I wish I had met Sam and Janet Trychin sooner.

With more than twenty books, countless articles, workshops, and seminars on the psychological and coping aspects of hearing loss since the 1980s, it is safe to say that they are the foremost experts in the field. An early supporter of Self Help for the Hard of Hearing (SHHH) the precursor of the Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) Sam’s connection with the founder Rocky Stone is revealed in this interview.

Janet, an audiologist, along with Sam, creates an unbeatable team. Just as two ears are better than one, together they have created resources found no where else. Their website is Trychin.com

If you, or someone you know, has a hearing loss, progressive or sudden, single-side, or bilateral, the Trychin’s interview is invaluable.

NOTE: Within the interview, HLAA is mentioned as a source. The correct website address is hearingloss.org

Transcript

Richard :

Cochlear Implant Basics is a site for candidates and their families and friends. If you have been told you qualify for a cochlear implant, these podcast interviews tell how receiving a cochlear implant can be a life changing experience. You will meet recipients who face a hearing loss and the hearing aids could no longer provide comprehension of speech or music. They faced growing isolation, inability to socialize or compete in the world of business. The joy of music disappeared. They explained how receiving a cochlear implant changed their lives. Welcome to Cochlear Implant Basics. A reminder Cochlear Implant Basics is not sponsored by anyone nor is it offering medical advice. Please consult your own healthcare provider.

Richard:

Good afternoon. We’re having a interview with two of the foremost experts in psychological aspects of hearing loss. We have Sam and Janet Trychin on there. Would you please just state your name, the date and where we’re at?

Sam Trychin:

My name is Sam Trychin, T-R-Y-C-H-I-N. And today is the 23rd of February and we are in Erie Pennsylvania waiting for spring to come.

Janet Trychin:

And my name is-

Richard :

I think summer already arrived in Florida. So [inaudible 00:01:33].

Janet Trychin:

Oh, that’s where you are?

Richard :

I’m just south of Sarasota.

Janet Trychin:

Oh, nice. You’re nice and warm. We’re nice and warm. We were warm. I’m Janet Trychin. I’m an educational audiologist and Sam and I are married and we have been working with families with hearing loss, Sam since the eighties and me since the early nineties.

Richard :

Okay. Sam, tell me a little bit about your background. You have a hearing loss. How did you get involved in counseling?

Sam Trychin:

How did I get involved in counseling? I got my doctorate in psychology from George Washington university in DC. And then I was working at a psychiatric hospital in Cumberland, Maryland. When I first learned about what’s now the Hearing Loss Association of America. At that time, it was Self-Help for Hard of Hearing people. I was living in Frederick, Maryland, and working in Cumberland, so quite a drive each way every day. So I was looking for something closer to where I lived and I had an interview with Rocky Stone and he said, “Well, do you want to do something with us?” And I said, “You bet I do”. So that’s when I started first, that was early 1983.

Janet Trychin:

And you were working for Gallaudet then too.

Sam Trychin:

At that point, when I left the clinical job, I went to teach in Gallaudet University, of course, at Gallaudet that at least at that time, everything was sign language, all communication. Of course, I didn’t know sign language. And I had a crash one week course in learning sign language. And I don’t think I was ever very good at it. And I heard about SHHH and Rocky Stone. So, I called them. And as a result of that, then I went up there and met with his staff and did a little workshop stuff up there, managing hearing loss. They had a joint meeting between Gallaudet University and Self Help for Hard of Hearing people at that time.

Sam Trychin:

And there were like six people on each side, and they met for three days all day to see how they could cross communicate. And as a result of that meeting, I was able to take the work I was already doing with people with hearing loss and travel around the country and do it. So, they took my position out of the psychology department and put me in research where nobody really knew or cared what I was doing with my job. And I just traveled around the country. And I would often go to where local SHHH or HLAA groups were meeting and talk there.

Janet Trychin:

And were you using sign language?

Sam Trychin:

I was not using sign language. No.

Janet Trychin:

And so, were the groups using sign?

Sam Trychin:

On occasion. If there were people who were relying on sign language in any of the sessions, they would then bring an interpreter just for the people who needed that. But largely it never happened because the vast majority of people that I’ve been working with don’t rely on sign language.

Richard :

I never learnt to sign because I had no one to talk to except myself.

Sam Trychin:

Oh, wow.

Janet Trychin:

Yeah.

