Almost all my life I’ve absolutely despised children. Pretty much from the moment I stopped being a child I’ve hated being around children.
It doesn’t even matter what the child is doing. Whether they’re laughing and having fun or screaming and throwing a tantrum. The sound of a child being loud activates an almost primal rage that I can barely contain.
I’ve had to leave social gatherings/restaurants/grocery stores all because if I’d stayed I’d have made a complete ass of myself by screaming at a child just for existing.
It’s even worse with infants which makes me feel horrible because I know they can’t help it. I know the kids don’t know any better and it’s our job as adults to get them through childhood, but my blood boils when they get loud or demand attention.
Has anyone else dealt with something like this? Is there anything I can do to stop from getting so angry?
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I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.
The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118
While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.
I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.
I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.
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I have misophonia and kids are definitely a big trigger in a lot of ways… Screaming, crying, chewing, coughing. It’s anecdotal, but yeah the high pitch sounds don’t play nice with my brain. Misophonia suuuuuuuuuucks.
I also don’t particularly like kids, but that’s not really about the sound. Just not my cup of tea.
I’ll have to look into this. People chewing normally don’t bother me, but if someone is sitting close and chews with their mouth open… yeah, instant rage.
I’ll have to look into this again thanks, but Just a cautionary note that it can be hard to get off of beta blockers iirc
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