The loss of any sense is devastating. If you’ve lost your hearing, you’re likely feeling a range of emotions and may be struggling with depression. This is understandable and normal, but there is help available. You don’t have to suffer alone. Here are some ways to deal with the emotions that might come with the loss of hearing.
Be Sure Of Your Situation
If you haven’t had a second opinion on your situation, visit a qualified hearing clinic and make sure you know about all your options. New treatments and interventions are being developed all the time, and whoever gave you your first diagnosis might not be aware of all your options.
Most important, you don’t want to find out later that you missed an important intervention. If you find out later only to learn it’s too late do anything, this will only make your mental health struggles all the more difficult.
Honor Your Feelings
The world has changed for you and everyday tasks will be harder. You have real feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and confusion. Don’t be ashamed of these feelings or tempted to ignore them. Most of all, don’t isolate yourself.
Instead, reach out to your existing support network of friends and family for emotional support and acknowledge that all these feelings are natural and valid. You may be surprised to find that they’re feeling similar things on your behalf and that they expect you to have normal human reactions to such a difficult situation.
Be On The Lookout For Depression
Everyone feels blue sometimes, and it’s natural to feel very sad about your hearing loss. But there’s a difference between normal sadness and the natural grieving period, which includes a period of depression, and long-term clinical depression. Clinical depression has certain symptoms, though the specifics are unique to each individual.
Symptoms to look for include constant feelings of hopelessness, the inability to enjoy anything you used to love, persistent fatigue, irritability, and sleeping problems. Depression is serious, and if you notice these symptoms, seek help. Depression doesn’t get better on its own, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Join A Therapy Group
Therapy groups allow you to interact with people who are facing similar struggles. Working with them, under professional guidance, you can become stronger and take back control of your life.
At TherapygroupDC, you’ll find expert therapists who can offer you personalized help. With data-driven treatments, they offer therapy designed not just to help you feel less depressed, but to get you back to being your very best.
Be Honest With Your Loved Ones
Your friends and family care about you, but if they’ve never experienced hearing loss, they won’t know how to help. They don’t understand your frustration or how their behavior can make life more difficult for you. Instead of withdrawing, be open.
Explain to people what you need and how they can help. You may be feeling inadequate or embarrassed, but that’s almost certainly not how your loved ones see you. In fact, they’re probably eager to find ways to show how much they care and how valuable you are to them: they just don’t know what to do to help.
Don’t Try To Rush The Stages
Losing your hearing is like losing a friend: it brings on the five stages of grief. Most people will go through a period of denial, followed by anger, then bargaining, then depression, and finally acceptance. Sometimes these stages overlap, and it’s not always a linear process.
While it’s important not to get stuck forever in any stage, especially in anger or depression, it’s also important to acknowledge that you can’t rush grief. If you do, you risk even greater long-term consequences in the future. When you accept that grieving is a process, you make true healing possible.
