empowEar Audiology

From Misophonia to Mission:Cris Edwards and the founding of SoQuiet

• empowEAR Audiology and Coaching, LLC • Season 1 • Episode 75

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In this episode, I sit down with Cris Edwards, founder of SoQuiet, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting individuals with misophonia through their mission of offering advocacy, support, and resources for people who suffer from misophonia so that they may lead productive and serene lives.

Cris shares his personal journey living with misophonia, what inspired them to launch SoQuiet, and the nonprofit's growing impact through advocacy, education, and peer community connection. Cris also shares about World Misophonia Day which occurs on July 9 and the story behind this special day.  Take a listen as this conversation offers powerful insights, practical takeaways, and a hopeful look at the future of misophonia.

For more information about SoQuiet: 

SoQuiet Website: https://soquiet.org

Free Misophonia Info Cards: https://soquiet.org/cards



For more information about Dr. Carrie Spangler- check out her Linktree at https://linktr.ee/carrie.spangler.

For transcripts of this episode- visit the podcast website at: https://empowearaudiology.buzzsprout.com

Cris:

Hello and welcome to Episode 75 of the EmpowEar Audiology Podcast with Dr. Carrie Spangler.

Carrie:

Welcome to the EmpowEar Audiology Podcast. I'm Dr. Carrie Spangler. your host, an educational audiologist, a certified professional coach, and someone who brings both personal and professional experience to the conversation. This podcast is a space to explore meaningful stories, innovative ideas, and inclusive practices that support individuals on their hearing journey. Today's episode is proudly sponsored by So Quiet, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting individuals affected by misophonia. I'm especially honored to welcome today's guest, Cris Edward, who is the founder of So Quiet. Let me share a little bit more about Cris before we introduce him today. Cris was diagnosed with misophonia since childhood and personally lived with it for over 40 years. Cris turned his lived experience into advocacy, Creating So Quiet, which was created in about 2020 to raise awareness, provide resources, and foster a community of support. So Quiet also provides free information cards, they launched a research participant registry, and they awarded student research grants in the field. Cris is also a content creator on topics related to misophonia. Driven by a mission, Cris brings together individuals, researchers, and educators to promote understanding, acceptance, and action. And their work continues to shape how the public and professionals recognize and respond to misophonia. So Cris, welcome to the Empower Ear Audiology Podcast.

Cris:

Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here. I appreciate you having me on.

Carrie:

Well, I am delighted to have you and I am excited for our listeners today to hear your personal story as well as the information that you have to provide about So Quiet and the organization that you have developed. Before we kind of dig deeper into your personal story, Cris, would you be able to share with some of our listeners who might not be familiar with misophonia a little bit about what it is?

Cris:

Sure, absolutely. I'd be happy to. I do want to tell your listeners that I'm not a medical professional. So I speak in layperson's terms. I actually have a theater background. I just happen to have misophonia. So there's probably a lot of things that... that are not that technical. But anyway, misophonia is considered a sound and other sensory aversion disorder. And it's fairly recently been on the scene. The term was created in 2001 by a couple of audiologists. And it sort of sat in obscurity for a while and has only really picked up in awareness and research in about the last five to eight years tops. It's often misunderstood. If anybody knows about it, it's easy to mistake it for something else and misdiagnose it as maybe some other kind of condition, psychological conditions too. But it's sort of in a similar realm as hyperacusis, which is also a sound sensitivity disorder that your audience probably knows about. They're different things. And hyperacusis is about as well known as misophonia and researched about as much as misophonia also knew on the scene. So this is a new area that clinicians should know about. We know that misophonia is, and I'll tell you what it is in a second. We know that misophonia is not rare. It occurs in about 5% of the population. So it's actually more prevalent than OCD or bipolar disorder and things that people are more familiar with. What misophonia is, now that I've got that out of the way, is a really abnormal, uncomfortable, excessive physiological reaction to pretty common sounds that are not loud and sometimes the visuals or other sensory input related to those sounds. So if you have a client or friend or yourself who can't be in the same room as somebody eating chips or smacking gum or clicking a pen in a way that's well beyond just annoyance. It's a deeply uncomfortable feeling that is an excess to what the sound is. And there's a lot more complicated things about it than that. It's not that simple. So some of the things that are good to know about are that there are validated assessments that are freely available for clinicians to use. People can use them on themselves. And we're getting to a point where We've proposed a diagnostic code to the World Health Organization for it. So you won't really find it in your diagnostic manuals now. And I can talk a lot more about that. But that's what misophonia is. Not unusual. People complaining about being very bothered by sounds at dinnertime or in class or at work. It's a good place to look.

