Auditory processing involves both cerebral listening and body listening modes. While the cerebral mode focuses on analysis and interpretation, the body mode registers sound through physical sensations and nervous system responses. For neurodivergent individuals, this somatic experience is often heightened and less predictable, leading to intense physical reactions to sound.
At the first tutorial I had with Ingrid, she left me with a task of exploring environments that already cause dissociation and what sounds I would want to experience instead. My first reaction was quite literal: I understood “dissociation-triggering sound” as something clearly connected to trauma — a specific sound tied to a specific event. And that would be happening in a reduced listening mode, as if a single frequency or noise could fully trigger the reaction. A typical example appears in the film Girl (dir. Shu Qi), where the protagonist reacts intensely to the sound of a motorcycle or and iron door. These sounds are not traumatic in themselves, but they become unbearable because they signal the father’s return and the violence that follows. The sound acts as a warning system for the body.
I realised that my own reactions follow a similar pattern. I am highly sensitive to sounds related to doors and footsteps — not because they are loud or unpleasant, but because they carry the feeling of my mother breaking out to my space and shouting. Even certain phrases like “You are overthinking” provoke an overreaction in my body. In these cases, we are actually situated in the semantic listening mode which we are actually understanding and interpreting the meaning of an encoded message. However, for many East Asian people, trauma rarely appears as a single dramatic event. It is slow, repetitive and invisible. It exists in habits, family dynamics, silence, hierarchy, and emotional restraint. Dissociation does not only come from “bad sounds”, but from environments that constantly demand self-monitoring an emotional suppression.