Richard:

I was a member of the Self Help for Hard of Hearing back in New York when it first started. So, I’m a little familiar from that side of it, but not necessarily with, I went to Gallaudet that study Cued speech when I lost my hearing.

Sam Trychin:

Oh, nice.

Richard:

Never had success with that either.

Sam Trychin:

No. Right.

Janet Trychin:

Have you always had a hearing loss?

Richard:

I had a progressive hearing loss from Scarlet Fever when I was five. I wore hearing aids and then I had a sudden total collapse of all my hearing when I was 30. Totally deaf for 35 years before receiving cochlear implants.

Janet Trychin:

Oh my gosh. Had you gone to college?

Richard :

Oh yeah. I have a BA in psychology.

Janet Trychin:

Oh, you’re a psychologist too.

Richard :

No, no. I’m a picture framer. I have a BA in psychology from Alfred university, upstate New York, but my specialty was behavioral psychology. You can ask me anything about rats. I know a lot about how to change behavior in rats, but not people.

Sam Trychin:

Well, it’s pretty similar. Yeah.

Janet Trychin:

Me too.

Richard:

You came into this psychological aspect of hearing loss. I think one of the topics that we’re very, very interested in now, I spend about 50 to 60 hours a week on social media. And I do that in hard of hearing and deaf sites. Looking for people who have experienced hearing loss to help educate them. I think one of the things I really need to call upon your expertise is the differences between people who experience a progressive loss and those who experience a sudden hearing loss. I hope you would talk about that for a few minutes. Let me know your views on that.

Sam Trychin:

Well, advantages and disadvantages on both sides. When you have a sudden hearing loss, it’s pretty obvious right off the bat. So whatever adjustments that need to be done needs to be done very quickly. Whereas if you have a progressive hearing loss that gets increasingly worse over time, there’s all kinds of habits you can develop to deal with the hearing loss that are not in your own best interest. So, you learn how to bluff. You learn how to nod and shake your head like you’re understanding when you’re not. And then there’s usually, or often some social problems related to that. When people find out that’s what you are doing, they’re not too happy.

Sam Trychin:

So, the difference is between a rapid onset and the rapid onset, particularly if it’s severe, I mean really throws people, people can’t work often. Their whole life is turned just upside down and then trying to find out who you see professionally to help with that can be difficult as well.

Janet Trychin:

And you were saying there’s advantages and disadvantages to both. And I think as an audiologist, we see people very quickly who have suddenly lost their hearing, where we tend to see people over time, like Sam was saying, the average is 12 years between the time of diagnosis and actually purchasing a hearing aid. And that’s not true with a sudden hearing loss, sudden hearing loss, everybody is in. Your PC is in, and then you get to a specialist, you get to someone like me, an audiologist to try to determine maybe a site of lesion or the extent of the hearing loss, cause of hearing loss. Everybody is on board.

Richard :

So, the difference is I would like to know more about as a person who wakes up deaf in one ear one morning and they’re in a panic, how would you handle that kind of situation? What do you tell that person?

Janet Trychin:

Well, as an audiologist, usually there’s accompanying pathology. Sometimes it’s been Meniere’s causes that very suddenly. Other times, we don’t know what causes it, usually steroids are given right away by the attending physician, the effect of it as an audiologist, I can talk more about the effect of that and how difficult it is. I was just asked to be a witness in court for a child where the parents were having an argument about whether or not the child should have the second cochlear implant. And so, we talked about the difficulty of knowing where a sound is coming from and in a closed room or with friends it’s an inconvenience, but if you’re out on the road and you think you know where the car is coming from, because you hear a car, there’s a chance you’ll step out into the oncoming traffic with the car.

Janet Trychin:

And that’s the thing that people report. It’s a very dangerous to have unilateral hearing loss when you don’t understand the problems with it. And of course in a school situation, those kids really suffer because they hear some of the time normally. And other times they hear as if they’re completely deaf. So it’s very confusing until somebody gets into the mix with that and begins to separate it a little bit. And Sam has a unilateral loss. He has more of a loss in one ear than the other. Can you talk about why you wear two hearing aids in that situation?

