Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

From Go to the Limits of Your Longing, by Rainier Maria Rilke

This snippet of a poem speaks to my early, dark days of parenting with misophonia. Grief and despair felt like permanent placeholders. Doom colored the future; not just mine, but my son’s.

By the time Thomas was diagnosed with misophonia shortly after his 16th birthday, the condition was ruling his life. A psychologist explained his palpable suffering and months of disruptive behavior with a single, strange word—misophonia.

One word, one moment, one family’s future redirected.

Misophonia most often, but not exclusively, manifests in childhood (Guzick, 2024). This was true for Thomas. He also veered from the norm. His first trigger was not sound, but sight: my leg jiggling during middle-school orientation.

Although misophonia is currently categorized as a decreased sound tolerance, visual triggers are common. Frequently discussed in support communities, visual triggering (sometimes called misokinesia) barely appears in research. The first of the three existing published studies on misokinesia (Jaswal) didn't appear until 2021, two years after my son’s diagnosis.

The visual triggers that science hadn’t yet acknowledged made Thomas miserable. He was hit with a double whammy. Sounds typical of misophonia, and more, also triggered him.

People with misophonia tend to be triggered by sounds and sights coming from other bodies. Triggers for children emerge among the bodies populating their small worlds—family members, teachers, classmates, etc. Thomas was no exception. His worst reactions were to the sounds and sights of his family members’ bodies, especially mine.

His triggers also cast a wide net that seemed more idiosyncratic than systematic—jiggling legs, flipping hair, wind chimes,........

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