The ability to hear many voices in your head at the same time was previously considered a sign of psychosis. Could it be an advantage in allowing you to hear the truth? Psychologist Charles Fernichhau decided to look for advantages in this type of consciousness and studied a new, radical approach to psychological illness.
Margaret's story
Margaret, a woman in her 70s, admits that the voice in her head sometimes says something extremely funny. She has a bright open face and a pleasant smile. She came to the doctor's appointment with her daughter, who really wants to get advice on how to help her mother cope with the voices. There are about twenty scientists in the room, including theorists and clinical psychologists. Everyone gathered in order to deal with Margaret's case - they even invited a special guest for her, Jacques Dillon, who also hears voices. The woman had never before met people with the same situation as hers. The opportunity to communicate with someone who understands her is invaluable - a woman is transformed just before our eyes.
Groups for people with voices in their heads
Recently, support groups began to appear for those who hear voices. In them, people discuss that voices can be very wise, and often they tell something very important. The idea that voices can have serious meaning is no longer new - psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that hallucinations can be meaningful. If interpreted correctly, it may be easier to start the healing process. This idea directly contradicts the traditional approach of psychiatry, in which voices are perceived as empty trash, meaningless brain signals. Unsurprisingly, many people find comfort in this alternative approach.
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Book by Elinor Longden
Elinor Longden wrote a frank and moving book about the voices in her head. She described her psychological distress, which eventually led to schizophrenia, for which experts told her there was no cure. For the first time, she heard a voice commenting on her actions in the third person. When she told a friend about the voice, the situation changed. She was advised to be treated, immediately sent to a psychiatrist - and so began her path from an excellent student to a degraded madwoman. She was told that cancer is better than schizophrenia, because even cancer is easier to treat. Like numerous other patients, Longden was able to change her position thanks to a social movement in favor of supporting people with voices. After long days at the clinic, she found a psychiatrist who helped her understand that voices are not symptoms of illness,but the work of the survival mechanism. Elinor's psyche suffered from her life trials and adapted in a certain way. Elinor had to endure the horrors of childhood sexual abuse, which led to the emergence of voices. The bullying affected the child's psyche, so Longden grew up to be an intelligent, socially adapted woman - but with deepest problems.
Important message from voices
Longden was able to figure out that voices can help. Essentially, voices are messages that carry important information about unresolved emotional issues. It makes no sense to fight the messages themselves just because you don't like their content. Better to try to understand what life events have led to this tension expressed by voices. The main question is not how to treat the problem, but at the root of its occurrence.
First case of successful decryption
The public movement to support people with voices began after the first successful therapeutic collaboration between Dr. Romme and his patient, the young Dutch woman Petsy Haige. Romme's first instinctive desire when meeting the patient was to treat destructive voices as a symptom of the disease. The patient insisted that the voices were real and had a deep meaning, they were the deities she prayed to. She was sure that in ancient times, our ancestors heard the gods talking to people, and believed that she could experience something like that. Therefore, she tried to convey to the doctor that voices may not be a sign of schizophrenia, but a special device of the subconscious. The doctor listened and began to perceive voices differently. This is how his project for working with people faced with the same problem came about. Together with the patient, Romme appeared on Dutch television, inviting patients to contact him. He received an amazing response - he was approached by more than one hundred and fifty people, who also found a way to deal with the voices in their heads. The movement began to grow. It became clear that voices might not really be a symptom, but messages about problems that a person is facing in their life.
An innovative approach
At first glance, the concept is very different from the idea that voices arise from the brain's misperception of the subconscious. Instead of engaging in the study of linguistic processes, the concept proposes to turn to traumatic experiences in the patient's past and look for the key there. As it turned out, this approach actually works!
Scientific basis for the approach
So what is the evidence that voices in your head can be signals of a painful past? It is worth first of all to study the question of how people with voices process their memories, and how this process differs from normal. Scientists have suggested that auditory hallucinations result from the inability to suppress memories that are not related to what a person is doing at the moment. This idea has received confirmation from experiments. People with voices are really bad at abstracting from information in their minds. In addition, they have problems with context memory - they are not able to remember the details surrounding events. Because of this, memories invade the subconscious and take on a special form. Another piece of evidence is in connection with the injury. There is a lot of evidence that the appearance of voices is associated with difficult experiences. This is often childhood sexual abuse. The link is as clear as that between smoking and lung cancer.
Detailed description of the mechanism
How do memories get their weird shape? Scientists had to think about how thoughts of a painful past can lurk in the subconscious for many years, then suddenly appear in adulthood, causing diagnoses such as schizophrenia. The problem is that memory just works differently. Recollection is a special reconstructive process that involves combining information from different sources into a single picture. As a rule, people cannot combine this information perfectly accurately - many forget the details of the dialogue and other trifles. A recollection is more of a sketch than an accurate description of the past. How can voices be detailed re-enactments of the events of ancient times? The idea that a traumatic memory can be stored unchanged in the subconscious is contrary to people's ideas about memory. The explanation can be hidden in such a phenomenon as dissociation. This is a phenomenon in which thoughts, feelings and experiences do not integrate into the subconscious in the usual way. A person seems to be divided due to a tragic experience, the psyche tries to erase sensations, as a result, memories become fragmentary.
Marina Ilyushenko