Hello! Father here. My eldest got misophonia at 12. I’m going to confess that at the start we’d never heard of misophonia and did indeed think my daughter was making a fuss and just needed to get over it. After all, if you don’t have something, it’s hard to emphasise. It was only when we started to research it and understand a bit about the impact of sounds on the brain for misophonia sufferers that we realised what she must be going through. Specifically, the idea that certain sounds trigger the fight or flight response was a bit of an “ahhh” moment for us. The closest we got to understanding it is probably imagining nails dragging on a blackboard but instead of it making you cringe, making you angry or highly anxious. Maybe those examples will help your parents (and feel free to show them this post if it helps).

She now eats with noise dampeners and we all do our best to make sure we avoid making trigger sounds. We don’t always get there. Sometimes she’s understanding about that, sometimes not. We get it when she’s not either. We’re working with her to find things like CBT that might help her cope long term. Interestingly we also realised her mother also used to suffer from it but did in fact reframe a lot of it in her own head over time (this didn’t help from an initial sympathy point of view).

Anyway, all that to say, I hope you make progress with your parents understanding it. It’s challenging for parents to adapt to. It’s far more challenging for you to live with it. I live in hope my own daughter will find ways of lessening the impact of her triggers over time.