Does Your Child Over-React to Sound?

They don’t have to!

By Dorinne Davis

Many children with autism seem to be over-responsive to sound, whether it be loud sounds, background noise, or particular noises like the vacuum cleaner or children crying. This impacts their quality of life and their ability to listen, attend, and communicate. Your child should not have to be overly sensitive to sound!

In my work with sound-based therapy over the last 19 years, I have identified 4 different types of hypersensitivities to sound. All 4 types have been helped with the protocol of therapies that I establish from my test battery called The Diagnostic Evaluation for Therapy Protocol (DETP®). This assessment does not provide diagnosis codes for medical reimbursement. The assessment, however, is key to determining if, when, how long and in what order any or all of the many different sound-based therapies should be utilized. The assessment uses The Tree of Sound Enhancement Therapy® as the developmental flow chart for the correct administration of any sound-based therapy. This assessment is key to the success of our clients using The Davis Model of Sound Intervention. No one sound-based therapy can help all four of the different types of hypersensitivities.

In fact, it is not uncommon for someone to tell me that their child did such-and-such sound therapy and their child’s hypersensitivity ‘got worse’. Most likely the one type of hypersensitivity was improved and the other type(s) became more pronounced because of the elimination of that one type. In some cases, two sound-based therapies can be administered at the same time when the child also has the one type that takes a long time to eliminate.

The approach that I use is not about particular sound-based therapy methods such as Berard Auditory Integration Training, the Tomatis® Method, EnListen®, or BioAcoustics. Instead my approach is about finding where the problem exists within the energy of each person and then begin to make change at that core level in order to develop overall skill functioning from that point forward. If therapy is done in a random or guessed-at order, change will occur but not at levels to help support and maintain positive change overall and for the long term. An analogy would be, if you have a 6 inch gash on your arm and you try to fix it using Band-Aids, the wound typically begins to heal but the wound can leave significant scarring, be prone to infection, take longer to heal, and leave a weakened skin integrity overall in that area.

If you want to take short cuts with the healing process, then the Band-Aid approach may help initially and superficially but in the long term, the results are not supportive for maximizing the overall results. When a person is ‘out of balance’ with how they hear, process, and use sound vibration, a Band-Aid approach, such as using a sound-based therapy that you heard had made change for someone else, is not the best and most long-lasting approach. When hypersensitivity to sound is present, it is extremely important to know where the hypersensitivity comes from and address it with the most appropriate therapy(ies) in the right order.

When someone is hypersensitive to sound, their world is so uncomfortable that it is difficult to listen, pay attention, and function well. By repatterning how their body responds to sound, the person’s world opens up to them in new ways, most notably with how they respond and communicate with the world around them. Yes, some people have been ‘desensitized’ to sound by addressing the problem with psychological and medical interventions, but I have found it very important to address things from the physiological core of how the body receives sound energy patterns.

When used in the correct order, sound-based therapies can make a major difference in sound hypersensitivities. For some autistic children, these therapies must be combined with other biomedical interventions. But no child should over-react to sound because of sound hypersensitivity.

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