'Little House on the Prairie' Star Melissa Gilbert Reveals 'Isolating' Disorder
While countless viewers were tuning in to watch Melissa Gilbert as "Half Pint" Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie, the actress was dealing with an undiagnosed neurological disorder.
As Gilbert, 60, recently revealed to People, she suffers from misophonia, a condition that causes a "decreased tolerance to specific sounds and things you can sense related to them," according to the Cleveland Clinic. While trying to film Little House on the Prairie scenes set in the school room with other child actors, "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 said. "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."m
Gilbert called the time a "really dark and difficult part of [her] childhood."
It wasn't until many years later that Gilbert found out her symptoms were due to a real condition.
"I sobbed when I found out that it had a name and I wasn't just a bad person," said Gilbert.
According to Gilbert, as a child she "would just glare at my parents and my grandmother and my siblings with eyes filled with hate," she says. "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."
Even Gilbert's children were affected by her misophonia.
"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 said. "My poor kids spent their whole childhoods growing up with me doing this. They weren't allowed to have gum."
Gilbert didn't actually discover a treatment for her condition until last year, when she reached out to Duke Center for Misophonia and Emotional Regulation at Duke University's School of Medicine. "I wrote in just randomly and said, 'I need help. Please help me,'" she said. The center's director, Dr. Zach Rosenthal, wrote back and told her she wan't alone, which "was huge" for the actress. Gilbert underwent 16 weeks of "intensive" Cognitive Behavioral Therapy treatment, which involves working to change both thinking and behavioral patterns, according to the American Psychological Association.
"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."
Next: 'Little House on the Prairie' Cast: Where Are They Now?
