I kicked this show off with possibly the most antagonistic question I’ve ever posed Julian. The credibility of this site, his credibility, and our entire effort at CureTinnitus.org is put to the test. After a jolting start, this show wound up being quite soothing. I hope that I represented the “anger” in and with tinnitus well, and that this show serves our community long long long into the future.

Sinerely,
Dainis

Here is a YouTube Show Excerpt for folks getting to know us. The Complete Archived Show is available for members below…

Transcript Available for members below (preview for visitors)

Show #5

Dainis:  Welcome everyone and welcome to the 5th episode of the Cure Tinnitus show. My name is Dainis Michel. I’m your host and we have Julian Cowan Hill as our guest expert.  Julian had tinnitus for 20 yrs and he healed himself.  He is a craniosacral therapist and he works with core process psychology and Buddhist psychology and has over 3000 hours of work with  clients and he has dedicated himself to helping us get better with tinnitus so Julian thank you very much for joining us and for being here and helping us.  I’ll tell you about how the structure of the show is.  I’ll start with a few announcements and then we’re going to cover questions that I gathered during the week and then we’re going to do a one on one session between me and Julian about my personal tinnitus and after that all of will be able to do an exercise together.

As questions come up in your mind just chat them over and we’ll have time to focus on your questions towards the end of the show.  One of the announcements that I’ve got is really interesting.  Its kind of the theme for this show:  and the theme for this show is what relieves and what aggravates tinnitus.  We have a post on that in the curetinnitus.org community on what aggravates and what relieves tinnitus.  So let’s just keep that in the backs of our minds as we go through the show.  One of the announcements was about an article  that’s available to the community  “what are tinnitus people like?” and that’s actually from Tinnitus:  From Tyrant to Friend” that Julian wrote.

A member wrote:  “That list is somewhat frightening especially when I can identify with at least 80% of it.  But with the help of this site I am leaning to deal with such things and my tinnitus is becoming less and less noticeable.”   Isn’t that neat? And I wanted to say thank you so much for sharing what’s working for you, thank you.   Another announcement is that I discontinued the free membership preview in the format that it was in before.  We will have some free “getting to know you” content for e-mail subscribers so you can keep that in mind if and when you recommend “curetinnitus.org to people.  These curetinnitus shows are going to become more private in the future. I’m not sure about the details of that but we’ve got a lot of efforts going outward and it’s going to become important for curetinnitus.org as an electronic and online community to develop reciprocity and fair exchange and just not broadcast out but in the sense of community to make them a little more private because right now we’re just available to everyone.  I interviewed Paul Tobey who is a pianist Wednesday of last week and I want to let everybody know that after the interview I was editing it and my wife looked over my shoulder and she heard a little bit of it and she wanted to watch the whole thing so we wound up watching the whole thing before going to bed.  So there’s an interview with Paul Tobey.  He’s created a product called “tinnitus-free living” and you can check that out on the member area.  Somebody sent us a comment saying “I’d like to see a deep relaxation package/product with soothing music, guided meditations, a self-help questionnaire and resource material.”  Thank you very much for helping let us know how we can serve you better.  That’s a big part of the curetinnitus.org community.  For you to let us know what we can do for you.  We do have some meditations and there are some exercises in Julian’s book, Tinnitus: From Tyrant to Friend” and we’re working on putting together some meditations with music.  We’re still looking at how we can do that best.  Again, I do have a satisfaction survey where I’m going to be calling members for a 15 min survey on your experiences at curetinnitus.org and that’s going to start on Monday May 11.  I’ll have a post in the community about that and I’ll be able to make direct contact with members who choose to participate and I can ask them how they like it and what we can do better.

Just so you know, Julian and I have been working on a “recently acquired tinnitus” product and it’s been really fun and it’s been really engaging so we’re putting that together and it’s turning out to be really fun.

On to questions gathered.  I’ve got a steamy one. This is SO nasty.
Are you ready?

“I find your claims, Mr. Michel, to cure tinnitus to be a bit arrogant when experts like the doctors at OHSU (and I mean no disrespect to doctors I’m just emphasizing the word doctors) admit they don’t have the answers. Just what are your credentials to be appearing as a self-proclaimed expert and guru here.  I see no medical referencing credentials regarding yourself. The writing I see here causes me to put you in the same boat as Dr. Phil and that is sad that you choose to self-create such a phony persona.  The latest dribble you e-mailed just proves that to me.  Too bad that many many real people are seeking relief but I won’t follow a self-proclaimed guru with no reality check.”

Now Julian, I don’t know if you want to respond to that.  I have a bit of a response.  Maybe I can do that first which is “who is this person talking to?  Is this person talking to you?  Or is this person talking to me? Is this person talking to Kevin Hogan or Dr. Mike Matthews from sharedcare.com who is a retired family practitioner but he then joined our community and made a few posts. Are you talking to Paul Tobey?   Maybe, Julian, you can do a better job of responding.

