"Selective hearing"

Wait... did someone say ice cream!?!
 
I get this a lot too!
i really get tired of:
You hear what you want to hear!

Are you kidding me?
 
Yeah, my mom always gets mad when I ask her to repeat things. "You've got on 4000$ of hearing aids and you still can't hear? that was pointless!" And other things along that line, like hearing aids magically make your hearing normal again.
 
plasticdinosaur said:
Yeah, my mom always gets mad when I ask her to repeat things. "You've got on 4000$ of hearing aids and you still can't hear? that was pointless!" And other things along that line, like hearing aids magically make your hearing normal again.
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I agree.

I will never understand why hearing people believe that hearing aids or CIs would make the deaf or hard of hearing be able to hear perfectly. They are hoping for miracles for their deaf and hard of hearing children and adult to hear and listen with no trouble. :crazy: That is why it is all a hogwash. We are still deaf no matter what. Gawd. :roll:
 
Bebonang said:
Botti, I am not sure what you mean by that statement. Is it a new phrase or just meaning of the word? Just wondering. :hmm:
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It's just a silly joke. It's like what you might say if you aren't paying attention. It just struck me funny that this is a two year old thread coming up again.

Sorry. Just ignore me. I probably had too much sugar today. Big family party.
 
I get that and I am hearing. Problem is it is not completely untrue. You say something I am interested in and I "tune in" to it even if I am deep in thought about something else. But say something I have little or no interest in and I find myself "not hearing" them.

Oh well...
 
CJB said:
Here's a question. I was having a conversation with someone today, or rather, trying to have a conversation. He accused me of "selective hearing."

Does anyone else ever get this accusation? Deaf, HOH, HA or no HA, CI or no CI. And if you do, how do you respond? I never know how to respond without going into detail about "hard of hearing" means I can hear some things and sometimes and cannot hear other things and other times.

:ty:
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I get that all the time from my band friends. They like to joke about it to me about how i'm deaf. I have 2 CIs on both ears. And honestly, when somebody says "selective hearing" i just don't really care about it. I would think its funny because we do have an advantage of turning off our ears whenever we want and they aren't able to. Look at it that way. I also had to tell them that if i ever invite my deaf friends over to our competitions to watch us, they would have to be careful with what they say because us deafies don't always understand what the joke means. for example, My deaf friends were at amusement park and i bumped into them with my band friends, and we somehow kept going on the same rides after them, it was weird but also funny, so i decided to text one of my deaf friends who was at the park by saying: stalker, but he didn't think that it was a joke, he thought that he was actually doing that but he wasn't. I thought it be a little funny to make fun of him a little bit. but lesson learned though.

My friends understand on how i can hear some things and some others i cannot. I taught my friends how to help me out with that by teaching them signing, how to get my attention, what i can or cannot hear; for example: when a person is talking through a microphone, it sounds muffled to me, i can only make out little words from it but not alot. I'm really glad i have friends who help me out in band. I don't really know how i would repay them my thankfullness of how they helped me so much from the past 3 1/2 years. So, if they accuse you about the selective hearing thing, just don't worry about it. I'm sure they don't mean it, whether it sounds like you're being accused of, or being joked about, etc, don't take it the wrong way. I'm sure they don't mean it.
 
Well, I don't know about that. I think they sometimes do mean it very much. Sometimes their feelings are hurt because they think they are being "ignored" when really they just are not being heard.

My mom used to speak to me from behind me, and often I would not hear her in that situation, especially if it was, as usual, a large family gathering and people were talking in front of me, to the side, and behind me as well. If someone then pointed out my mom was trying to get my attention, I would turn around and talk to her.

Then she would say "See, I'm speaking at the same volume I was before, and NOW you can hear me."

Me: "But mom, now I'm looking at you, too."

She really didn't get it, that I had to be looking at her in order to hear and understand her.

She was a lucky woman, had normal hearing and nearly normal eyesight right up until she died at age 91. Although her memory got a bit iffy in her last year...but for age 90, that really wasn't too bad.
 
My Grandmother is late deafened for the last 10 years or so. She's 87 and some of my family members will say, "oh she has selective hearing sometimes."
I'm like, "WTF are you talking about!?!?! She's profoundly deaf! She can't hear you!"

Needless to say it really pisses me off.

This is a side note, but when she has been hospitalized it always makes me nervous (the communication issue) because I don't know that the doctors and nurses are taking the time to write things down. I always make sure there is a dry erase board, and leave a note at the head of her bed stating that she is deaf and to use the board. I'll even talk to the doctors and nurses, but I know they don't always take the time to write things out.

People are just annoying and stupid sometimes ;-)
 
I have selective hearing. When my roommate goes off on a crazy rant, I take out my HA's. Works every time.
 
One of my bosses did worse than accuse me of selective hearing. She hinted that I was faking my deafness.
 
Bebonang said:
I agree.

I will never understand why hearing people believe that hearing aids or CIs would make the deaf or hard of hearing be able to hear perfectly. They are hoping for miracles for their deaf and hard of hearing children and adult to hear and listen with no trouble. :crazy: That is why it is all a hogwash. We are still deaf no matter what. Gawd. :roll:
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It is an extremely common misconception among hearing people that hearing aids and CI are basically the aural equivalents of glasses and lasik. My best guess as to why this would be is because sight is the closest equivalent to hearing that most hearing people are familiar with, so they assume that hearing loss is equivalent to poor vision (near/far-sightedness and astigmatism, not blindness or partial blindness).

Since I started taking ASL classes, I've had an extremely large number of hearing people who only recently (within the past 5 years) learned of CI and asked why I was learning ASL, since there weren't even any deaf people anymore, since "old people can get HA" (to them, "old people" are the only ones with enough hearing loss to need HA but not so much that HA won't work) and "deaf kids can go get them implants, and then they won't be deaf anymore".

Thankfully, I found this place (in particular, the two enormous threads I found regarding "stupid shit hearing people do" and "shit hearing people don't do but should") so I'm actually able to respond and educate them (including my parents, of all people :roll: ). I can only imagine how frustrating that might be if it was a necessary part of my everyday life. While I don't know that I actually personally interacted with any deaf people (unless they were extremely skilled at lipreading and speech) in the past, I apologize if I've ever been guilty of this in the past.
 
From my previous CHS/Toronto "Coping with your Hearing Loss" classes- one must never bluff-you say you hear when you don't. Stop the conversation at the point and say so. One must always pay attention. Right- it get harder with an Implant.
One is trying to override our brain-shunting off "irrelevant noise" by NOT paying attention.
An ongoing exercise in one's life.

Implanted- AB Harmony activated Aug/07
 
My family would saying I have selective hearing.

I battle with my fiance almost every day that "I'm not paying attention" and seriously no matter how hard I try to explain it, no one else understands that I hear words I just can't understand them at times.

I just ignore it. All I can do.
 
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