Carrie:

All right. Well, thanks for that. overview. And Cris, I know you have a personal journey with misophonia. Would you be able to share with our audience a little bit more about that?

Cris:

Sure, certainly. Yep. I guess my background in this comes from my own lived experience. I'm 50. And so I've dealt with this thing from long before it had a term or any recognition back in probably the early 80s. I can remember having what we call triggers, but or activators of that reaction, third or fourth grade. Definitely by the fourth grade. I remember there was a girl in my fourth grade class who was a hair chewer and hair twirler. And that hair twirling is sort of a visual trigger that was along the lines of the sound. So somewhere around there. And nobody had any idea that it was a thing. I didn't even bring it up. I was just... I got to a point where I didn't eat dinner with my family because the sound of my family eating dinner was very bothersome. And so I started eating dinner in my room. But... You know, flash forward many decades later, I found out about this term. I'll go back and cover that gap I just jumped over. I found out about this term probably 15 years ago, I want to say. And it was an aha moment that there was a term and that it was a real sort of at the time proposed or somewhat recognized disorder that was thought to be audiological disorder. And it allowed me to piece together everything looking backwards at how this particular condition had affected my schooling. My grades weren't good because I couldn't focus in class and I was very frustrated and unable to do that. I've quit jobs because of misophonia. Looking back, you know, there's been times where something would be so aversive to me. I was a barista at one time and somebody came in and was a gum popper in line and it was a busy day. And I just left. I never went back. Like that's not a great way of handling things, but that's how it affected me. So it's affected a lot of my life and managed to go to grad school for theater, like I said, and was active in the theater community here in St. Louis until the pandemic happened. And then live performing arts was on hold for who knows how long. And so I decided to really focus on advancing research and awareness and advocacy from a lived experience experience perspective about misophonia, and I'm still doing it five years later.

Carrie:

Yeah, and I know I want to get to So Quiet in the organization that you started to, but a couple questions about your lived experience. You said that started around the age of 10, that you probably had some of these aversions or triggers. and it's really impacted you. How do you feel like you are able to cope with it now?

Cris:

Well, having the word and the recognition was a watershed moment for me and a lot of other people. A lot of us, because of lack of awareness that this is even a thing, are often accused of being too sensitive or controlling or... You know, it's very misunderstood and easily misunderstood by other people. But now that I know that there's a word for it and there's a community, this is not a rare thing, that helps a lot. It helps me do what I do. But as far as getting by, you know, it had a huge impact on my mental health when I really think about it, even though we don't think of misophony. We don't know what kind of disorder misophony is. It kind of traverses psychology, neuroscience, audiology. It's a little bit of all of those things. But it can definitely have an effect on people's mental health. And I spent a lot of time being very frustrated at school and not being able to really have the words to communicate what I was experiencing. It doesn't make any sense that a pretty normal sound would be so bothersome to somebody that it impacts their life. And I remember in school thinking, wondering how the other students weren't so distracted and annoyed and frustrated by, you know, the kid at the back of the class with the crinkly snack wrapper or something. How could they concentrate? I didn't know that it was actually just a thing that I experienced. But, you know, I've really taken the time to try to piece together a life that is pretty accommodating to misophonia now that I know what it is. So I've tried working in open offices before. That's a nightmare, I hate to say. We do know that misophonia can qualify as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act because of its impact on us. But now I work from home. I'm very fortunate. My wife is very understanding. I think about the third date is when I brought up misophonia. And so she's very understanding of that. And we've gotten to a point where we can ask for accommodations in school and at workplaces. I carry earplugs everywhere I go. I'm not afraid to just get up and leave a situation. At 50, I'm like, they can think what they want about me. And communicating about it is a big way of coping. But something that helps is just maintaining as best as I can a moderate to low level of stress in my normal life. And that makes it so that when things do happen... you know, I'm at the grocery store and somebody's popping their gum or whatever it happens to be, that I can handle it with a clear head.

Carrie:

All right. And you said about 15 years ago is when you found the term misophonia around there.

Cris:

Something.

