Hearing Voices - Our relationships with others speaking through us

I recently started attending a local Hearing Voices Group, facilitated by an occupational therapist, a community psychiatric nurse, and a social worker, and more or less following the Romme and Escher model or philosophy of a hearing voices group. I'd missed the first session, but as not much was said in the first session, other explaining the basic principles and agreed ground-rules of the group, I hadn't missed much, and we were given a couple of articles on the Romme and Escher approach to hearing voices; which is the original philosophy of the national and international Hearing Voices Network.

Romme and Escher's approach to hearing voices does not regard hearing voices as an illness, but regards it as a human variation like sexual differences, or being left-handed. It accepts that the voices are real to us as an experience, and encourages us to accept our voices, learn the meanings in them for ourselves and others, and share and develop effective coping-strategies. I agree with the Romme and Escher model, that voices are often about people's life-experiences and situations, and that hearing voices are about people's past and present relationships with others speaking through them.

I also see voices as a disability or positive ability - whichever way you look at it - at experiencing the various relationships we have with different people in different contexts and situations, and how those experiences and situations might delude or enlighten us by being experienced as mutli-contextual or overlapping. I'd like to see the constructive use of this recognised as a cultural and literary style, which is used constructively by poets, playwrights, and artists, and used by such novelists as E. L. Doctorow, who gave factual historical events a personal, interpersonal, social and human meaning, by creatively mixing historical fact with fiction; and I think this aspect of hearing voices is better understood as something that might get stuck in a creative process, or get stuck within the three phases of understanding and coping that Romme and Escher's philosophy and approach describes. The three phases of understanding, accepting, and coping with voices are: 1. The startling phase, 2. The organisational phase, 3. The stabilisation phase.

It came out in the local Hearing Voices Group, from one persons experiences, that negative voices could be about the defences, social pressures, or inadequate social or work roles that have been imposed upon us; about our past or present life-changes; and in terms of our social interactions or relatedness with other people. It also came out that negative voices could be about social alienation, powerlessness, feelings of hopelessness, and how we see ourselves in terms of self-esteem or in relation to other people.

It was suggested by one of the facilitators of the group, that if we get negative or aggressive voices, telling us to harm ourselves or others, then this could be due to the fact that others haven't accepted or believed us about the voice hearing experience, or if they've responded negatively or aggressively to our voices experiences, making it harder for us to accept, understand, and positively cope with it. She said that accepting the voices is about accepting your actual self in that sense, that this is what the group is partly about, and it brought up issues in relation to negative voices, of how we respect ourselves in relation to others, and whether we should respond aggressively, assertively, or passively to the ways in which how other people treat or mistreat us.

If a person has been abused or bullied, for example, and they have been pressurised or forced to fight back aggressively or violently, then they might have been continuously caste in that passive, victim, or aggressive role in their life, occupation, or identity with others, due to those pressures and defences, and in terms of social and self-identification. In that sense then, how we interpret or respond to the voices, might be a displacement of those feelings and problems, which we otherwise need to deal with and look at.

Using that as an example, hearing voices might also be about how we communicate or express our feelings or problems to other people, perhaps in a situation or context where we would otherwise not be understood or listened to, and how this is made problematic if others are superimposing the defences or negative identities that have been imposed upon us, or if they are incapable or unwilling to understanding these realities and experiences.