How to live with person with a vocal tic?

February 26, 2023 8:40 AM

I live with a person who has a vocal tic, which (sometimes) causes me a lot of stress. I cannot change the tic, how can I develop strategies to cope with it?

The person's tic is usually a normal cough followed by a very loud kind of extra-pressurised cough. It is so loud that it physically hurts when they do it near my ear. It is sometimes combined with snuffing.

Depending on the day or week, they might do it just a few times a day (so it's not a problem) or up to 5 times a minute (so it drives me crazy and I have to leave, but can't always).

Apart from treating the tic itself, which we do, what are my strategies for coping? I know that I can cope better if I enter situation in more relaxed state to begin with, and any relaxation strategies will help during the situation.

I would still like to know how you live with a person with vocal or other tics, Tourette's, OCD, or similar situations, please. Thank you!

posted by oxit to Health & Fitness (6 answers total)

Look into resources for living with misophonia. Whether or not that's what you're experiencing, I think a lot of the coping mechanisms for misophonia will be relevant to your interests.

Offhand, earplugs and/or music come to mind.
posted by aniola at 8:57 AM on February 26, 2023 [2 favorites]

To follow up on aniola's comment, there are earplugs intended to help people who suffer from sound sensitivity (of any kind). They reduce the impact of loud or harsh sounds without impairing your ability to hear normal conversation. TechRadar has a pretty thorough comparison article. I don't know if they'd work for something as loud as you're describing, but perhaps it's worth a try.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:42 AM on February 26, 2023

I have several friends with vocal tics like these, which used to make me very anxious. A therapist helped me realize my role in this response: I turned my own "yikes! Shitty noise!" outward into "yikes why are you making me feel shitty?"

I developed a self-soothing response to do at every tic: deep slow breath in, imagine leaping into my favorite body of water, slow breath out.

After a month or so, the tics no longer irritated me.
posted by Jesse the K at 9:44 AM on February 26, 2023 [16 favorites]

If you try earplugs, I really like the Loop brand.
posted by NotLost at 10:56 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Live with like a flatmate or live with like are married to or parent?
I have found it less stressful being around people with vocal tics once I got away from the feeling that I should respond somehow, be it by having a feeling or whatever. I don't need to answer, or excuse, or react or (performatively?) ignore, it's not a communicative noise, it's just a sound, like their shirt is a colour.
posted by Iteki at 1:02 PM on February 26, 2023 [7 favorites]

In addition to what the above posters are saying - it's really about reminding yourself of your empathy for the person for the vocal tic as a way of softening it on yourself and treating them with loving kindness for something they can't help doing - one thing that I have done when I am around an unavoidable repetitive noise is that I turn it into a game when it's bothering me. I count each time it comes up and trying to beat my count each time, cheering (internally!) when they make the noise, turning it into a positive thing rather than a negative one. This helped me get over a cube neighbour at work clearing his throat every 30 seconds or so, which drove me up the wall because I am very sensitive to sounds - I just made a little tic on a paper every time he did it and went on with my work until I noticed it again, to see how high it got for the day and whether it beat the previous best. It is silly, but it really helped me reframe it when I had no choice but to live through it, and it helped desensitize me to it in a way that avoidance techniques couldn't.
posted by urbanlenny at 6:43 PM on February 27, 2023 [3 favorites]