Hearing Loss LIVE! What We Learned #IdentityCrisis and #HearingLoss

We examine our own crisis modes with respect to hearing loss and how we handled them. We share why it's important for all to take the time they need to overcome the new obstacles they face with hearing loss.

Transcript

What We Learned this Month about Identity Crisis with Gloria Pelletier.

Julia: Good morning, and welcome to oops, I bopped that. Sorry. Hearing. Start again. Good morning, welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! This month, we have been looking at identity crisis. I hope you joined us for our live, let's talk. It was a great talk about identity crisis and what that would look like for people. We learned some interesting things this week. Hopefully, you've been following our kind of follow up blogs with impostor syndrome and some other things that actually kind of lead into identity crisis. One thing I'm going to say, you can even take the word identity away, right? It's a crisis. And maybe Gloria will fill us in on some of the thought process on how a crisis works. Some of the things that I think I learned this month and and we talked about, some of it happened, actually at our talk. And some of it was when we were talking in general about things. And I tell the story quite often of --my grandma's stories, right and getting angry or upset. One of them's around when talking on the phone stopped, it was a weekly thing we've done since I was a little kid. And in my 30s, it came to an abrupt halt because of her hearing loss. And the conversation that made me so angry that I had lost that right. It was a loss. Yes, I am the hearing partner. And I did realize when I was able to calm down, you know, if I had that loss, how big was it for her? My grandma was a very social person, she just lost the ability to call any of the grandkids, she just lost the ability. You know, and I didn't, I didn't equate it to an identity crisis, right. And Gloria kind of called me out on it. I was like, I'm still not really sure. But it was. It was a change in my characteristics of daily, weekly, whatever, my lifestyle. And I was lucky because I had friends in the HoH community, and was able to come up with solutions and think through what I could do to change for that communication. Because I wanted to keep that communication. Change is a key word in all of our stuff. I hope people pick up on that. And I was willing to do that change to mitigate the crisis. I think identity crisis looks different for everybody. One of the things that our takeaway this month, during the pandemic, if you lost your hearing, maybe you were in your comfort zone and didn't have a crisis situation right away. what that might look like? How long crisis might last? Which are all questions only you can answer. But you're hearing partners who are in crisis need help too, in a different way, maybe, but they need to understand communication is going to change. Yes, you can get hearing aids that will help you understand better. Yes, you can do this, but maybe not that. And they need to understand more. I want to emphasize yes, you're hearing partners having a crisis too. Maybe your employers having an identity crisis, but a crisis about how can I support my employee. This is where it becomes very important that you work together. You cannot just fit mom with a pair of hearing aids and expect it to be normal. You cannot tell your mom to go get cochlear implants so that she can know when her doctor's appointment is on Fridays and be able to know it and understand it. You have to be involved at the grassroots level with them so that you can have better communication. It's why Chelle and I really did design a class all around how to have better communication with lipreading. It's why we design workshops and CPUs for employers and business people to understand how they can communicate better with their hearing loss employees. Advocacy work starts with the hearing loss person, right? You need to know you're in crisis, and you need to be able to tell us what that crisis looks like. And we need to recognize our crisis and how we're going to better communicate any of that making good sense. Somebody build off this rambling that I'm doing about my crisis. Which only lasted a day, but for my grandma lasted a couple of years in trying to figure out how to be social again, with hearing loss. Chelle or Gloria, who wants to go first. Gloria does, per Chelle.

Gloria: Yeah, I was, you know, there's so many things that were going through my mind when you're talking about this, because we often forget that we're not the only person in the world. That we are part of a family. And the family also has to adjust. And some people will say crisis. The words don't matter, there's just something has to change. And so we look at finding how do we, how do we change in order to be supportive of the person who now has specific needs or more needs. And

sometimes the family doesn't want to change? And that creates even more of a problem. Sometimes it's about there's no information. How do you change if you don't have information? And sometimes, the lack of information for the hard of hearing is in and of itself a crisis.

There's, it's different if you have the information and refuse-- that's a different concept. But what if you can't even get the information? What if it's not there for you? What if you don't know how to do it? If your grandmother was born, now, we, I was thinking about this, Julia, when you're if your grandmother was born, now she would have texting, she'd have visual, she'd have all these technology to make communication easier.

