Little House On The Prairie star Melissa Gilbert made a name for herself as the sweet Laura Ingalls on TV. But behind the scenes, she was struggling. The actor revealed she has had a neurological disorder since childhood and got the diagnosis as an adult.
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Gilbert has misophonia, which causes people to have strong behavioral responses to stimuli. It's affected her since she was a child. For instance, chew gum or hand clapping caused her to feel overwhelmingly angry.
"If any of the kids chewed gum or ate or tapped their fingernails on the table, I would want to run away so badly," Gilbert told People. "I would turn beet red and my eyes would fill up with tears and I'd just sit there feeling absolutely miserable and horribly guilty for feeling so hateful towards all these people—people I loved."
Melissa Gilbert Opens Up
"I sobbed when I found out that it had a name and I wasn't just a bad person," she said. "I really just thought that I was rude. And I felt really bad. And guilty, which is an enormous component of misophonia, the guilt that you feel for these feelings of fight or flight. It's a really isolating disorder."
It didn't just stop when she became an adult. Gilbert said she's struggled with random feelings of anger related to stimuli. It's even affected her as a mother. Things got worse as she went through menopause and found herself acting out.
"I had a hand signal that I would give, making my hand into a puppet and I'd make it look like it was chewing and then I'd snap it shut — like shut your mouth!" she recalls. "My poor kids spent their whole childhoods growing up with me doing this. They weren't allowed to have gum."
"This is an emotional issue. It's about self-regulation and self-control," said Gilbert. "I realized I could ride out these waves but that they're not going to go away. They never go away. But now I have all these tools to enable me to be more comfortable and less triggered. It made me feel in control."
