When Sounds Hurt and Voices Aren't Heard: An Experience Report on Misophonia, Sensory Trauma, and Trauma-Informed Design

2026-05-10

AI Summary

This study addresses misophonia—a condition characterized by dual sensory and cognitive distress triggered by audiovisual stimuli such as chewing or pen-clicking sounds—and highlights how its harms are exacerbated by societal and clinical neglect. Drawing on the researcher’s lived experience, the work employs semi-structured interviews with 16 individuals, participatory reflection, and community ethnography to reveal that digital platforms, particularly those featuring autoplay audio, significantly intensify sensory distress. It further uncovers how experiential legitimacy within closed online communities is often monopolized by a minority of moderators. The paper pioneers the integration of misophonia into trauma-informed design frameworks, thereby expanding their applicability, and offers critical design implications for venues like the ASSETS conference: platforms should minimize sensory intrusion and foster more inclusive, decentralized mechanisms for validating lived experiences.

Abstract

This experience report reflects on researching misophonia as someone who lives with it. Misophonia is an aversive response to everyday sounds (chewing, sniffling, pen clicking) and, for many of us, to associated visual cues (misokinesia). It is poorly recognized clinically and socially. People with misophonia are routinely disbelieved, and they live inside platform surfaces (auto-playing audio, algorithmic ASMR, normalized eating on camera) that turn the sensory environment itself into recurring distress. This report is a re-reading of a prior qualitative study of 16 semi-structured interviews with misophones, conducted in dialogue with my lived experience and my role in the soQuiet Misophonia Research Network. I extend the trauma-informed design (TID) conversation in two ways. First, TID must treat embodied, contested conditions as sources of both sensory and epistemic harm: ongoing trauma produced by the audiovisual surface and by repeated dismissal of users' accounts of their bodies. Second, the closed groups and moderated subreddits participants relied on can reproduce that dismissal when a few moderators decide whose experiences count. I close with implications for ASSETS.

Problem

• misophonia
• sensory trauma
• epistemic harm
• trauma-informed design
• misokinesia

Innovation

• trauma-informed design
• misophonia
• sensory trauma
• epistemic harm
• inclusive HCI