Sam Trychin:

Well, I have hearing loss in both ears. One is worse in one in the other, but the one with the lesser hearing loss, I still don’t do well understanding what’s going on in that ear. So, I need both. And a problem with the unilateral .So I need both. And a problem with the unilateral hearing loss for people who don’t realize, or have not learned how to handle it, is that for example, in a work situation, my left ear is okay, but my right ear is not. And I sit at work, the people who sit on my left side, they say something to me, I respond and I respond appropriately. If somebody on the right side says something to me, the chances are I won’t even know they’re talking. And so I don’t respond. So then you get into the issue of, “Oh, he likes some people, but not others”. So the social issues that happened when people are unaware of the effect of a unilateral hearing loss and everybody who is in a communication system needs to be aware of it. Coworkers need to be aware of it. Employers need to be aware of it as well as family and friends.

Janet Trychin:

And we had a situation, we used to do week long seminars at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. And we had a couple come in and she was talking about having a hearing loss. She was the wife of the minister, and that had caused a problem in the church because people tend to sit where they sit each week. And so she was inadvertently acknowledging some people and inadvertently ignoring other people. And she didn’t realize that was happening. And the church became very upset and they were blaming her and thinking perhaps they needed a new minister. And so this was very eye opening to them. The problems that her hearing loss was causing for people within the church.

Richard :

Was she upfront about it? Did she tell people she had the hearing loss?

Janet Trychin:

She did. She wrote a letter to them immediately. And then she sent a copy of the letter to us and they were very interested in discussing it and sorry to misunderstand that she had a disability, that she had never really seen it as a disability in a situation where it may cost her husband his career. And she didn’t know it wouldn’t be the same situation again in another church. And so they got to the root of it and it was great. It was great.

Richard :

So, what you’re talking about is finding out you have a hearing loss and not being in denial about it. Too many people are in denial. I’ve even found watching the Facebook site about sudden hearing loss, how almost suicidal people become when they realize this is the rest of their life. It’s a going to have a hearing loss and it’s very difficult for them to wrap their heads around that. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Sam Trychin:

Well sudden hearing loss for people who don’t know anything at all about hearing loss, really, and all of a sudden you wake up one morning and you can’t hear. It throws your whole life into disarray. And particularly if there’s a medical reason that also relates to loss of equilibrium, dizziness, that kind of thing, that really compounds all the problems and all the issues. But the fact that you are… Were talking unilateral?

Janet Trychin:

Well, we’re talking about suicide. Really the implications and-

Sam Trychin:

Well, there’s still some people who are reluctant to wear a hearing aid because they are concerned about other people seeing the hearing aid and demeaning them in some way or losing some status in some way. It’s reality too. Some people have lost jobs if they are getting hearing aids and the boss has figured, “Well, don’t hear well, you can’t work well here”. So there’s some reality to that. But the first thing we talk about with people when we meet with people in groups over a period of time. One, the very beginning stuff is a necessity for letting other people know that you have a hearing loss and number two, the necessity of doing the things you still can do with the hearing loss in order to improve your understanding of what the people are saying.

Sam Trychin:

So, the other issue is a lot of people who have hearing loss are unaware of what they really need to be doing. And often, depending on where they get the hearing aids, where they get the hearing aids, there’s no discussion about social implications and what you need to do to be sure that people are aware of the fact that you have a hearing loss and they need to be aware of what they need to do in order to be understood.

Richard :

And this is exactly what your expertise is. I’ve gathered you’ve written over 20 books on the subject. Are they broken down by topics like that?

Sam Trychin:

A couple of the books are very general issues and some get a little more focused on particular topics. So one book for example, is for couples where at least one of them has a hearing loss and what they need to do and what the hearing person needs to do in order to increase understanding of what’s being said and keep the relationship intact. The book contains a lot of exercises. You start out and first thing you do is you read the first six pages and do the exercises that are on that page. And then sit down and talk about what the effect of doing that practice was.

Sam Trychin:

For example, the way I can get your attention when I need it in a way that’s not offensive to you, because some of the problem for some people of hearing loss is that they get the other person’s attention in such a way the other person doesn’t want anything to do with them. So if they say, for example, “Can’t you speak up?” It’s just terrible, nobody wants to hear that. So you need to start out when talking to people, just start, “Remember I have a hearing loss, and if I’m not understanding what you’re saying, I’ll let you know. And I’ll tell you what we can do to improve that”. So that [crosstalk 00:18:33].

Richard :

Sometimes [inaudible 00:18:34].

Sam Trychin:

It’s presented in a way that’s not threatening.