But yet, at the time that your grandma was suffering and struggling, she didn't have that. So for me, I said this earlier in our conversation that until I met Chelle and then you, I didn't have anybody who was supporting me, there was no support from my family, there was no support from my friends. I don't think it was done out of malice. There wasn't any place for them to get the information. You have to have some place to find the information to do that. When I was going through, for me, my identity is communication. That's what I do as a social worker, right? That's, that's the thing I do. When I no longer could have receptive language. My job was all done. It didn't matter. I couldn't find help. That was the hardest thing until I started watching your guys' podcasts and listening. So I stayed maybe longer than other people did in that flux. Because in the town that I was in, there wasn't any place for me to go to get information. So um, not -- I don't want to sound too negative. But I want you to know that I think we have more opportunities now five years later than I had five years ago. Before the pandemic, we couldn't use video phones, video conferencing for therapy. That was a no, it was very looked at. And now look at us. That's the primary mode that we're using to communicate now. So things are changing. And it behooves us to find that technology that we can use to continue to be a viable part of our environment. We don't have to isolate anymore. We don't have to be that place. So I'm going to turn that over to Chelle. It's time to--

Chelle: I'm just sort of listening right now. And that -- thinking back to my identity crisis and how it really happened mostly when I came out of my protective environment. That was the big thing that I learned and found that on our last last podcast. You understand that. But in our chat before the podcast because we do a lot of chatting before the podcast to figure out what we kind of want to send stuff. I realized that when I was in my protective environment, there was no growth, I had people doing things for me, and helping me out. So I didn't have to figure out how to do it on my own. And when I moved to Utah, I had to figure it out how to do it on my own finally. And these are challenges. And, you know, I think maybe you too, can help tie this. But the challenges gave me growth that I didn't have before. It sucked big time when I was going through it. But now I'm kind of thankful because I'm far ahead of anywhere I would have been in had I stayed in my original environment. I had to grow, it forced me to grow, it forced me to be independent. And I think it's good now, as hard as it is to hear that for those of you going through the bad parts of it, I can look back now and say, I grew, I can do a lot on my own now.

Julia: That's because crisis, whether we like it or not, I think the word is scary, right? identity or crisis, both words are scary. But a crisis causes us to grow. Either you grow or you're stagnant, or you become recluse, right. There's, the crisis makes you either. I don't want to take die. That's not, that sounds terrible. But, you know, crisis either keeps you in a stage that you, you need to look for help, right? Or it causes you to grow, and you need to look for others who may be-- we talk all the time hearing loss for everybody is different. I don't even care if our audiograms could be stacked against each other and look exactly the same. My experience is going to be different than yours. There's going to be paths the cross. And there's going to be paths that never cross that. That's the truth. Right? So understanding, here's where your hearing partner can understand. When is the crisis a problem? So maybe it takes me a week to get over my crisis and figure out a new routine with grandma. But maybe I'm Chelle is expired experience, her crisis took about two years to get to the next level. What's the difference in how long it takes versus somebody needing to seek help? This is where I think our hearing partners need to pay attention. Is the person enclosing on themselves shutting everybody out how long they're doing that? Or are they saying I need the protective space for a minute, but I will try this next week or next month. I think that's where you need to be maybe cognizant of letting them have that journey yet, making sure it doesn't get to an unhealthy place for either of you. Are you changing who you are? To fit them? And now you've got-- your depressed because of it and that communication block, again, I'm always gonna go back to that communication block and how to watch for when is the crisis a problem? Versus Yep, I'm in crisis, and I have to figure it out. But it's going to take me X number of minutes, days, weeks, months, years. In the meantime, again, I think some of the difference for you, Chelle, you've you've said over and over in crisis, while you were learning how to deal with it, you still sought people with hearing loss and associates, you know, HLA a local services people with hearing loss and how were they you know, understanding coping, moving on. I think that plays a huge part.