Julian:  Well, this person sounds very angry and I don’t think this program is about gurus at all. A guru is when you put someone up on a pedestal.  I think this is hopefully a more human brotherhood where we are just helping our fellows here and gathering positive results from people who have learned how to help their own T and sharing that with other people  It’s a great benefit and that’s certainly where I’m coming from and I guess that’s my sense of you, Dainis, where you’re coming from.  I’d like to ask this person to consider what it’s like being in my shoes where I had tinnitus extremely badly and I wasn’t able to hold down a job and I couldn’t hear the phone ring.  I found it extremely hard just listening and talking to people because of the tinnitus.  It got in the way of everything.  I was kind of deafened by it.  And when it’s bad….I really know what it’s like to have bad tinnitus and I don’t want to go into the gory details. And to go from that state, really on the extreme scale, to not having it at all, is quite a journey.  My life is completely changed and I’ve learned an awful lot about this symptom along the way.  One of the things that really motivates me is the fact that I went to get help for my tinnitus and I took the conventional route.  I went to a doctor who said “oh it looks like you’ve got tinnitus, there’s nothing you can do about it.  I’m going to refer you to an ENT surgeon.”  So I went to the ENT surgeon, did some tests, had a long chat.  He was a nice guy and he said “well, I’m afraid you’ve got tinnitus and there’s nothing you can do about it and by the way you’re deaf…you need a hearing aid.”  And that came as one hell of a shock.  I didn’t really understand anything about tinnitus at the time and I didn’t really know what to do and I didn’t have anywhere to go and I kind of crumpled for a couple of months and the state that I went into caused my tinnitus to get even worse.  Anyway, to cut a long story short , when you learn what helps and when you help hundreds of people, you become very motivated to continue helping people and I’m just a person who’s helped his own tinnitus.  I don’t like the word guru, I don’t like the hierarchy that that suggests.  And I think people that are extremely angry, and I come across lots of tinnitus people who are seething with anger and who want to be quite aggressive, who want to blame other people. You know it can be like hissing snakes, wanting to fire venom at other people.  We all know what it’s like to be in this state and it’s quite unpleasant. For all involved.  And tinnitus absolutely loves this.  This is one of the best states we can be in to have tinnitus so when I meet people like this, when I work as a therapist, and not as a member of the community, sharing things I’ve learned for the benefit of others, but when I work as a therapist with a client, and when they’re throwing daggers and espousing fire out of their nostrils, when the energy is really really strong it’s really important to help these people find a way of cooling down, releasing, discharging all this very challenging energy and sometimes as a therapy you get it directed at you but that’s part of the process and with angry people, like this guy, what I really really recommend is finding a safe channel to physically express this anger.  And that might be going to the gym and taking it out on the weight machines or thundering up and down the swimming pool or stamping up to the top of a mountain and yelling at the top of your head. It’s going to become really important to let this anger to come through processes and let it settle because the more it settles the more the tinnitus will back off.  And I’m speaking with thousands of hours of experience here, working with angry people and I really wish people well with anger because anger is very infections, it affects people immediately and it’s really hard to see through to what really maters.  That’s my general response to this guy.

Dainis: Thank you very much,  I’m fine w/moving on the next question. The next question is: “An acupuncturist was suggesting that I get a low tone hearing aid and when the noise is present when I’m relaxing that the hearing aid will make the tinnitus recede significantly. Is this a bit like the neumonic program?  Has anyone ever heard of the hearing aid approach?

Julian: Yes, I have and I’ve also worn hearing aids myself.  The thing about tinnitus…..what really helps us understand this is that when you’re straining out to hear that’s what leads to sensitivity.  If you are in fight or flight you are very sensitive and you end up hearing the noise inside the body.  If you have hearing loss and you’re straining out to hear your nervous system actually heightens that sensitivity and that, in turn, can lead to tinnitus. So if you put hearing aids on that takes away the need to strain so your hearing mechanism doesn’t need to be so switched on and so sensitive. It can settle a bit more and your hearing can relax and you don’t have to work too hard the more likely the tinnitus is to back off. And it really changes the focus, wearing a hearing aid, so for many people, wearing a hearing aid, esp. if they have hearing gloss, it really can have a beneficial effect, not only on hearing, but on T and you need to speak to your audiologist about this, this is something that is very much the audiology department they are expert on hearing and hearing aids. And can I just add one last thing because I felt like I didn’t answer something from the last question. Doctors have a certain level of authority in society, based on a very rigorous training.   They’re experts in diagnosing, sign-posting pointing people in the right direction, prescribing medication and hopefully pointing people towards therapists as well. And that’s something in Britain that’s increasing more and more.  Therapists are experts at working w/relationships and w/long term, chronic conditions. And some of the things that I know from having worked for thousands of hours with people may be very dif. From a doctor who maybe spend an average of t10 minutes maximum talking to somebody he sees maybe once a month.  I work with people in depth and I see them probably an hour a week and sometimes for years and so I really get to know people very well and also when I do the hands on work I’m palpating physiology and I can get a very clear sense of how that body is, how it’s holding itself and how it changes with contact.  This is a shifting state that hands on therapists are working with.  Doctors don’t have a clue about this unless they’re trained therapists and doctors are very skilled in their areas but are not trained to work with hands on body work and they’re not trained to be a psychotherapist for example.   So I’m a professional with my professional body behind me, with many hours of training experience, practical experi8ence, supervision, very strict guidelines to what it means to practice as a professional and I also have a lot of experience and everyday I meet doctors who don’t know anything about T and I try and share as much info as I can and my aim is for doctors, for ENT surgeons, for anybody if they don’t know much about T for them to find out and learn.  We can all earn from each other. Doctors may not always be the best person for helping, certainly if they say there is nothing you can do about it.

Dainis:  There was a development in hearing aid technology that I uncovered and it was an open hearing aid and I think I might need to recover that because it might be useful for some members at curetinnitus.org.   But we’ll move on to the next question.