Carrie:

And when you found that term, did you... find the questionnaire that you were talking about, or did you just read the term? How did you self-diagnose yourself, basically? Well,

Cris:

yeah, that's a good question. When I first found the term, there wasn't any diagnostic criteria, or excuse me, assessment measures or anything like that. It's just the word existed, and we had a very loose understanding of what the definition was. But it did make sense to me. Before I found out that term, I had actually– back when Facebook started doing Facebook groups, I started a group called I Hate Hearing People Eat and things like that. I can piece together how some of the things in my life that I have done were as a result of that when I've lived in apartments. I've always been a top floor person because I don't like hearing people stomp around above me. I could piece those kinds of things together. But because we don't have official diagnostic criteria yet or a diagnostic code yet, it's not really possible to get an official diagnosis. We're hoping that changes in the next year. We've worked with Duke University and a few other places to propose a diagnostic code to the World Health Organization for misophonia. Yeah, it was more just the word existed, and people were telling me vaguely what the definition was, and I thought, I never thought of this as a unique medical thing or a condition of any kind, but this makes a lot of sense and really answers a lot of questions about how I've gone through life.

Carrie:

Thanks for sharing that. And I am thinking this lived experience... And finding the word and finding a community of people, especially I like the group, I hate hearing people eat that, the group. Did that lead you into thinking about starting a organization?

Cris:

It did. I had a hunch that misophonia was not that unusual. Back when we first started, it was actually listed only online in a couple of places, and one of those was there's a rare disorder website. And I had a hunch that it may be more prevalent than we thought. But, you know, we look at other communities, and we can see how other communities around a particular condition or disorder or disease have over the decades and years. the communities that support them or represent them, have made progress in certain ways. And they've run into pitfalls with research and awareness and so forth. And so we have a lot of things we can look at that have worked and not worked in other communities. And I just knew that at the time there wasn't much research happening, but that's changed. And a lot of people didn't know about it. It's really great to have that aha moment where people find out that there is a word for this thing that for decades has frustrated them. So all of that kind of came together, and I just saw a huge opportunity for things to exist that didn't exist around misophonia awareness and community. And to quote Bob Dylan, I guess it must be up to me. So I decided, like, I guess I'm the one who has to do these things I'm thinking of, and they were batting ideas around about. So that's, yeah, that's what I'm doing here.

Carrie:

That's great. And I have always found that people who have the firsthand experience and have aha moments are the ones that are very passionate about getting something off the ground. And that's what it sounds like you did with So Quiet. Can you explain to our audience a little bit more about what the objective of So Quiet is? or your mission and how that might help our listeners or those who may be experiencing misophonia?

Cris:

Absolutely. Well, we're a 501c3 nonprofit, so if you're outside the U.S., that's just we're tax-exempt by the federal government here in the U.S. Outside the U.S., they're called non-governmental organizations or NGOs. Same thing. And when we started, I didn't really know... organically what the organization was going to do. We had a bunch of diverse ideas of, it would be nice if we had peer support groups, or it would be nice if we were donating this to schools and so forth. And so it's organically grown based off of the input that we receive. But we cover a lot of different bases. We're very small as an organization. Sometimes people think we're a bigger organization than we are. I'm the only really full-time person working on it, even though we have great volunteers and board members and supporting organizations as partners. But we do a number of things. One, we fund research. Not a lot, but we have student research grants for graduate students and some undergraduates who are doing thesis, dissertation, or undergraduate capstone projects of some kind about misophonia. We're happy to hand those out. Their applications are always open. We process them very quickly. So that's been really neat to see. And we do have the only what I call comprehensive peer support program program for misophonia in the world. And it's, it's something that I was very passionate about. I became a certified peer specialist, a state certified peer specialist here in Missouri to understand the concepts better. And we put together kind of a proprietary training for people to be facilitators of peer groups for misophonia. And that's been really successful. We do a lot of other things. We have clinician training, we have a free one hour course on our website that is self guided, aimed at really anybody, but specifically audiologists or psychologists or whoever who wants to learn about it. What else do we do? We do a lot of personal advocacy. So if somebody needs disability accommodations at work or in school or something like that, we can kind of walk them through that, write advocacy letters for them from a lived experience standpoint that they can deliver to their HR office. We do a lot of other things. what's kind of crazy or not crazy but funny is one of our most popular programs is our free information cards these are just business cards they're not that special but but they ex they explain what misophonia is and on they're two-sided and we send them out they're full color we send them out for free and we've sent out tens of thousands of them but they're important because they can do the talking for us sometimes A misophonic reaction is a very frustrating feeling, and it's almost impossible to talk rationally when you are in that sort of triggered panic state that's so unusual. And people like to hand out these cards to people and say, this is what I'm dealing with. When I'm calmed down, we can talk more about the many facets of this thing. But here, you can Google it. Here's what it is. Those are very popular. So that and a bunch of other things we try to keep up with. spreading awareness and sharing research to lay people. I

Carrie:

I know. Yeah. And Cris, I think I told you that I came across your resources and I have printed out those cards for some of my students that I work with in the public schools who have misophonia and like you said, didn't really have a name for it. And I think it's really helpful for them to have that information and then help them support them in their environment too. One thing that I wanted to go back to is you talked a little bit about the peer support program. Can you share a little bit more about that? Is that like an online community or in-person community?