Gloria: And I would like to bring to your attention, Julia, that you said in the last podcast, we need to give them leeway. We need to let people feel safe, so that they can change in a manner which is for them. Because Chelle and I have almost the same audiogram. But we dealt with our hearing loss different We both had big drops. And I hear and and when that happened, we both had some type of adjustment that, you know, caused us crisis. But we did it very differently. Chelle did a little more healthy than I did that, I think what it is, is that

everybody's an individual. And so I can't say, it would be nice if I could say, if you follow this a, b, c, d, e. Oh, and then you can go back to F, G, H, that would be easy that I wouldn't have a job. But it's really hard for us to, to recognize that our individuality also defines how we're going to adjust. And the thing that I'm really liking about this month, is that you have put together some topics that all merge together. Such as

imposter syndrome. When Chelle first put it out, I was like, and then I started looking at it. And it's like, oh, it is part, we have all these pieces, which makes the hard of hearing extraordinarily more than what people think. It's more than my hearing aids, it's more than just my hearing loss. And it all ties together. And I really like what you guys have done this month, because you've tried, you've tied several concepts together in order to help people adjust. Now, I was really impressed with that. And Julia, I wrote down a bunch of stuff from the last video. But you said, Okay, I'm done being silly. That's quote, and I was like, oh, but that's exactly what we have to do. That's exactly what we have to be. When all these weighty things are going on. If we become silly, we can, we are on our way to adjusting. And so I was writing all this stuff down. It's like I'm going to highlight this Julia said this and Chelle said this. But what they did say in the last video was extraordinarily important to us. And I thank you.

Chelle: There we go, Julia, looking back and forth again. So we're careful not to overlap. As I've said, and on paper, or in the blog post and all that we are very careful not to talk over each other, to make this more accessible to people with hearing loss. And it helps with captioning too. So Julia and I are going back and forth. And I'll go back to one thing that Julia said in the last podcast and Gloria brought to my attention before the podcast was that we need an environment to heal. So, so important. I needed my own time to heal, and process all that and learn things. So this was self reflection. And we did talk about that last time, how to be supportive. Just don't be pushy. Don't be telling us what we should be doing. You don't know. You're not in our shoes. So like Julia said earlier, make sure you go back with us and go to the hearing loss meeting, listen to podcast and all of that, that is support.

Julia: I think it's a huge support. If our hearing friends and family can just understand that. Stop living other people's experience. Let us live ours and know ours is going to be different. You know-- Gloria often brings up you know, amputation isn't, is treated so differently. And you know, it's not like you had somebody who's had an A below the knee amputation, here. Here's your fake leg go figure out you know, the legs are built to fit the person right? Hearing aids unfortunately aren't there yet. I mean, they are built to fit the person but they still have so many limitations and we just we need to remember that at the end of the day. We are coming up on 20 minutes. Any last thoughts gals that you want to talk about? Think about? I'm getting a lot of nod shaking, head shaking. Okay. Well, I hope you've enjoyed learning about identity crisis. Whether you feel you've had one or not, I would look at that (alarm going off) I would ask you when we're big on self reflection, maybe self reflect on it. Why didn't you have an identity crisis? Or no crisis at all, and how that is helping you to lead a fuller life in your future. I always think it's a great idea to self reflect what may or may not have gone wrong, right, whatever. Next month, we are going to talk resilience. Our let's talk is May 7th, at 6pm Mountain Time, so adjust for your timezone. We hope you'll talk with us. Because, you know, let's be honest, this whole path that we have put together for the past two years for workshops has led to you have resilience in abundance with hearing loss, right? You have to get resilience to get those workarounds in place. Our classes, we have a Super Saturday in June for Lipreading Concepts and Super Saturday for Lip Shapes. So please go to our website and check it out. The times are I want to say 10 am Mountain Time. But you can find out more on our lipreading page on our hearinglosslive.com. Please remember to subscribe, like and share our information. Look forward to our new podcast called Hearing Loss LIVE! In Five. Where we're going to give you a short five minute version of information that we've collected over the month. If you want our work book packages that come with an easy workbook, the workshops include video, audio, transcript, captioning on the videos and a small workbook. If you're a reflector, those little self reflections really help you set yourself up for success as far as we're concerned. We hope to see you next month at our let's talk and have a good day.

Bye!