Relating to Voices using Compassion Focused Therapy

A Self-help Companion

Charlie Heriot-Maitland, Eleanor Longden

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000590425
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: Clinical Psychology

Relating to Voices helps people who hear voices to develop a more compassionate understanding and relationship with their voices.

In this book, authors Charlie and Eleanor create a warm and caring tone for the reader and a respectful tone for their voices. With the help of regular 'check-in boxes', the book guides the reader towards an understanding of what voices are, what they may represent, and how we can learn to work with them in a way that leads to a more peaceful relationship. It offers a shift away from viewing voices as the enemies, towards viewing them as potential allies in emotional problem-solving. This approach may be different to some others that readers have come across, which can often be about challenging voices, suppressing them, distracting from them, or getting rid of them. The Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) approach suggests that we can learn to relate to both voices and ourselves in a way that is less about conflict and more about cooperation.

This book will be a useful companion for voice-hearers as well as for their supporters and allies in their journey of self-help. It will also be of use to mental health and social service workers.

Part 1Before we start

Chapter 1Voice-hearing: A normal human experience

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166269-2

Chapter summary

So, what is voice-hearing?

In this chapter, we will be exploring some important questions about hearing voices, such as:

• Who hears voices?
• What kinds of voices do people hear?

We will then describe how voice-hearing can link to different emotions. In particular, we’ll be focusing on three main groups of emotions which perform important jobs for us in our everyday lives:

• The threat system: emotions that focus on threat and protection.
• The drive system: emotions that focus on doing and achieving.
• The soothing system: emotions that focus on contentment and feeling safe.

Finally, we will set the scene for the work we’re hoping to do together by sharing the personal accounts of five people who’ll describe their own experience of bringing compassion into their relationship with their voices.

Introduction

It goes without saying that hearing voices which don’t seem to be part of our own minds can be a distressing, frightening, and confusing experience. The natural thing to do when we are confronted with such difficult experiences is to try to get rid of them, but we may also wonder what it means about us. Does it mean we are crazy? Many people are told that they hear voices because they have a mental illness which is coming from abnormalities in the brain, and this can make them feel fearful and ashamed. However, if you hear voices, it’s important to know that you have nothing to be ashamed of. Voice-hearing is a normal human experience, shared by people of all ages, backgrounds, and cultures. One of us (Eleanor) has heard voices for over half her life, and the other (Charlie) has worked closely with voice-hearers for 15 years as a therapist. In turn, both of us have friends and work colleagues who hear voices and who live peaceful, successful lives.

For the last few years, the two of us have been working together in leading the development, training, and research of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) for voice-hearing, which is an approach that tries to help people learn to develop compassionate ways of relating with themselves and their voices. In this time, we have run numerous events and workshops in different countries, produced videos, and written articles. Our events have been attended by many voice-hearers, their friends and relatives, and the mental health professionals who support them. The reason we are writing this book is that we want to share some of the ideas and wisdom we have learnt over the years. What this book will do is help us understand what voices are, what they may represent, and how we can learn to work with them in a way that leads to a more peaceful relationship. Many people discover that when they understand their voices better, don’t fight with them, and learn how to relate to them in a calmer and more confident way, they are able to live their lives with much less fear and a greater sense of contentment and joy.

The ideas and approaches in this book have emerged from the experiences of people who have suffered hugely because of distressing voices yet have gone on to cope successfully with them and to lead happy and fulfilling lives. For some of these people, their relationship with their voices changed so much that the voices became friends and allies. Some people tell us that they would actually miss their voices if the voices went away. Of course, you might be reading this thinking that this does not apply to you – that it seems so far away from the type of relationship or experience that you have with your voices as to be totally unrelatable. If so, that is a very understandable way to feel. We realise that there is such a wide range of different experiences with voices – an infinite range, in fact. It might be helpful just to keep in mind your own understanding of your voices, and to look after yourself while engaging with these ideas. The same applies to your voices, who may also find that this does not apply to them, or perhaps have some reaction to what we are telling you. If so, bring the voices in. For example, if a voice is telling you not to read the book, ask what is it worried about? Is there anything that would help it feel less threatened? Perhaps, you could remind the voice that one of the authors is a voice-hearer herself. After speaking with many voice-hearers, we also find it is not uncommon for voices to feel frustrated with being in a negative, argumentative relationship with the person who hears them, so maybe it would be helpful to remind them that there may be benefits for them too if you read this book. Whatever you decide, look after yourself and your voices by considering what you need to feel safe in this moment.

Who hears voices?