Cris:

Sure, that's a great question. I'll give maybe too much background, but I'm pretty open about this because I think it's important. I'm also a part of the recovery community. I've been about eight years sober. And the reason that's important is, looking back, I can tell that my misophonia was one of the things I was self-medicating for, and it became a big problem. So I'm telling people that it's not unusual for people maybe to turn to alcohol and so forth to kind of get by, to be social, so on and so forth. Anyway... That became a huge problem as well. And then I ended up getting sober for that. And so I became, I still am very active in the recovery community and the peer support there. And that was a big aha moment because we think of, say, 12-step meetings as being for recovery, but really anything that people struggle with, a different condition, a disorder, a natural disaster, grief, all those kinds of things are things that people think they do alone. And peer support as a concept can be very helpful for any of that. It's very nice to talk to other people who really understand from their own experience what you're going through. And misophonia is no different. Misophonia has a huge impact on somebody's life. It is oftentimes hard for other people to understand it. Why would, oh, you're bothered by a particular sound be something that really affects you every day and affects everything in your life? Yeah, it's tough to be misophonic. understood accurately with that. So to go back to your question, these are typically online. They're free, like all peer support typically is, supported by donations. They're through Google Meet or a similar such platform, Zoom. And yeah, we just get them together. There's several different groups that meet. There's an adults with misophonia group. There's a teens with misophonia group for people 13 to 17. We have a parents of people with misophonia group. Parents who have children who are greatly affected by misophonia really are stressed out and worried about their child's future, how they'll be accepted in life, and so they have a peer support group. We even have a peer support group for partners and spouses of people with misophonia because, as my wife will attest, it can be kind of a challenge to be in a relationship with one of us. But that's what it is. Each group meets on a different schedule The main one, the adults with misophonia group meets twice a week, just whenever it's convenient for people. And we're hoping to have some kind of online community that is a part of that. So each peer group might have kind of an online message board or something so that they can all talk in between meeting times. But yeah, it's a free thing. We do have one in-person group in Columbus, Ohio. Somebody took our training to be a guide or a facilitator there. and has an in-person group in Columbus, Ohio. We're hoping to have more of those in the future as well.

Carrie:

Okay. I'll have to check that out. I live in Ohio, so... Oh, okay. Nice, yeah. About a couple hours from Columbus.

Speaker 01:

Oh, good.

Carrie:

Well, I would wholeheartedly agree with you that peer support programs are a critical piece of any type of, you know... being able to deal with whatever personal challenge that you might have. And I can relate that way from like having a cochlear implant and going through a cochlear implant process and being able to have peer support that way. So I am a strong advocate of having people who have lived experience to be able to relate to.

Cris:

Absolutely. And I, I naively didn't even think of that. But I follow several content creators who have cochlear implants and answer questions about those kinds of things. And that sounds like a really challenging thing to do, not just from a physical aspect, but socially. There's a lot of judgment and questions. And I can imagine that would be stressful and some sort of peer support would be very helpful. Yeah.

Unknown:

Yeah.

Carrie:

One of the things that I wanted to talk about is you let me know that on July 9th is World Misophonia Day. Can you share a little bit more about this day that's coming up?

Cris:

