I’ve integrated all the ‘voices’ I’ve had in my previous
years. For thirteen years part of my mind thought the best way to divide up
aspects of myself I didn’t agree with, from those thoughts I liked and called
my ‘self’, was to put those other thoughts into voices I heard outside myself.
If they ever were in my head, then they were marked as different from my own
spontaneous thoughts and different again from the external ‘auditory
hallucinations’. Admittedly I didn’t cognitively think this through, but
thought on such stories as John Shirley’s, ‘What Cindy saw.’
This
experiment in dividing up my thoughts failed to work well because I didn’t have
adequate support in maintaining this way of thinking. I knew I had to do
something with the thoughts that I didn’t want to own but intruded on me
because of the way others had put pressure on me at various times of my life,
causing a ‘bruise’ on my psyche, that’s why I created the voices. I became
isolated and was told that my writings about this system of thought could not
be marketed to the Australian public. It was disappointing.
As I
grew more disenchanted with society and it’s rejection of my solutions, I
pressed myself for ways that I could ‘show them’ the reasons why I had this
system of thought. This turned out to be disastrous because I also had other
things crash and burn in my life at that time.
After
my three last attempts to find a way to communicate my inner workings, I came
to the conclusion that my system was no good, because it was unsupported by
society, thus led to isolation, and this led to my symbolic accusations of what
society was doing (driven by my anger at them for not accepting what I had
accomplished) and then, there was the psychiatric abuse that occurs when
thoughts are outside the range of understood sense.
I
realised that in order to never accuse people in a symbolic, unclear way again,
in order to not become further away from consensual understanding, in order to never
again be abused by psychiatrists, I had to scrap my system of ‘hearing voices’
to separate my thoughts and change the network of my mind so that everything I
thought was integrated into ‘self.’ This I find is messy, not neat like the ‘voices’
system, but helps me not get wrapped up in inspiration, helps not confuse it
with what reality is about. The messiness of soup integration is exacerbated by
certain thoughts which connect heavily with speech and other movements that I’ve
been calling ‘Tourette’s.’ What I mean by Tourette’s is that these ‘thoughts’
are not really ‘thoughts’ any more than Parkinsonian movements are ‘thoughts.’
I recently attended a workshop about voice dialoguing. I
felt I needed to distinguish ‘Tourette’s’ from the ‘voice hearing’ I’d
experienced in for thirteen years, because, to me, what I term, ‘Tourette’s’ is
very different from my experience of voice hearing.
I
did try to dialogue with the lines of Tourette’s I’ve been hearing and sometimes
speaking for over a year. And, I felt great relief in being able to express
that stuff that’s inside me, by explaining it to other people. I get a lot out
of empathetic witnessing and sensitive questioning. Although, after the session
the frequency of the Tourette’s did increase, the next day the Tourette’s didn’t
hammer, or even ghost a few lines in my head. It was so wonderfully absent.
I
think I can break the Tourette’s up into categories and give it names, but
really, to me, it’s just a bundle of thoughts in a tangle. I feel in talking
about the tangle, I untangle. In having an empathetic listener, I become less
annoyed at the tangle.
I
have a theory that my particular ‘tangle’ of thoughts I call Tourette’s is
located in the motor part of my brain. That doesn’t mean it can be burnt out by
some surgeon’s laser, or cut with a scalpel. NFW! It just means over time, with
others’ help, I can untangle it and help those thoughts make more sense.
I
got criticised at the workshop, for calling my tangle of thoughts, ‘Tourette’s’.
In a telling off manner I was asked, ‘Why do you want to give yourself another
medical label?’
I wasn’t given the opportunity to answer, as
this person stormed off after he said this and wouldn’t engage with me verbally
afterwards.
And
yet another person followed what he said with, ‘Why don’t you just call them “Voices”?’
After
this I got an increase in my repeated lines from the ‘thought tangle’ and I
knew I was very angry at being told to fit in with what didn’t make sense to
me.
I’m
not totally happy with the term ‘Tourette’s’ or ‘verbal tics’, but what I have
don’t feel fall into the category of ‘voices’.
Voices, for me led to unusual
beliefs that were not supported by society. They also had a flood of other
ideas associated with them, that the verbal tics do not. The voices led me to
accusing people of doing things they hadn’t done. Which led me to being labelled
as having ‘psychosis’ and then to being forcefully drugged with chemicals I
believed damaged my neuropathways so badly that the verbal and physical tics
emerged as a brain injury response that verbally reflected on other traumas in
my life.