Richard :

Okay. But sometimes I’ve found couples where the husband or the wife is absolutely unsympathetic to the hearing loss and you know, they’re not going to change. And at that point, my answer usually is, “If you’re not appreciated, it’s time to leave”. Because if a person doesn’t love you enough to make those changes or to be accommodating, there’s no hope for the relationship. Now I’ve been married 47 years deaf for 35. So we know the jury’s still out.

Sam Trychin:

Yeah. In some situations, I think they’re relatively rare, but in some situations they’re better off just getting a divorce and going separate ways. If they’re just cannot be any cooperation at all. And what we tend to see is that if there’s a weekly or a daily family meal, where it is maybe six people at the table, and one of them has a hearing loss. Typically, what you see or often see is that there’s a conversation going on among five people. And the other person just sits there and is excluded. That person needs to learn, to make their presence known. And the fact that they want to know, and they want to be included as important. And to do that in a nice way, that’s an issue. Because if I say, “Can’t you guys ever shut up?” Or something like that, I’m just turning people off.

Sam Trychin:

So, part of the issue is always knowing what to do a situation. And so you understand better, but also how do you do it? Because we can all ask for help in ways that just turn the other people off. And it requires often practice. And we found that was a great thing about getting together in a group that meets once a week for two hours, is that you get to practice how you inform people about your hearing loss and how to go out. You go to a restaurant, how you going to handle the restaurant, how are you going to get what you want and be satisfied? And how do you deal with the waiting people? For example, that kind of thing.

Sam Trychin:

So, it’s one thing to say to people in situation A do X, but it’s often the case that people won’t do it. So if you can get them in a situation where you practice doing it, “Here’s your job. I want you to practice”. “What did she just say?” “Oh, I don’t know”. “What do you mean you don’t know?” “I don’t know. I didn’t hear it”. “What? You didn’t say anything?” “No, I didn’t”. “What I want you to do is to inform her in a nice way that you didn’t understand what she said and ask her to repeat it”. So that kind of practice is often very helpful for a lot of people.

Richard :

Well, when you do these seminars or meetings, obviously you’re limited by [crosstalk 00:22:09].

Janet Trychin:

Obviously you’re limited by [inaudible 00:22:10].

Richard :

How do you train people in a distance to do these kind of things?

Janet Trychin:

Limited, but you can do them in Zoom now.

Sam Trychin:

Yeah.

Richard :

Do you find men or women more in denial about the hearing loss?

Sam Trychin:

I think men are more in denial about it in my experience than women, I think women are, generally speaking, in a lot of ways, more social beings. And so the interaction can be seen by them as being more important than men.

Richard:

Okay. Now, Janet question, as an audiologist, I believe when I follow social media, that people who have to experience a hearing aid for the first time, lack the criteria, to know who to trust, because there’s so many hearing aid dealers out there that do not do a good job of it. I’d like to hear a little bit from you from an audiologist point of view, what a person with a hearing loss should be looking for in an audiologist?

Janet Trychin:

Well, we always say, look for a licensed audiologist, but I have to say, I worked for a hearing aid dispenser in Los Angeles who was excellent. He was an engineer. He had a nice background from Rutgers university. He understood about frequencies and decibels and the problems with background noise. He was very earnest and honest. I always was so grateful for that experience. I have worked in hospitals at universities and some of the people are earnest and honest and others just want to get through, get people in, get people out. But ASHA the American Speech-and-Hearing organization and AAA the American Academy of Audiology really suggests if you’re flying blind to look for a licensed audiologist.

Richard:

And Sam, one last question for you. My question is this, a person’s in distress, they need psychological help for hearing loss. How would they go about finding that help?

Sam Trychin:

I would say that the best initial contact for that would be Hearing Loss Association of America to contact the nearest chapter to them of that and find out who they recommend-

Janet Trychin:

Yes. That’s a good idea.

Sam Trychin:

For a particular services. The people who are the professionals that they have found are sensitive to and knowledgeable about the effects of hearing loss and what needs to be done to deal with that.

Janet Trychin:

But you might start at the national level. Yeah. And maybe the national level will tell you who is in your area or the closest to you.

Richard :

Okay. That makes sense.

Janet Trychin:

They’re very good at the national level too.

Richard :

Excellent. Okay. I think you’ve given my listeners a lot of very good information and I really appreciate your time. I will put your website with the podcast so people know how to reach you, but I appreciate everything you’ve done and I wish you best.

Janet Trychin:

Thank you so much.