Five years ago, during a year near death, one of the most intense stressors wasn’t the medical neglect or the endless fight for even minimal care. It was sound. The moment that shattered me was the 17–gun salute at my father’s funeral.
Hyperacusis had already taken over my life. Every sound hit like an intrusion. Even small, harmless noises felt like they were attacking my body. The metallic tick of the HVAC ductwork cooling down felt like explosions up my spine. So, when the rifles fired, it wasn’t “a loud moment.” Each shot tore straight into my system and hit so hard I thought I might crumble to the ground.
This is what people with hyperacusis and audio-somatic synesthesia need to hear: you’re not strange. This is sometimes what the human body does when it has been pushed so far past its limits that the entire auditory pathway remains on high alert. The world stops being “sound” and starts being “impact.”
At that time, sound didn’t stay in my ears. It crossed over into the somatic system. That’s audio-somatic synesthesia. It began in early childhood, when my ears had to be hypervigilant so I could brace for when my abuser was coming for me. The worse my environment treated me, the worse my condition. Several years ago, it was so disruptive that I wrote to Harvard neuropsychiatrist Dr. Alice Flaherty. She explained that my auditory processing center had become so sensitized under prolonged threat that it was activating the neighboring somatosensory areas. Interpersonal Neurobiology widens the frame: when life has been too loud, too threatening, and too relentless for too long, the boundaries between senses thin.
Those rifles didn’t “startle” me. They slammed through an auditory system already burning from years of overload. They triggered the same survival pathways that had kept me alive when every form of care was withheld. My response wasn’t unusual. It was the exact reaction any human body gives when sound becomes danger.
People with auditory sensitivities need to know this: the world makes this worse by refusing to recognize that hearing is relational. Our auditory system developed within community. Humans settle through voice tone, breath, presence, and rhythm. We were built to hear within circles of safety. When safety collapses, hearing can become a channel for threat.
Hyperacusis isn’t “too sensitive.” It is a natural response when life has demanded more than any human nervous system can hold. Audio-somatic synesthesia isn’t “weird.” It’s the body folding sound into the rest of the system when threat has been chronic and relief has been absent. When people live through cruelty, contempt, medical impunity, and a culture that treats them as disposable, of course, sound can become too much, and the auditory channel can become sensitized.
I survived because I understood what was happening inside me. But I shouldn’t have had to rely solely on knowledge while my body screamed for support that wasn’t available. Community care should have been the buffer. It wasn’t. I’m still rebuilding. Thanks to the application of IPNB principles, my symptoms are a tiny fraction of what they were 5 years ago. I’m rarely startled by sound, and hardly ever feel it in my body.
If you live with hyperacusis or audio-somatic crossovers, understand that your body is doing exactly what human bodies do under prolonged threat without enough co-regulation. This is the predictable outcome of living without safety for too long. Nothing about you is strange.
We were built for circles of safety, steady voices, warm presence, and connection without hierarchy. That’s what helps the auditory system ease again. That’s what allows sound to return to being sound instead of impact.
I want a life ahead where hearing isn’t a battlefield and where my system finally gets to settle. A life of belonging, warmth, steadiness, where sound no longer hurts. A life where I’m surrounded by people who understand that healing isn’t magic, but relational.
