Hearing Voices: Suppressed and displaced positive or meaningful actions, desires, and intentions.

Some months ago, after a fairly heavy drinking session a previous night, and whilst in the middle of writing my thoughts and perceptions down in the pub the next day in-between a few pints of beer, following some thoughts and desires, I became aware of some anxious or strong feelings of needing to do something - a desire for positive activity or meaningful action; but having this intention or urge displaced in my mind, it led to a voluntary perception or shift, and which led to, or was, the slowed-down stages, of the creation or manifestation of auditory hallucinations/hearing voices.

I just about felt the intention and mode-switch, for the voice to manifest itself, and caught the midstream area between an intention, desire, and a voice-creation or perception. I then tried to repeat or push this activity, mode, or method further, and the voice I deliberately created, this time got a bit louder, and the third and fourth time around, a bit more displaced or fragmented. The second, third, and fourth time around, the method of it was verifiable and repeatable in this discovery and experiment.

The content of the voice, what it was saying, was at first exactly what I was thinking, or wanted to think, and then the third and fourth time, it was pretty meaningless and unimportant - I think the content of it then said my name after a while, or asked me a short and simple, banal, and meaningless question. I'm sure that the manner of questioning, interrogation, and assessment, that goes on by some social workers and psychiatrists towards diagnosed patients, and some of the defence or provocation involved in some of it, actually gives some of us as diagnosed people, a bit of a complex or fear, about other answer-and-question situations and dialogues, and which is part of the causes of hearing voices. Perhaps finding strategies for dealing with these situations, is one way of preventing auditory hallucinations, or one way of diminishing or coping with them.

I was in full awareness and control of this discovery and experiment, although I didn't keep on doing it more than three or four times, for fear that the created-voice might become completely displaced or fragmented. Why and how the content of the voice changes, from what we're thinking, to what we're not deliberately thinking, I also think I know the reasons for, and will write about in the future.

It was as if I willed, experienced, and perceived all this happening in slow-motion, whereas 8 years or so before, it had been too fast or instantaneous to realise what was happening, and with too many distractions to be in control of or understand this activity, experience, and behaviour. Because the volume, consistency, and content of the voices has decreased, sometimes if I think hard, I can actually voluntarily create the voices in my head. In my pub experience, I became aware of the behaviour or process, personally and collectively, that leads to hearing voices, and felt the evasion of my will and mind, to switch into a 'different intention' or modality, and as this happened, I scribbled it down in my notes.

This slowing down of the voice hearing experience, was not due to psychiatric medication, which in anything but a very low dose, would have most probably blotted-out and slowed-down that awareness and realisation completely, and I was medication-free at the time of this discovery, although I was medicated by alcohol I suppose. I'm also older now, freer or free from cannabis misuse and discrimination, and in a different social situation and stage of my life.

I agree with The Hearing Voices Network, that hearing voices, are actually a behaviour, comparable to other different behaviours in the past, such as homosexuality, which have up until fairly recently, been falsely, one-sidedly, and discriminatorily labelled as mental illnesses by psychiatry. These days, when I hear voices, it very occasionally takes the form of a faint whisper, or very rarely a short loud radio transmission type-noise, from inside my ear and head, which usually happens when I'm tired or half awake, and is made worse by some constant drinking or over-drinking. Alcohol, is in my experience, and from what some other voice-hearers have said, an anti-psychotic drug in moderation; but like any drug, if taken too much, it distorts the mind, and actually induces psychosis or severe depression.

I went through three stages of hearing voices, over 8 years up to the present day: 1. An involuntary onset of voices beyond my understanding or control, 2. A phase of some of the content of the voices becoming less negative, and a more intelligent narrative, (one voice was very positive, of a female counsellor I knew, describing the root of my problems to the nasty voice, and jumping to my defence), and 3. A diminishing of both the volume, consistency and content, and an ability to voluntarily self-create voices, which might be dangerous or foolish to keep on doing this, but which has on that odd occasion, helped me to understand what voices really are, and how they are actively created.

The Hearing Voices Network
in their booklet The Voice Within by Paul Baker, describes these phases as: 1. The startling phase, 2. The phase of organisation: coping with voices, and 3. The phase of stabilisation. Originally the nasty voices were mostly female, but during the second phase, I suppose about 5 or 6 years ago, this gender structure was added to or reversed - the nasty voice this time was male, and the positive or supportive voice that newly manifested was female.

So it is clear to me from my awareness of how voices are self-created, or become split-off from conscious activity or control, that voices are displaced meaningful intentions, desires, or actions, that have been twisted or distorted in the past or throughout our lives, and that perhaps this behaviour and mechanism has been internalised or transformed. Some of the contradictory behaviours and methods we are subjected to in the mental health system, combined with a narrow and rigid authoritarian plan of action, that disregards and ignores our desires and intentions for meaningful action, also resembles and primarily creates this behaviour and experience of hearing voices in ourselves.

Medical psychiatry has a deterministic habit of over focusing on isolated perceptions, psychological metaphysics, or abstract states of mind, at the exclusion of acknowledging volition, and the social consciousness and intentions behind the desire for positive or meaningful activity.