I'd be happy to. Well, first of all, I'd always wondered from an advocacy standpoint, from our nonprofit, why they're hadn't already been created some kind of awareness week or month or day. Everything has an awareness day. There's a blueberry muffin awareness day every year, which is great. Some people had tried to start one. It didn't really catch on at various times throughout the years. There's been two or three proposed, and they just didn't have much fuel behind them. This is going to be kind of a sad story, but then it'll get better. Last year around October, we got in touch with a family whose daughter had very serious misophonia. This is the kind of thing where between on a scale of one to 10, this is like a nine or a 10, and it can feel really hopeless because of people not understanding you, blaming you for it. They had taken their daughter to an ENT who had never heard of misophonia and said, that's not a real thing. And it's kind of an all in your head kind of thing, just really not great advice. Anyway, The stress of all of this on this 15-year-old girl was so great. She ended up taking her own life because of the stress of it. And, you know, that sort of situation is something that we do hear about. It affects people that much. And so we reached out to the family. Her name is Michelle Del Valle. And we reached out to her family, her father and sisters, and said, we're sorry that this has happened. You know, this kind of thing is– something we never want to have happen again. And they were on board with it. And so we decided to use her birthday, which is July the 9th, as the day that we made World Misophonia Awareness Day. They loved that idea. We worked very closely with them. The next step was just to partner with a bunch of other organizations. There's a lot of large and small organizations, online accounts, influencers, whatever you want to call them, that are springing up in their areas about misophonia. And we partnered up with a lot of them from Brazil and India and France and Australia and all over the world, Iran, the UK, you name it, to really come together and say, this is going to be the official Misophonia Awareness Day, July the 9th, in honor of Michelle. And this is the first year we're observing it. So we just declared it in November. And this is the first year we're actually doing something for it. And it's gone well so far. Yeah.

Carrie:

Good. Well, what a wonderful way to honor someone this way. I mean, it's a tragedy, but I'm grateful that you're able to turn that into something that will help others as well. What do you see as far as World Misophonia Day? You talked about awareness. How do you see this kind of unfolding?

Cris:

That's a good question. We We debated, not debated, brainstormed, I guess, on what sort of things we wanted to really put at the forefront. And the Del Valle family and everybody else agreed that really, probably the biggest issue in the misophonia community, which we call the misosphere, that's the word I created, and for some reason it's caught on, I don't know why, but the misosphere is the lack of understanding and knowledge about it among clinicians. You know, probably a lot of people in your audience, maybe they've heard of it, it's really difficult to necessarily spot in another person. You might have a child or a teenager who is a client of yours as a therapist or as an audiologist. And it seems like maybe they have just emotion regulation problems or they're not being able to concentrate in class. And it can be hard to go, wait a second, maybe what this person is actually dealing with is misophonia. They may not even be aware of it. They may think that Everybody experiences sounds to this frustrating and distracting a degree. So getting the awareness about it to clinicians, school psychologists, anybody is really the biggest bottleneck, I think, in awareness. And we hear very frequently of people who find out about the word, that that's the word for the thing they deal with. They go to see their psychologist or whoever it happens to be, pediatrician. And it's kind of a dead end from there. That person has never heard of it. They look in their diagnostic manuals. It's not there. And they go, I don't know what this is. I've never heard of this. Or nobody knows what the word is. And so it's difficult to accurately diagnose it. It misdiagnoses a lot of other disparate things. That's what we're focusing on this year.

Carrie:

You kind of brought up a good point. someone finds out the word misophonia, and they're like, yes, this is something that I see in myself or my child or someone that, you know, I know, and they go somewhere and they hit a dead end because the ENT or, you know, family physician or pediatrician doesn't know about it. What advice would you give someone that hits a dead end?

Cris:

That's a great question. Luckily, it's getting A little bit better, but it's a slow kind of movement. We're trying to reach out to other conduits of medical knowledge. But if somebody does hit that dead end, that's sort of where we come in. We can't provide therapy. We don't offer medical services. But we do recommend the peer support groups. That can at least be a place where people can talk openly about it in all of its many facets. and be validated and so forth. And even though it's not therapy, it is very therapeutic. People get very emotional finally having some people to talk to that know exactly what you're saying and will not judge you or anything like that. We also try to put people in touch with resources. We have a variety of things that people can use to help them get by. Maybe if they do need to ask for accommodations at their employer, we can help them with that. Sometimes we have a, I guess, bring your own clinician plan, which is if your, let's say, psychologist doesn't know what misophonia is, bring them to us. We have a free one-hour training. We have an online directory that they can be listed on for free once they know what misophonia is and new clients can find them. We have a lot of clinical advisors who can answer questions for them and get them up to speed on how to work with clients with it and how to recognize it in their patients. So those are some of the things we do. Obviously, there's a lot of things that could still be put in place, but not all hope is lost. I know a lot of people can look at misophonia, especially younger people, teens and college age, and think, how am I going to get through the rest of my life with this thing? What if we don't find hope? a really great treatment for it anytime soon. We might, by the way, I don't know. There's a lot of research happening. People are really interested in finding out what the strange thing is from a research perspective. But it is possible to live a pretty rewarding and we call it serene life with misophonia. It might take some adjustments, just like any disorder or disability requires some adjustments in life. But I... As far as just from my personal experience, and I've had really big struggles with misophonia in my life, I'm doing all right. Not every day is great. Sometimes I'll go grocery shopping, and there's just an avid pen clicker at the checker, and I'm just, you know. And it can be tough. I like riding the Amtrak train, and sometimes my wife and I will have to move cars three or four times to find a a seat that's not near somebody who's doing something that's triggering. So those kinds of things can happen and you can get by okay. But I just don't want people to lose hope because people do lose hope sometimes when their clinicians have never heard of this and they're struggling every day and their family is in disbelief that it's a real thing. You know, it's like, it really piles up and it's hard.

