When Sounds Hurt and Voices Aren't Heard: An Experience Report on Misophonia, Sensory Trauma, and Trauma-Informed Design

TL;DR

This paper discusses the lived experience of misophonia, highlighting its social invisibility, sensory trauma, and the need for trauma-informed design in digital environments to better support affected individuals.

Contribution

It extends trauma-informed design principles to include embodied sensory conditions and critiques moderation practices that dismiss misophonia experiences.

Findings

Misophonia is poorly recognized and socially disbelieved.

Digital surfaces can exacerbate sensory trauma for misophonics.

Moderation in online groups can unintentionally dismiss affected individuals.

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.