INTRODUCTION

This book is written for the spouse, significant other, family or friend who is confronted with the frustrations, aggravations and turmoil that stem from untreated hearing loss in someone for whom they care a great deal. If you are among this group, this book is written for you. It will offer you insights necessary to understand the nature of problems you endure when living with someone with untreated hearing loss, and guide you in implementing techniques to create positive changes not only in the resistant person you love, but just possibly, in you too.

If you believe that things will get better by sitting and waiting, then you must also be waiting for the Tooth Fairy. This book is very direct and confrontational. Implementing any ideas from this book will require your utmost common sense and discretion. In the same way you cannot drive a locomotive without knowledge, you cannot jump into a loved one’s life to make changes without proper preparation. In both cases you could end up with a train wreck!

I believe the most effective way to make changes is through understanding. I will not skirt the issues in order to make you feel better. I will tell you how things are based on decades of personal, clinical and research experience as well as volumes of published data that address the problem. There may be times you need to put this book down and take a break. Other times maybe you’ll be compelled to read to conclusion a section that pertains exactly to what has been going on in your closest relationship. Read at your own pace but don’t give up.

Most people with hearing loss choose to do nothing about it. There are about as many Americans suffering from heart disease as those with untreated hearing loss. Can you imagine if 80 percent of heart disease victims resisted treatment? Surely there is no greater number of Americans needlessly suffering from any other malady than that of untreated hearing loss.

Put another way, if one loses 50 percent of high frequency hearing making it difficult to clearly hear women and children only a few feet away, it’s impact can be comparable to losing 50 percent of one’s peripheral vision (as found in macular degeneration) making it difficult to clearly see people standing on one’s side. Those with visual problems quickly seek out treatment while people with hearing loss often put up resistance. What lies behind this resistance and what you can do about it is the focus of our exploration here.

Now then, since resistance means doing nothing about it, you have probably reached a point of feeling that this has become a greater problem for you than your loved one. In fact, the problem may have even shifted from the hearing loss itself to the outright resistance. . .