Identity Issues of the College Student with Hearing Loss
Alison Freeman, PhD.
Adjustment to college is a big and expectable challenge for any entering college student. Who am I? and What am I? These are the existential questions that reflect the angst of adolescence and young adulthood. Exploring one’s identity is an important part of a student’s emotional development and academic growth. For students with hearing loss, exploring identity can be even more complex. It is one where the student asks whether “Am I deaf, Deaf or Hard of Hearing or bicultural?
Even though I am no longer a “young adult”, I wanted to share my personal experience in college as well as my professional experience as a clinical psychologist at the counseling center at California State University at Northridge, which is one of the four top universities for deaf and hard of hearing students in the country.
The real question is “where can I be most included?”. The student attending a college with a significant population of deaf and hard of hearing students will differ from the one that is alone or is one of only a few students in a hearing-dominated student body. For example, this identity process can look different for a student at California State University at Northridge, which has an average of 200 students a year from the student who is attending a small community college where s/he is the only student with hearing loss.
Here, being part of a collective community becomes a critical part of identity development i.e., hard of hearing or the Deaf community.
The exploration of identity needs to be addressed as it necessitates the process of learning and integration of new and past coping skills.
K-12 education for the student with hearing loss tends to focus on the learning of the 3 “R’s” and how to pass tests whereas the learning of communication and stress management skills takes a back seat. When the high school graduate with hearing loss enters college, seeking counseling is an opportunity to learn new skills of self-advocacy, communication and stress management skills.
In counseling, the student with hearing loss deals with an evolving identity that is a fluid one; one that may shift back and forth on a spectrum from denial to acceptance and can be fraught with many questions of whether one is hard of hearing, deaf, Deaf or bicultural. As such, counseling becomes
an important part of their growth and individuation process where they have a chance to explore how they want to be identified and function in the world. Further, this is a process that is likely to extend even past the college years.
Personal Experience
Personally, I was a prematurely born baby, which probably explained my moderate hearing loss although it wasn’t diagnosed until I was almost 3 years old. Educationally, I was mainstreamed and grew up with years of speech therapy and lipreading skills. Over the decades, I skirted between the politically correct label of the decade- hard of hearing, hearing impaired, hearing challenged, a person with hearing loss, deaf and Deaf.
In education, I was orally trained, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned sign language and began my journey into joining the Deaf World. Prior to entering college, my greatest goal in life was to “pass” as much as possible so that people would not know that I had a hearing loss. It wasn’t until I experienced several situations of danger, where I realized that my denial was so costly.
Shortly before entering college, I found myself in a situation while traveling abroad with my best friend; we were walking through a park when a small group of friendly appearing guys started following us. One guy approached me and asked me something while another guy approached my best friend and I nodded affirmatively to something I didn’t understand. He, then grabbed my hand and attempted to drag me to some nearby bushes where- upon my friend sprang to action yelling and then onlookers appeared. The guys took off, but I got scared enough where I had to look at how my denial put me in a dangerous situation.
This sparked the beginning of the process of accepting my hearing loss. During college, there were several common denominators that I struggled with – how do I describe my hearing loss to strangers, classmates and dates. As a hard of hearing person, was I allowed to be as frustrated as my Deaf peers because I had some hearing? Was I allowed to be in the Deaf community because I could speak and talk on the phone? Was I hard of hearing in one situation and deaf/Deaf in another?
This search for identity became even more complicated when I lost more hearing where I went from having a 65 to a 90-decibel loss (from moderate to severe to profound hearing loss). Technically, I was deaf and then it became even more confusing. It wasn’t until I could no longer talk on the phone, that I started referring to myself as being deaf more frequently, but I still reserved the label of being hard of hearing when I spoke to hearing people because it was easier to explain the limitations of my hearing loss. It wasn’t until relatively recently that I decided that it was okay for me to be comfortable with the label of my choice and to choose it whenever I wanted to and in whatever environment I found myself in.
Professional Experience
Professionally, in my ten years at CSUN as a psychologist in the Counseling Center, I have seen how students with hearing loss struggle with this identity issues. Like myself, many students who enter college in their freshman year, come in with one identity, and then find themselves struggling with how to identify themselves in a myriad of settings at home, school and the dating scene.
One factor that invariably emerges in counseling is how the student interacts with their family of origin. Most students come from a family where they are the only one in their family with hearing loss with little or no sign language.
When they become immersed in the d/Deaf student community, learn sign language and develop new friendships with other students with similar hearing losses, feelings of anger and frustration with their family often become intensified. When this happens, they are forced to contain these feelings and become motivated to learn how to better cope and learn new communication skills.
