Talk to the voices: Unconventional yet obvious ways to heal schizophrenia and average mental mayhem

Saturday, September 21, 2013 by: Mike Bundrant
Tags: voices in your head, mental health, mind

(NaturalNews) Your mind has a mind of its own.

The subconscious mind is operating around the clock, processing information and creating sub-realities outside of your awareness.

If you doubt this, then you must not believe that dreaming is possible. You've never had a nightmare that scared the pants off you, causing you to wake up and feel relieved to be in your bed.

The relief came as your conscious mind reoriented to a more familiar reality and dismissed the sub-reality. Whew!

Every day, all day long, normal, average people are walking around hearing voices in their head. We hear voices from the past of parents and teachers and other influential people. We hear voices that say, "You can do it!"

We also hear critical voices. "You're such a loser. You will fail. You can't do it." The inner critic is perhaps the most insidious obstacle that anyone faces. People react to the inner critic as if it were real and speaking the truth.

In the case of schizophrenia, the voices are more dissociated. The troubled person experiences these voices as separate from himself or coming from the outside world.

People with schizophrenia hear voices coming from imaginary people and creatures, inanimate objects and from interesting places like light sockets. This is merely a more extreme example of a normal human phenomenon.

In fact, researchers suggest that as little as 3,000 years ago, people regularly heard voices coming from trees and rocks and all kinds of objects in the environment. They speculate that this was merely a stage of development in consciousness. Read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

Either way, hearing voices in our head is part of the deal. When voices talk to you, whether or not you perceive those voices as part of you or part of a lampshade, why don't you just start a conversation and learn something?

I don't talk to strange voices, Mike! I'm not a lunatic.

Sure, but you do react to them, don't you. They annoy you. They paralyze you with fear. They influence your thoughts all day long. You pretend they aren't there and wish they would go away. I'd call that crazier than simply talking back to them and figuring out what's going on in your sub-conscious mind.

Cases of schizophrenia are currently being widely and successfully treated in Europe through group education circles known as the Hearing Voices Network. People with a diagnosis of schizophrenia are said to be reclaiming their lives by the tens of thousands.

The Hearing Voices Network is the brain child of Dr. Marius Romme, a Dutch psychiatrist who set up thefirst meetings for voice hearersin the Netherlands on a dare from a patient who was unhappy that her experience was not being taken seriously.

The first meeting of the Hearing Voices Network washeld in Holland in 1989. The movement hasflourished in the United Kingdom.

What if you could negotiate peace with the strange, annoying or critical voices in your mind?

What if ignoring them is the least helpful thing to do? What if pretending they do not exist only makes them more persistent? What if the crazy people are those that walk around in denial, pretending they are all put together, when on the inside they feel like they are falling apart?

NLP developers have a rich history of dealing with schizophrenia in unconventional ways. One case involved a gentleman in the hospital who took bizarre orders from a voice coming out of electrical sockets in the wall. The voice would make demands and he would feel compelled to obey.

According to NLP legend, one practitioner had a crazy idea. He hooked up a small speaker inside a socket in the patient's room and sat in an adjacent room with a microphone. When the patient entered his room, he heard the practitioner's voice coming out of the socket.

The voice in the socket said, "Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

"Your voice changed," the patient remarked.

"So what! I can change my voice if I want to. It's not your place to question me."

"Oh. Sorry about that. What do you want from me now?"

His authority established, the practitioner gave instructions, "You've been listening to me for some time now. However, you aren't going to listen to anything I may say in the future. You don't need to do anything else for me. You're off the hook, forever."

I don't know how things turned out or even if this legend is true. The point is, there are creative ways to deal with voices if we accept the situation for what it is. Then, anything is possible.

Conventional psychiatry, these days, considers talking back to your voices "irresponsible."

It seems psychiatry prefers to pretend that deeper parts of the mind don't exist, and if they do, we should avoid getting involved. This is what modern psychiatry has become!

Don't explore your mind. Don't learn something new. Take this pill instead.

In my coaching practice, I help people with self-sabotage.

Here is a common scenario:

Client: I don't know...I can't seem to do what I want. Every time I try, I end up doing the opposite. It's so frustrating!

Me: How do you know when to do the opposite?

Client: Huh? Um, well, I just get this feeling like I don't want to do anything healthy, like I don't care about anything.

Me: Where do you feel it in your body? Do you see or hear anything in your mind that matches the feeling?

Client: Right in my chest. Like, I am pissed off. And there is this voice that says, "Screw you. I can do what I want."

Me: Great. Ask the voice why it wants to screw you up.

Client: Wow. It just said, "Because that's what I do."

Me: Yep. Here's the deal: You've been trying to ignore this little voice for a long time and it's not going away. Obviously, it needs something, probably an unmet need from long ago. So, we are done neglecting this aspect of your psyche.

I'd like you to begin to appreciate this part of you, because you are not going to get what you want without its agreement. This is a very powerful part of your mind and you won't be successful unless you align with it. There's a lot to learn about your inner world, so let's continue the conversation...

Start a conversation with yourself

From here, anything is possible. The fragmented parts of your psyche are just doing what they do. They will not magically align without some conscious intervention and they will not go away just because you pretend they don't exist.

Whether you are diagnosed schizophrenic or just an average person with an inner saboteur, your subconscious mind is waiting to be heard.

Sources:
http://blogs.psychcentral.com
http://www.hearing-voices.org/

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Watch the free video The AHA! Process: An End to Self-Sabotage and discover the lost keys to personal transformation and emotional well-being that have been suppressed by mainstream mental health for decades.

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Mike Bundrant is co-founder of the iNLP Center and host of Mental Health Exposed, a Natural News Radio program.

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