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CHAPTER ELEVEN Improving Your Listening and Hearing Skills Mark Ross, Ph.D.
. . . As a hard of hearing person you want to ensure that you’re making the best use of your residual hearing. This means maximizing the benefit you’re receiving through your hearing aids. Amplification is the only “therapy” that directly increases the actual amount of acoustic information available. All the training and practice procedures that are to be covered are predicated on you getting as much useful acoustic information as possible through your hearing aids. Although you should realize some immediate benefit from hearing aids, you should obtain even more help after you get used to them. Getting the most from your hearing aids requires us to consider both some general principles and some specific practice procedures. Tenacity Foremost—don’t get discouraged! Remember that while you’ve had a hearing loss for a number of years and experienced the frustrations of poor hearing, for you the sounds you had been receiving seemed perfectly “normal.” Now with hearing aids you’re suddenly exposed to sounds that are not only louder, but a different pattern. You’re going to have to reeducate your brain to accept different sound patterns as “normal.” As a rather simple analogy, what you now perceive with hearing aids can be likened to someone talking English with a very different accent. Just as it takes time for an American to get used to, for example, an Australian speaking English, or for a New Englander to comprehend the speech of someone who comes from the Deep South (and vice versa), so it will take some time for you to adjust to the amplified “accent” coming through your hearing aids. The Adjustment Process When you first put on your hearing aids, you’re suddenly going to hear many sounds of which you previously were unaware. Many of these sounds will jog familiar memories. For others, you’re going to have to consciously identify the source of the sound, either by asking someone or by honing in on it yourself. One woman in a recent hearing aid orientation group was going a little crazy with the hissing and splattering sounds she kept hearing until she realized it was coming from her frying pan. She hadn’t heard the sounds of frying food for many years. All at once you’re going to be exposed to a world of sound you had forgotten, such as the whirl of the dishwasher, the whine of an electric can opener, the sounds of birds singing, or the “ting” of your microwave when the food is done. Other familiar sounds will be experienced somewhat differently and may even be disturbing, such as traffic noises in the city, the tumult in your favorite restaurant, and the screeching from your grandchildren’s boombox (I’m told it’s music!). It’s true that it’s a noisy world in which we live, and it seems to be getting noisier all the time. But it’s the only world we have and it’s the one in which you’re going to feel more comfortable when you can more fully hear what’s going on. Expectations Not everybody will be able to realize the same degree of benefit from hearing aids. After resisting the notion of hearing aids for years, some people, when they finally relent, expect that hearing aids will re-create their hearing abilities of fifty years ago. It doesn’t work that way. While hearing aids will help most people with hearing loss, no matter how advanced a hearing aid or how skilled the hearing aid dispenser, the ultimate benefits achievable through amplification are determined by the nature of the hearing loss. Even though just about everybody with a hearing loss can obtain some benefit from hearing aids (hopefully, quite a lot), the degree of benefit will vary among individuals. Your satisfaction with hearing aids is going to depend greatly on your expectations, which should be set neither too high nor too low. One important way to develop realistic expectations is to educate yourself about hearing loss (which is what you’re doing by reading this book). Another is by talking to other people with hearing loss. A third is by working closely with the professional who fit you with hearing aids. You’ll find most of them ready and willing to help you understand what you can and cannot readily achieve with hearing aids. It is important that you identify specific situations in which you appear to have the greatest difficulty, and then work with the hearing care professional to determine if there is some hearing aid feature or other assistive device that can provide additional help. Such features as telephone coils, personal frequency modulation (FM) devices and television listening systems can often provide just the extra boost a person needs to overcome specific listening problems (see Appendix I). Developing realistic expectations does not mean acceptance of anything less than is possible for you. . . |
