Look After Yourself Properly and Your Tinnitus Will Take Care of Itself

byJulian Cowan Hill MA UKCP RCST

When you work with hundreds of people with tinnitus, certain patterns become clear. The core issue seems to be learning how to let go at a deep level and, once a person becomes able to do this, symptoms get better. In this article I want to show that if you receive the right kind of support, then the process of letting go takes place all by itself. I have had a lot of experience easing people with tinnitus out of a locked up state, and have witnessed great improvement, not only with the noises in their head but in their ability to be comfortable, positive, relaxed and healthy.

A person with tinnitus typically holds tension at the base of the head and along the length of the spine. Often the body feels like it is standing to attention or bracing itself. One man lay on the couch and claimed he was relaxed, and yet his head wasn’t even touching the pillow! He wasn’t aware of this and, when I told him, he needed to put his hand behind his head to check what I said was true. I have met literally hundreds of people with tinnitus who have not much body awareness because they are too locked up and numb to be able to feel what is going on inside.

If tinnitus could talk, as a symptom, it would cry out, “Listen to your body and learn to let go.”

Tinnitus people live in their heads spending most of their time living in hectic thought processes, planning, analysing, worrying, imagining, sorting out problems. There is always something to be achieved and there is rarely a prolonged period of just being happy with the way things are. Give a person with tinnitus a day off, and they will fill it with frantic activity, rather than sitting somewhere quietly and noticing the surroundings, without a care in the world.

It is always very revealing talking to people with tinnitus about how they relax. They might say they enjoy gardening for example. But when you look into it, rather than being aware of the positions of the body, what they can smell, or how the plants looks, that is simply being aware of the present moment, it seems that they spend most of their time in their thoughts, only vaguely in touch with their body and sometimes miles away from what they are doing. People with tinnitus on a walk, for example, will be much less aware of the simple sensation of their feet on the ground than what is going on in their head.

As a craniosacral therapist you can literally feel how people hold themselves and how open or closed their system is. When treating tinnitus I often find a moment when intense energy at the base of the head releases and suddenly the spine relaxes and people reconnect with the body. When they get up at the end of the session they are much more aware of how their body feels inside and they feel really connected to the ground. When this happens their head feels lighter, calmer and clearer.

If tinnitus could talk, as a symptom, it would cry out, “Listen to your body and learn to let go.” Although this condition actually forces you to listen to your body, most run away and hide in frantic activity, desperately trying to divert their focus away from themselves and their inner world. Sometimes tinnitus makes people run away from themselves even more. They cannot accept the way they are inside. The only place for them to go is into their thoughts and activities.

People with tinnitus have a deep need to be heard and understood

In my experience it only becomes possible for the central nervous system to let go and switch off when genuine support is offered. When this sense of support is felt through direct contact and the nervous system experiences a calm, clear and manageable contact, this brings in a very real possibility of transformation.

We can only let go when we feel safe, and someone is there to hold us. As a practitioner you become very used to meeting people who are carrying too much and do not let themselves be supported. Consequently they spend most of their life in a permanent state of overwhelm.

When this support strengthens into a help network, reaching out over several weeks or months at a time, it can have a profound effect on a person’s sense of well being, and what they are able to manage. It can provide the platform for them to let go much more deeply than they are used to, on a mental, an emotional and a physical level.

CST also brings sensitivity and energetic awareness into contact with your body. This gradually helps you develop your own awareness of how you really are inside at a deep level. In my mind it is one of the best therapies for bringing the nervous system back into a state of manageable calm. This is a very real, palpable experience that you gradually develop over the course of a few months and years, depending on how far people want to go.

People with tinnitus have a deep need to be heard and understood. Because I had tinnitus myself for 16 years, of which four years was so severe I couldn’t hear the phone ring, I am in the fortunate position of being able to understand what people are going through. People find great solace in knowing that I have healed my own tinnitus and this gives them not only a positive sense of hope but also motivation and inspiration to start looking after themselves appropriately.

In a society where people are often told devastating news that there is nothing they can do about their tinnitus and need to learn to live with it, I find providing hope, guidance and a means of being able to let go has proved to be a powerful antidote to this negative “spell”. When a person is in need of support and feels they are losing control, it has very serious consequences when a practitioner they go to for help leaves them feeling hopeless and with no way out. This shows very little understanding of this condition and how to meet people’s needs appropriately.

In circles where there is a lot of awareness and experience with the relationship between practitioner and client, it becomes clear that practitioners need to care about their clients and be open to be affected by their suffering. Deep down we all know that if the person we go to for help doesn’t really care, there is only a limited amount of value in what they are offering and their ability to resolve deeply-held issues.

It is commonly accepted that tinnitus appears when someone’s nervous system becomes stuck between “fight or flight” mode (sympathetic hyper arousal) and the freezing response (parasympathetic overwhelm).

When we move into a state of red-alert the way we hear radically changes. Normally we happily monitor background noises just below the level of consciousness and can focus sharply on important information when needed, e.g. hear one person’s voice in a noisy pub. In red-alert mode, which includes most people with tinnitus, you listen out for any sign of danger most of the time and as a result you notice background noise.