Tinnitus can be quite an overwhelming experience that may have a major impact on all aspects of your life. Since the onset of tinnitus many of my patients experience that their daily life now consists of almost nothing else but the intrusive sound(s) and their constant and hopeless fight of reducing the impact of tinnitus. If this is how you’re doing it is quite natural that you, in addition, will feel anxious, worried, stressed, emotionally unstable with emotions going from anger to grief, hopelessness, meaninglessness and aloneness. Because how can one imagine existing in life with nothing else but the disturbing and invading sound of tinnitus?

Therefore, when tinnitus patients come to me for psychological treatment, they have the feeling that they have come to a dead end. They cannot see the possibility of a new start. This chapter addresses patients who feel like this, who are suffering from tinnitus.
In most of this chapter I will let my patients speak through me. In this way I want to describe how tinnitus sufferers initially experience their tinnitus and how it influences the different dimensions of their lives. Perhaps you’ll recognize some elements of your own story in my description. Perhaps you’ll find out that you’re not alone in your experience and that your reactions are known and natural. Also I want to describe the typically needs of tinnitus patients bringing some practical (and non-psychological) suggestions on how to meet these.

In order to give you an idea on how psychological therapy can help, the last part of this chapter is devoted to describe the therapeutic course of one of my tinnitus patients, Martin. You’ll follow him in his travel from the point of being fixated on tinnitus to a new point where life came to overshadow his tinnitus so much that it ceased troubling and worrying him.

Martin’s therapeutic course and outcome in many ways represent that of most of my patients. Patients like Martin repeatedly have shown me that if they expand their fixated focus from tinnitus to exploring the way they presently are living their life, many unknown resources and possibilities emerge that make it possible for them to co-exist peacefully with tinnitus. This typically is one outcome of psychological therapy. Many of my patients also realize they can co-exist with tinnitus; through tinnitus they have gained an enriching perspective on their life. In other words, they have moved from a position where they – due to tinnitus - could not imagine a life really worth living, to a position where tinnitus is present and life indeed is worth living.

I hope to be able to give you an understanding of how this can happen. I will also try to provide you with hope through this chapter. To make you trust that each dead end contains the possibility for a new and fruitful beginning.