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During Better Speech and Hearing Month in May, we focus on a more comprehensive communication plan. It’s time to examine how we communicate and develop better techniques and tools to complement our current habits. This year’s theme is “Connecting People,” which the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association started.
Better Speech and Hearing Month aims to normalize communication problems, such as hearing loss. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association pushes for more hearing loss and other communication impairments awareness and education days for the more than 48 million Americans who have some hearing loss.
Individually, we can use this month to look for ways to improve our communication in the world. Hearing loss tends to isolate people, causing relationships to suffer and our world to shrink. It’s easy to see how, in a world where verbal communication is king, interacting with others while living with hearing loss can be especially difficult. We start to develop practices to avoid these moments of connection, which can cause severe emotional and mental suffering. Humans are social creatures, and one of our most basic wants is connection.
Relationships and Hearing Loss
Communication is one of our fundamental responsibilities as humans on this planet, and the seamless flow of communication is extremely reliant on clear hearing. As a result, persons with hearing loss frequently experience feelings of isolation, leading to depression.
You can intervene before your relationships suffer if you can recognize the indicators of hearing loss early enough. This is a great reason to schedule an appointment with your hearing health professional or take the plunge and buy those hearing aids.
Perhaps you’re doing well with mild hearing loss, but it’s driving your spouse or partner insane! Instead of putting off the inevitable, you might want to be proactive and address any frustrations as soon as possible. Consider it this way: you’ll cover far less ground in the long term!
All relationships need to be worked on
A hearing aid purchase could be viewed as an investment in your relationship. Frequent and intimate communication is often one of the most critical determinants of marriage and long-term relationship success.
Consider how adding a hearing aid to your life can boost the clarity and frequency of those daily talks and exchanges if your hearing loss makes them challenging. Getting your relationship back on track usually only takes a few simple steps in the correct direction. Your spouse or partner will most likely change their mind once they feel adequately listened to.
Have difficult conversations.
Make your loved ones aware that you wish to communicate with them. While it may be challenging to open up about a sensitive issue, your loved ones want to know about your experiences and how they can help. We can’t follow orders we aren’t aware of, after all. We can’t attend to needs we aren’t aware of, either.
If you find listening difficult and frustrating, offer methods that might help you relax. This could imply abandoning phone discussions in favor of email, text messages, and video chat. Remember that the most critical component of this is that your communications are pleasant for both or all of you, not your communication method.
Although it may be tempting to avoid discussing this subject, it is ultimately the best approach to let others in. Let folks you care about know that you may isolate yourself at times due to the effort required to have a discussion. In a problematic listening situation like a phone call or a dinner party, your friends may believe you’ve forgotten or are disregarding important events in their lives that they mentioned. It’s possible that you never heard the information in the first place! Tell them it’s not personal and that you’re committed to working together to find a solution.
While the change to hearing treatment will be challenging at first, conversations with patience and effort will blossom with a bit of patience and effort. Don’t let your relationships suffer because of your hearing loss. To schedule a hearing test, please get in touch with us.