How to Live Successfully When You Hear Voices

by Karen Taylor

Working to Recovery (WTR) has always specialized in working with people who hear voices. In this article, Karen Taylor, who has a background in psychiatric nursing, describes the organization’s approach to working with people who hear voices and how WTR helps people recover their lives and live with their voices.

Can you hear voices and be healthy? Can people who hear overwhelming and distressing voices be helped to find ways to live successfully with their voices? Over the past 20 years, research and practice originating in Europe and developed in partnership with voice hearers indicate that this is indeed the case.

This empowering approach to assisting people—both adults and children—who hear voices and are distressed by them starts from the premise that voices are related to real feelings and emotions that need to be investigated and understood. Therefore, voices need to be accepted as a part of oneself rather than eradicated. This perspective has made a significant impact on the way voice hearers and mental health services regard the voice experience, leading to the development of a vigorous peer support network and important changes in the practice and treatments offered by service providers.

A measure of the success of this approach is that there are now networks and activity in more than 23 countries around the world, with an emergent network being established in the United States.

Need to promote recovery. WTR was born out of the need to promote recovery. Established in 2002 by Ron Coleman and myself, the Scotland-based WTR offers training and consulting services around the world to many different kinds of agencies and organizations specializing in mental health practice.

Ron, who survived the psychiatric system for more than 10 years, started his recovery journey when he became a member of a hearing-voices group in Manchester, England, in the early 1990s. After listening to other voice hearers in the group for a year without saying anything at all, he started to speak up. He began by sharing his own experiences, and as an expert (by experience), soon developed a deep understanding of the issues facing people who hear voices. As Ron says of this period in his life:

“At my very first hearing-voices group, a fellow voice hearer asked me if I heard voices. When I replied that I did, she told me that they were real. This does not sound like much, but that one sentence has been a compass for me, showing me the direction I needed to travel and underpinning my belief in the recovery process.”

People around him realized the massive potential he had as a public speaker and innovative thinker on mental health and recovery. Over the next few years, Ron developed and ran training days and spoke at meetings and conferences on the subject of hearing voices, evidencing the possibility and hope of recovery.

Talking with patients, negotiating with voices. Then he started to write. With Mike Smith, a psychiatric nurse he’d befriended, Ron wrote a workbook for voice hearers, Working With Voices. This book has been the foundation of many of WTR’s subsequent training programs and is based on how Ron gained control of his voices. To enable voice hearers to understand their voices better in a systematic way, the workbook asks the voice hearer to consider the ways in which life events and voices can be connected, describes a variety of long-term coping mechanisms, and offers a range of ways that can help the person hearing voices cope better with the experience. The objective of the workbook is to help voice hearers respond to the challenges the voices throw up in a resilient and positive way and ultimately to gain ascendancy over them.

Our best-known workshop is a 1-day event, also called “Working With Voices.” This workshop helps workers understand voices better and develop their confidence, so as not to be afraid of talking with their clients about them. As a psychiatric nurse, I know how important and liberating this is. When I started nursing, it was common practice to be taught to not engage in conversation

with a consumer about his or her voices, as this would be colluding with the consumer in a false belief or delusion and could be harmful. I have yet to see any evidence for this claim; in fact, the research shows the opposite: the simple process of talking to people about their voices reduces anxiety and even lessens hospital stays.

Ron and I have also developed a 2-day workshop for voice hearers and workers, where we bring workers and voice hearers together to work, in pairs, through the Working With Voices workbook. We then bring the larger group together to discuss their findings. As part of the training, Ron runs a hearing-voices group with the voice hearers who are in attendance, to assist workers in better understanding the process. What I find astonishing, no matter where in the world we run this workshop, is the number of workers who will confess that they have learned more about their partner voice hearer during those 2 days than in the previous years of working with them. I believe this is because, unfortunately, we learn to not ask the right questions, learn to take a life history with no interest in the “life story,” and forget the person behind the diagnosis.

Our latest workshop on hearing voices concerns a technique called “voice dialoguing,” which involves voice hearers talking back to their voices and negotiating with them. This is something some voice hearers have always done. We teach workers how to talk to the voices heard by the voice hearer with the objective of finding out more information about the characteristics of the voices, negotiating with the voices themselves, and showing the voice hearer how to do this if he or she has not engaged with these voices before. This may seem bizarre, but it works and has been proven to help the voice hearer gain control of his or her voices.

Significant progress. In our work with voice hearers, we have found that the most common reason a person hears voices is that the hearer experienced sexual, emotional, or physical abuse as a child. In many cases, one of the dominant and controlling voices is that of the abuser. Sometimes, another of the voices is that of the abused child. The recovery work in these cases concentrates on restoring the person’s “emotional innocence,” as many of the voice hearers carry considerable and overwhelming shame and guilt about their experiences, which is not theirs to carry. Once this takes place, there is often significant progress in their journey toward full recovery.

I feel honored to have carried out this work over the past 13 years. I have met many wonderful, talented people who had all but given up on life but, through the influence and support of Ron and other recovered voice hearers, have started to make the journey toward recovery for themselves. I can honestly say that setting up WTR has been the best thing that Ron and I have ever done, and I look forward to many more years of sending our message out to the world.

Ron Coleman and WTR associate Paul Baker will be visiting the United States to conduct a 2-week lecture and training tour in October 2011. They hope that sharing their experiences and knowledge with interested groups and individuals will help stimulate the further development of work with people who hear voices in North America. For more information about this tour, contact Karen Taylor at karen@workingtorecovery.co.uk.
Posted in Recovery to Practice Newsletter. Reposted at darkestcloset.blogspot.com