Melissa Gilbert's childhood was often "really dark and difficult" because of her neurological disorder
The 60-year-old actress starred on the NBC Western series 'Little House on the Prairie' as a child but suffers from a condition now known as misophonia - which causes an extreme emotional reaction to certain sounds - and "sobbed" when upon her diagnosis because she felt "horribly guilty" for how she had behaved as a child
22 August 2024
She told People: "[On set], if any of the kids chewed gum or ate or tapped their fingernails on the table, I would want to run away so badly. 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.
"It was a really dark and difficult part of my childhood.
"I sobbed when I found out that it had a name and I wasn't just a bad person.
"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."
The 'Diary of Anne Frank' actress - who is now married to Timothy Busfield but has son Dakota, 35, with her first husband Bo Brinkman and 28-year-old Michael with her second husband Bruce Boxleitner - also banned her children from making hoises such as chewing gum when they were growing up because of how much it all affected her.
She said: "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.
"My poor kids spent their whole childhoods growing up with me doing this. They weren't allowed to have gum!"
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