text: In the 1980's I absolutely loved punk rock. I lived in Greensboro NC and struggling punker bands traveling from Atlanta to DC for weekend gigs would unload their equipment-filled vans into tiny bars for mid-week performances to pay for gas money for the trip. I would move toward the stage to listen to the raging of tatted, bare chested men, roaring like aircraft engines, their words almost impossible to decipher. You didn’t need to. You didn’t listen to this music. You felt it.
  When it first showed up a decade or so ago I began wearing earplugs, closing doors quietly, and avoiding loud noises in the hopes that at least I could prevent further damage and perhaps turn down the volume a bit. It didn't work. The stuff the audiologists suggested didn't work either. Every time I checked, there it was, shrieking back at me. Over a couple of years time period it gradually drove me absolutely crazy. How anyone could put up with this constant, constant, constant noise! For a lifetime! Are you kidding me?! A lifetime!
  Then -- after years of struggle -- a brilliant and highly creative (not) thought occurred to me. "uhh, maybe you should apply your life’s work to it."
  I sat right down and over the next hour I did exactly that. I applied the "turning toward" moves of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and its psychological flexibility model (my TEDx explains the basic moves: http://bit.ly/StevesFirstTED). By the next morning the “problem” of tinnitus was in the low range. In few days, the distress and interference from ringing in my ears was at zero, where it has remained in the several years since.