Carrie:

Yeah. It sounds like you have done quite a bit with so quiet from this conversation right here, and I know we can talk a lot more, just to think that you really started this organization in 2020, and it's only been around five years, and you have an incredible amount of resources and peer support program, and a scout or I guess a research program for students who want to find out more or dig deeper into that. And so when I think about all of that, if our listeners are listening today, what can they do in order to connect with you and maybe support your mission a little bit more?

Cris:

That's a great question. It's not all me. We've had some great partners. We're very fortunate to have some very kind, intelligent, active people who have really been helpful from the research and clinical communities. For example, one of many, Duke University, has a whole department that just researches and works with people with misophonia. It's the Duke Center for Misophonia and Emotional Regulation and other people. So I've learned a lot about science and medicine In the meantime, so it wasn't just me. We've got great partners. I do have to mention that. As far as supporting us, feel free to reach out to us. Our website has a lot of information on it. I'm very dedicated to making sure that we are presenting accurate information. There's a lot we know about misophonia. There's way more that we don't know yet. And I don't want to speculate on possible treatments if we don't have any data to support it or possible causes. We don't even know what causes it or what bucket of information. medicine field it goes into. I don't want to speculate on that, but I do try to present pretty clear and accurate information. We always need volunteers. Everything we do is remote at this point, with rare exceptions to going to conferences here in the St. Louis area. Any kind of an hour or two if people want to help us out, that is greatly appreciated. Donations, obviously, are a big help. Most importantly... If you have misophonia or somebody you care about or know has misophonia and is really struggling with it, let them know that there is hope and that there's a community. And if there's something that they need in their life that doesn't exist in the world, a particular piece of literature or resource or something that they think would really help them with it, that's what we do. We try to make those things happen.

Carrie:

That's great. Great information. And what I can do, Cris, is link the website to the show notes so people can go directly to the website to find out about Misophonia and the resources that you provide and the other volunteers provide on that website, too.

Unknown:

Mm-hmm.

Carrie:

Before we wrap up, is there anything, Cris, that I didn't ask you that you think our audience should know before we wrap up?

Cris:

That's a great question. I have a hunch. I don't know. You probably have a pretty wide listenership, but probably a lot of medical professionals in the audience. And so misophonia is complicated. It's not just a sound aversion. There are a lot of weird contradictory things about it. For example... A lot of people don't trigger themselves. So I can eat an apple, no problem. But if I'm in the room with somebody eating an apple, I have to leave. That doesn't make any sense. Just try to, to quote Stephen Covey, try first to understand something, then to be understood. So if somebody is telling you their own lived experience about misophonia, or maybe they don't even know the word, they're just saying, I can't concentrate at work because of Bob two cubicles over in his, or whatever, typing loud or something. That's like an aha moment. And there's a lot of resources for clinicians. We're making headway on research every day. And they're welcome to reach out to us. We want to help them help their clients as best as they can too. And it's possible to have a good life with misophonia without being completely isolated or hopeless.

Unknown:

Yeah.

Carrie:

Well, thank you, Cris, so much for sharing about So Quiet and especially about your personal journey. I think that really captures a lot for our listeners to understand even more about misophonia. And I also want to just give a heartfelt thank you, Cris, and So Quiet for, again, sponsoring this episode. Sponsorships like this help keep the Empower Your Audiology podcast going. with supporting production and transcripts and that ability to bring this conversation to the community.

Cris:

Thank you.

Carrie:

Yes, thank you for being here today. And I hope today's conversation left all of you listeners feeling inspired and informed and a little bit more empowered on your own journey. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who might need to hear it. And this podcast is a production of the Empower Ear Audiology and Coaching Company where hearing connection and personal growth come together.

Cris:

Thank you.

Carrie:

Thank you.

Cris:

Thank you.