Adding to this complexity of identity with hearing loss, is the intersectionality of other identities such as hearing aid wearer/cochlear implant wearer, gender, sex, cultural and additional disabilities. “Intersectionality can be understood as a camera lens approach to the work because identities are contextual, complex, both deeply rooted and emerging, layered and inter- meshed. The camera lens moves across a landscape of our experiences, zooming in, zooming out, panning, becoming still, rapidly moving forward, slowly recollecting the past” (Chong, 2016). Each culture may have its own assumptions, stereotypes and rules. Intersectionality of the various identities can differ with varying levels of oppression. Then, the question is often, which identity assumes top ranking and how to figure out how to balance the other identities.
Keisha is currently the only African American student in her classes who is deaf, and she does not feel accepted by the Deaf student body because she visibly stands out alone. Likewise, it is difficult for her to participate in any of the Black Student support groups as she would need to have a sign language interpreter help her be included.
Juanita is a Latina student who became deaf as an adolescent due to a genetic condition of neurofibromatosis and her family still doesn’t understand why she is so frustrated and depressed. When she states and tries to advo cate for herself by refusing to go to certain family social events, she is told that she is being disrespectful to her Mexican born parents and siblings who don’t truly understand her invisible disability. In this case, she is challenged by her primary identity as a Latina, and her hearing loss receives second billing.
Jonathan is White, Gay and Deaf and has two cochlear implants. While he may struggle with the coming out process, he acknowledges that his indentities are invisible and that he can choose to pass or not. Further, he passes even more as his articulation is more like that of a hard of hearing individual due to his early speech acquisition when he was implanted as a toddler. Un like Keisha or Juanita, he is fully aware that his invisibility ensures a certain level of security unlike the visibility of skin color in Keisha or Juanita.
Trisha is a freshman from a predominantly white, wealthy community and she feels somewhat protected in her privileged state where she must learn how to exist in a diverse community. Her trauma comes from being a deaf survivor of childhood molestation (another invisible identity) where she never told anyone. Sadly enough, this is a common identity that must be added to the mix as sexual assault occurs three times more often than in the hearing and non-disabled community.
This aspect of invisibility may help to explain why many students in the deaf and hard of hearing community may not identify themselves as being disabled. As such, there tends to be a disconnect and they see themselves as a separate group from those that have other disabilities. While it might make sense for them to join the larger group of people with disabilities, they cherish the feeling of connectedness and belonging with others who share the common language of sign language and culture.
However, this connection can become clouded if there is an additional dis- ability that is not invisible. Chloe has unilateral deafness and has Cerebral Palsy (CP) which affects her ability to move, speak and sign. She functions more like her hard of hearing peers because she hears in one ear and yet is profoundly deaf in her other ear. As such, she is thrusted into an existence where she floats between the worlds of deafness and those with a visible neurodevelopment disorder. Chloe deals with the feeling of not fully belonging in either the deaf/Deaf/hard of hearing community or the CP community. As such, she feels that she cannot be a fully participating member of either community and has to learn to adapt to this duality.
As professionals in the educational arena, we are already trained and sensitive to the general concept of disability awareness. It helps to remember that identity is not a static concept but a complex and ongoing quest for be- longing to a community, perhaps, one that they may have never experienced prior to college life. In the student with the single identity of hearing loss, this is a quest that is bound up with the acceptance of being deaf while findings one’s voice in a hearing-dominant community whereas the student with two or more disabilities will have a more complex journey oscillating between the various communities.
In closing, it is incumbent upon us as helping professionals to encourage the student with hearing loss, or any disability for that matter, to have affirmative counseling to navigate through these multiple identities and issues. Students need to be informed that college counseling is a free service that their student fees pay for, and can be an invaluable service, one that they may never be able to easily access upon graduation. With students who come from families whose culture views mental health counseling with stigma and shame, this becomes even more important. Counseling can best be seen as a growth process where students can learn new coping and communication skills to become the best student and person they can be.
References
- Freeman, A. (2016) Who Am I? What Am I? Dilemmas in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adolescents presented at the 24th Congress of the European Federation of Associations of Teachers of the Deaf.
- Freeman, A (2014) Hearing Loss Across the Lifespan. Zur Institute.
- Leigh, I. And O’Brien, C. (2020) Deaf Identities: Exploring New Frontiers. Oxford University Press.
- Goldblat, E., & Most, T. (2018). Cultural Identity of Young Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants in Comparison to Deaf without Cochlear Implants and Hard- of-Hearing Young Adults. Journal of deaf studies and deaf education, 23(3), 228–239. https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/eny007
- National Center for College Students with Disabilities clearinghouse re- trieved from https://www.nccsdclearinghouse.org/intersectionality-of-identi- ties.html
- Ruiz-Williams, E., Burke, M., Chong, V. Y., & Chainarong, N. (2016). My Deaf is not your Deaf. In M. Friedner & A. Kusters (Eds.), It’s a small world: International Deaf spaces and encounters (pp. 262-273). Gallaudet University Press.