Freedom and Choice

Creating Space for Choice
Here, as clinicians, I'm sure that you have many, uh, many patients that come into your office, and they don't speak very well of tinnitus. I don't know about you; I've never met anybody that likes their tinnitus.

And oftentimes, with that comes an awful lot of stories about the tinnitus.

And there was a man, Viktor Frankl. I don't know if any of you remember him. He was actually a Holocaust victim who then left and became a psychiatrist, and he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning.

And he's quoted as having said, "Between every stimulus and response is a space, and within this space lies our freedom and our choice."

Between every stimulus and response is a space, and within this space lies our freedom and our choice.

Creating Space Around Tinnitus
And so, when a tinnitus patient comes in to see me, I'm trying to think, how can I help them to create some more space?

Okay? Because their knee-jerk reaction to tinnitus is often, you know, "Oh, I hate this. Oh, this is just horrible. This is ruining my life."

Okay? And after a while, that becomes a habit, a reaction, so to speak.

And so what I hope to help them with, through working with them with mindfulness, is to see if we can't create some space for them so that they can still choose to think negatively or to have these stories about their tinnitus.

But what you see is, now they have more options. There's other things that they can choose to do.

Strengthening Awareness
And so then the question becomes, how do you do this? How do you open up this space?

And I think that the way to open it up is by strengthening our awareness.