Perhaps I should just say I
have involuntary thought tangles which mean I have repeated thoughts
accompanied by small jerking movements in my body, and when I am alone these
verbal lines that repeat come out my mouth, and surprise me. I have no
indication that it is going to happen when it happens, it just does.
What I’d like to do is work with
someone in untangling the thoughts. I recognise that the sentences and words
fall into three basic categories which relate to three separate traumas via
three separate perpetrators, all of which happened over a number of years.
Perhaps I could work in doing
voice dialoguing. But I think this needs to be done in combination with other
non-invasive therapy.
Most likely I won’t get to
work with a professional therapist. Most likely I will have to try to work it
out myself. But at least I have a lovely partner who will talk things through
with me. And, I have over a year of Art Therapy techniques I have learnt in my
diploma.
It is hard to find people who
really engage with where you’re at, when you need to sort out your mind. Well,
for me, I’ve found it is. I’m not into people who aim at getting a cry out of
me. I’ve lived with enough bullies to just laugh at people like that. This
tends to make a therapist like that sulky and then they just make me angry and
even though I may like them in many ways I feel like turning them into a joke,
just to wrap them up and have done with them, because they don’t seem to like
me and I don’t see why I should continue to like someone who doesn’t like me. I
also get annoyed with a therapist who is too spiritually orientated and sort of
suggests that maybe I’m being haunted by ghosts. I don’t roll my eyes, but I
want to, because, when I’m not the therapist, and they are, I feel if they’d
listened to me properly they’d have realised that ghosts aren’t really part of
my belief system, and I don’t want them to be, because, it’d mean the danger of
ending up in psychiatric hands being labelled with ‘psychosis.’
I want someone who is willing to
understand my beliefs. That my thoughts have taken a physical battering via
neuroleptics and that I developed particular coping mechanisms to deal with
trauma situations I’ve experience that haven’t been properly healed.
It’s hard working out things
on your own. But, not all therapists are right for you. I haven’t given enough
therapists a go. In my life I’ve only seen two psychologists and they’d all add
up to probably only twelve sessions.
If I do go to a therapist,
again, it’d probably be an art therapist, or someone in peer support who’s done
some training. Otherwise I’ll go to workshops and annoy the lecturers with
questions they don’t have the answers for.
Peer support groups are a
really good way to discuss what’s on your mind in a non-threatening,
non-diagnosing environment. I’ve found them to be the best way of understanding
consensual reality from the view of people who have had similar experiences,
like ‘hearing voices,' ‘grief’, or ‘addiction’.
Probably ‘Tourette’s’ as well, but then, who am I to use a medical term that
leads to invasive surgery and ends in brain damage?
Thinking is thinking and
learning to think in ways we want to, that enables us to forge connections in
society, rather than become isolated, is important. Thinking outside the range
of understood sense, is not an illness, it is a coping mechanism, it is a
habit, it is an attempt to be understood, an attempt to be successful, an attempt
to invent what needs to be invented. This thinking should not be harmed but
helped into becoming what can be accepted by society, for inventions to come to
fruition, for people to succeed.
I want professionals in mental
health to think outside the test-tubes of their science studies and realise how
limiting chemistry is when it comes to human thinking, coping with stress,
trauma and learning to behave appropriately (ie in wartime people collected
containers in cupboards, now we put them in the recycling bin! People have to
learn…) I want therapies that don’t isolate, stigmatise and torture people for ‘not
making sense’. People want to communicate. It is only things like fear of
further harm and harsh judgment that puts barriers in communication pathways.
An effort must be made by people who want to work in the field of mental health
to get over their own fears in regards to ‘madness’. They must actively try to
understand another’s perception, their path of thoughts, their way of
organising their thinking, or a particular use of terminology, because that’s
what makes individuality.
By reading memoirs of people
who have been labelled by psychiatry, watching video or written blogs by people
with lived-experience of things like ‘voices’, understanding can be reached. Otherwise,
continuing to read second or third-hand ‘case studies’ or going to psychiatric
lectures, is kind of like trying to understand the holocaust from the point of
view of those who judged, labelled, undermined and made money out of the people
they tortured and murdered.
