somebody's basketball game and actually make adjustments while they're in the bleachers.

I mean, the way I'm working is just so different. But that's not what you were asking. You want my contact information, so, yeah. Yeah. Because you do all 

amazing things, right? 

I mean, that I've been, yeah, I've been trying to explain to an insurance company why we shouldn't just send one of the people I'm working with who's doing amazingly, why we shouldn't just send her to some random provider.

And I'm like, 'cause they can't do A, B, C, D, E, F, and G and no one else does it yet. Because I'm working on a more holistic model, okay? Finding me is very easy. The best way to find me is on a website. It's uh, doctor like D-R-D-R-R-A-E-S-T-O-U t.com. Dr. Rae stout.com. Stout. 'cause I'm not thin. Or like the beer, but there's no D in it.

So D-R-R-A-E-S-T-O-U-T t.com. And if you put, uh, if you go up to the top, uh right, I'm not good at left and right. If you go up to the top right, you can find my blog. And I have about 60 articles that are worth looking at, including the citations. Um. If you go on the bottom, you can find my Facebook group, which is for auditory processing disorder and related sensitivities, and there's 13,000 members, and you can ask anybody anything.

We do not take down negative comments, 

and I'll of course put that down in the show notes as well for someone to just click in and go straight there because. I don't want there to be any, uh, barriers to people being able to find out, um, all the amazing things that you and your team are, are doing to be able to meet these very real needs of, I think one 

of the main 

things 

you have to realize is that most places when you go and you say, I wanna find out if this would help or not, they'll say, you can borrow this for a day, or you can listen to it for an hour.

I let you borrow technology for six to eight weeks, and if after that time it doesn't work, you're only out. About $50 to cover shipping and handling. Right? You're not out any time for my work, and that's 'cause I'm willing to take a bet on my patients. 70 to 80% of my patients end up staying with me just like you and your daughter did.

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

And we offer multiple models of doing it, including rentals, so that people are able to pay things slowly over time without losing money. It's a rent to own kind of program, right. We call it extended trial. Nobody else offers this. Everybody just expects you to pay upfront, you know, anywhere from five to $10,000.

Well, I can tell, you know. Based on our conversation now, all of my interactions with you and your team leading up to this point, and even when I just found out that information for myself, it's just so clear that you're passionate, you're passionate about what you do. And as a fellow, just healthcare provider and as a, as a mother, I just felt like, wow, your heart is in the right place.

You know, I just felt like you're really in it to, to help individuals, to help families. You know where we are because you've lived it yourself. You know, you, you, you've seen it thousands of times. So thank you for what you do. 

Thank you so much, and it's, it's really exciting, you know, to run into the, the parent of a patient of mine unexpectedly and not even realize it until we're being broadcast.

Podcast super 

fun. It's okay. Uh, that's how much I believe in what you're doing, and so I'm happy to be able to, to share and to also to share with our audience more about how hearing and functional listening affects so many areas of our life that you might not expect. So thanks for being here, Dr. Rae.

Thank you so much.

Well, that is a wrap for today's episode. I truly hope that you have found some information to help you better understand yourself, your children, and those around you, whether or not you identify with having these difficulties, so you can find ways to connect with Dr. Rae at her website as Dr. Rae stout.com.

 You will see that down in the show notes for Easy Access. And her Facebook group is also active and very helpful. You can find that by searching for auditory processing disorder and auditory sensitivities on Facebook, and I will link that below as well. Of course, you can connect with me at Sensational Moms or on the website.

And until next time, may you find connection even in the chaos.