In my experience of schizophrenia the active symptoms are or were delusions, voices, hallucinations, and, to a much lesser extent, suicidal thoughts. While the voices and hallucinations persist to this day, the delusions were perhaps the most difficult to grapple with but were the first to go, and suicidal thoughts that were brought on by despair passed when the feelings of despair passed. The hallucinations proved to be of little or no consequence in my experience being similar to the hallucinations brought on by the street drugs I ingested in my youth, but the voices continue to be a part of nearly every waking day to one degree or another. I would like to talk about the voices here and leave the rest to another day.
Some people who have not experienced schizophrenia or the schizophrenic have a difficult time understanding what hearing voices is like. Let me help the uninitiated understand. Fellow sufferers will understand immediately. The voices I hear are not in the room around me but rather they are heard in my head. To have an idea of what hearing voices in your head is like think about how you perceive your thoughts. When you are thinking do you think in words? If you are like most people you think in words, and if you are aware of the words, than that awareness of the words is the act of ‘hearing’ your thoughts. Hearing thoughts in this sense is tantamount to hearing a voice, the voice being the stream of words in your head that constitute your thoughts.
In my discussions with people who are not schizophrenic that hear their thoughts in this way find that their thoughts are under conscious control and can be directed and turned on or off by this conscious control. However, in my experience of hearing voices, the voices take on a life of their own and exist beyond my conscious control. I cannot always direct them or turn them on or off. It is this lack of conscious control that places me at the mercy of the voices and causes much of what suffering and misery that I experience in my inner life that I still experience.
The idea of hearing voices is further understood by envisioning yourself in a dark room with several other people with the lights off. You are sitting down strapped to a chair while these people stand around you in the dark. These people are talking but because the lights are off you cannot see them and consequently their voices seem disembodied. Their voices come at you out of the darkness from different directions around the room. You have no control over what these people say to you or about you and you and these people are unable to leave the room so their talking goes on and on unabated. And these people know intimate details about you and your life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and they comment on it. Some are friendly, some not so much. Some are moral, some are immoral. Some are kind, some are abusive. And all you can do is listen and ‘talk,’ or ‘think thoughts,’ back to them but you and they cannot leave ever, and so the situation persists on and on. You are left to make what peace you can with the voices and tolerate the rest. It helps to have a thick skin and strong personal restraint.
I finish here by noting that it is a characteristic of the disease for the sufferer to personify their thoughts. Therefore, random thoughts or voices tend to take on a personality of their own as characteristic of the disease. Consequently, the voices I hear used to be strongly attached to an idea of a personality and I had some good friends in here through the years. I also had some particularly abusive personalities. Recently, I have been trying to understand the voices as parts of myself that need compassion and understanding. In this endeavor I have undertaken a study of Non-Violent Communication to assist me in interacting with the voices in a more kind and compassionate manner. It is too early in this undertaking to comment on the results of this new way of relating but I am excited about the possibilities this new way of relating through self-compassion presents.
That’s all for now. See you next week.