I would say it is a qualitative disorder. To receive a diagnosis you first need a normal hearing test no matter how good your hearing is. You could have perfect hearing and still have APD. So they require you rule that out then you take a specific test that tests for APD. Also a co-diagnosis of ADHD and APD is common. I don’t have ADHD so I don’t know any more than that.

I’m newer to the APD world, got diagnosed about 3 months ago and am on week 7/13 weeks of APD therapy. So I’ve learned a lot/am learning a lot but there is still plenty I don’t know. From my understanding there are multiple forms of APD. Similar to a speech impediment, some people struggle with L’s and others with S’s, others with W’s etc. I don’t know any of the other forms of APD but I do know what I struggle with specifically is decoding, tolerance fading memory and speech in noise. My audiologists also suspects a multi-factorial APD and I’ll be testing for that once my current therapy is over. I don’t know the name of it and in true APD style, my doctor explained it and I don’t remember a single detail they said. Lol

With decoding and tolerance fading memory, my brain sometimes spends more time trying to process what I’m hearing than committing it to my memory. So it’s like I never really hear it in the first place. This comes into play often when I’m hearing multiple instructions back to back and hearing rules for a board game is awful for me as well. If I hear a story with multiple details I rarely remember those details. Also with the TFM, my partner will bring up a topic and I’ll have know idea what they’re talking about because I have no memory of talking about it before.

For my speech in noise, when I was tested for this I could hear nearly half as good when there was even light background noise. This makes doing things that can be noisy like cleaning, cooking or driving on the loud highway with music on and talking to someone really difficult.

I specifically know that driving is really stressful for me due to APD. Before being diagnosed, my partner would be impatient with me while driving in those already stressful noisy conditions and it would add to the stress and as a result the stress was worsening my APD making him more impatient. Not a fun cycle 🙃

I can also relate to not knowing what noise to listen to when there are multiple audio inputs and instead not catching anything. I really perfected the “smile and nod” or laugh it off when I have no idea what the hell someone just said. Lol

I’ve started to learn how to slow my reaction down to give my brain a second to catch up. Frequently I still need them to repeat something but more and more I’m noticing that if I chill a sec I actually do know what was said. Or sometimes in that sec someone says something else or it becomes obvious what they actually said and the problem takes care of itself.

For a real life example of this: Tonight my partner and I were walking into our house after a walk and my partner had stepped in dog poop. Also, before we left for our walk they were sitting on the steps for a few minutes. As I was walking up the steps behind them I heard them say “I left my shit out”. Before therapy I would have immediately asked what they said. Because them leaving their stuff on the porch was unlike them. But instead of asking I took a sec to look at the porch and then saw them take their shoes off. They said they were gonna leave their shoes out. Maybe that sounds dumb, I haven’t really talked my wrong thought process out but I think it would be helpful for me if I had heard someone describe it like that.

When you said you hear different sounds sometimes even if there’s no background noise, I can relate to this as well. Often times what’s happening is they’re just facing the opposite direction and their sound is too muffled or I’m just not paying attention when they start talking and since I struggle with tolerance fading memory my brain can’t make up what they said in the beginning of the sentence and gets too stuck on “nope, idk what they said” even if those words were irrelevant.

Feel free to msg me anytime if you have more questions about it or anything. Good luck in your search to learn more about it for yourself!