When Sounds Hurt and Voices Aren't Heard: An Experience Report on Misophonia, Sensory Trauma, and Trauma-Informed Design
TLDR
This paper examines misophonia as sensory and epistemic trauma, urging trauma-informed design to address digital environments and social dismissal.
Key contributions
- Misophonia, an aversion to common sounds/visuals, is poorly recognized, leading to distress.
- Digital platforms (e.g., auto-playing audio) and social dismissal cause ongoing sensory and epistemic harm.
- Trauma-informed design (TID) must address both harmful audiovisual surfaces and invalidation of user experiences.
- Even online support groups can reproduce harm through moderator control over valid experiences.
Why it matters
This paper highlights the critical need for trauma-informed design to acknowledge and mitigate the unique sensory and epistemic harms experienced by individuals with misophonia. It reveals how digital environments and social interactions can perpetuate trauma, urging designers to create more inclusive and validating spaces.
Original Abstract
This experience report reflects on researching misophonia as someone who lives with it. Misophonia is an aversive response to everyday sounds (chewing, sniffling, pen clicking) and, for many of us, to associated visual cues (misokinesia). It is poorly recognized clinically and socially. People with misophonia are routinely disbelieved, and they live inside platform surfaces (auto-playing audio, algorithmic ASMR, normalized eating on camera) that turn the sensory environment itself into recurring distress. This report is a re-reading of a prior qualitative study of 16 semi-structured interviews with misophones, conducted in dialogue with my lived experience and my role in the soQuiet Misophonia Research Network. I extend the trauma-informed design (TID) conversation in two ways. First, TID must treat embodied, contested conditions as sources of both sensory and epistemic harm: ongoing trauma produced by the audiovisual surface and by repeated dismissal of users' accounts of their bodies. Second, the closed groups and moderated subreddits participants relied on can reproduce that dismissal when a few moderators decide whose experiences count. I close with implications for ASSETS.
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