The short answer is that, given the right circumstances, any human being is capable of hearing voices. Despite what you may have been told, voice-hearing in itself is not a mental illness, and voices are not only heard by people in mental health services. Nor is it true that only people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia hear voices, because it can occur in a wide range of different diagnoses – everything from depression to posttraumatic stress. However, what’s also important to know is that many people who hear voices have never used mental health services at all – and are not only untroubled by their voices, but actively find them to be a helpful and enriching presence in their lives. In fact, there is considerable evidence that a wide range of voice-hearing experiences exist throughout the whole population, which can vary from just occasionally hearing a voice saying one or two words, to hearing many voices constantly [1]. It is estimated that around 12% of children hear voices (often in the form of imaginary friends), and for adults the figure is somewhere between 5 and 15%. A number of famous and noteworthy people have spoken and written about their experiences with hearing voices. These include well-known actors (e.g. Anthony Hopkins and Zoe Wannamaker), musicians (e.g. John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lady Gaga, the dubstep artist Benga, and Danny McNamara from the band Embrace), sportspeople (e.g. Zinedine Zidane and Vinnie Jones), and famous historical figures (Gandhi, Joan of Arc, and Sigmund Freud).

In this respect, it is increasingly clear that the presence of voices isn’t so much of a problem as the type of relationship we have with our voices. In other words, someone who feels very distressed by their voices is far more likely to struggle with them; and this, in turn, is more likely to happen when the person is also experiencing other difficulties in their lives. For example, this might include:

• feeling depressed and/or anxious
• being very isolated
• not having helpful coping strategies
• using drugs or alcohol
• being a survivor of trauma or abuse

If you recognise any of your own experiences in this list, remember that this is not your fault, and you are not responsible for the distress you feel from your voices. Instead, it is likely that certain difficulties in your life have come together to make you feel overwhelmed, and that’s something we really hope we can help you with in this book.

What kinds of voices do people hear?

Just like people, no two voices are the same. Some voice-hearers find their experience a source of support, companionship, or helpful advice; for instance, the voices may arrive following a loss or bereavement and be very comforting. For example, according to one study in Sweden, 30% of people were still hearing the voice of their partner a month after they had died [2]. However, for some people, voice-hearing can be an extremely negative event. This can be because voices are very upsetting, because people around us may not understand or make us feel ashamed of these experiences, or it could be a combination of both these things. Sometimes voices can sound like people we know, or have known, in our life, or they can say things that are so cruel, unpleasant, or disturbing that it feels impossible that our minds could ever create such statements. This is a very understandable way to feel and can make it seem that the voices could only be coming from outside of ourselves. Everyone is of course their own expert about their experience, and we are not claiming that we know more about your voices than you do yourself. However, in this book, we would like to explore some possible suggestions for why we think voices can sometimes say things that feel so terrible and cruel, and why they can seem so at odds with how our own minds would think. We will come back to this in the next section when we talk about voice-hearing and emotions, particularly emotions related to a feeling of threat.

CHECK-IN BOX

How are you feeling reading about this? Do you need to take a break? Would it be helpful to talk about how you are feeling, or write down a couple of things? It may be that your voices have become angry or upset, in which case we would like to reassure them that it is not our intention to make them feel this way. Some people find it helpful to explore different ways of understanding their experiences, but there is no pressure for you or your voices to agree with what we are saying. If you feel something doesn’t apply to you that is fine. There is still a lot to come in the book that you might find helpful.

In order to give you a sense of the range of voice-hearing experiences that occur across different groups of people, we would like to share with you some research that one of us (Charlie) did, which was published in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology in 2012 [3]. We interviewed 12 people about their personal “out-of-the-ordinary” experiences, all of which had started within the last five years. Six of them were recruited from mental health services (the “clinical group”), and six from the wider population with no mental health service involvement (the “non-clinical group”). The majority of the experiences they reported were hearing voices and receiving messages from sources outside their own mind. The presence of these experiences was similar between both groups (see table below). However, the way they were described was very different. For the clinical group, the experiences were all talked about in medical terms, such as “symptoms” of a psychotic illness, but for the non-clinical group, they were not symptoms, but rather described in terms of spiritual/religious experiences, or as psychic abilities or mediumship skills.

A brief description of people’s experiences in both the clinical and non-clinical groups.

Participant	Out-of-the-ordinary experience (OOE)	Group
Holly	Receiving visions from God
Omar	Body taken over by spirits
Beth	Telepathic communication and speaking with God	Clinical
Tom	Receiving symbolic messages from other realms
Nessa	Hearing voices, and thoughts of being watched/filmed
Leroy	Hearing voices when nobody is there
Jenny	Body taken over by spiritual energy
Clive	Visions of people who have died and religious figures
Maria	Receiving words directly from God	Non-clinical
Daniel	Spiritual calling, and developing intuitive perception...