Conversations Within - Hearing Voices II - Day 30 of "100 Symptoms"
Channel: nednednerB the Schizophrenic
Date: 2019-04-29

What is "voice sculpting" for schizophrenics? Karen Taylor says it is about people learning to "dialogue compassionately with their voices and learning what the voices may represent".
This video shares the experience of my own Conversations Within, at an early point in my psychotic journey.

I started sculpting voices on my own before the peak of psychosis, and I ended up not hearing voices to a "common" degree, but my auditory sense still hallucinates and can activate sometimes. I started to hear voices as a teen, and I spent time talking back to them, which might have been a good choice according to those like Karen Taylor:

https://www.spotlightonmentalhealth.com/voice-sculpting-with-karen-taylor-nov-21-2019/

My knowledge about this topic arises from symptoms I experienced in the early onset of my psychosis. As a teenager around 16, and over several months, I developed the symptom of having disturbing conversations in my head.

I would come home from high school, and I would go into my back yard and pace back and forth. I felt like I was testing out hypothetical conversations. I would test out the statements of peers or teachers as well as field my responses and theirs. Eventually this experience was seamless.

It was easy to imagine-hear the conversation as a strong subliminal automatic flow. At times of stressful and late night insomnia, sometimes the subliminal talk became actually auditory. Eventually the internal conversation would become less voluntary and more uncontrollable.

For me, I wanted to hold many significant conversations, but I felt pressure as if I couldn't actually have them. So I started suppressing my thoughts and feelings when they would occur, and I'd test the subject on my own. In the end I often experienced a response to the situations I encountered, but I would be silent and the situations would become automatic.

However, I would engage in a "talking storm" as I once put in writing years ago, so I would understand my issues as resolving in some way. But when I didn't escape harmful situations or actually resolve conflicts, that meant I would suffer incredibly for a few years.

I have sparingly mentioned in my other videos that I was the target as a teen of two sexual predators, and that situation came with a huge compounding of stress toward my eventual psychotic collapse. Suffice to say, for several years my social situation was a pressure boiler for stress. Eventually it popped into full blown hallucination, delusional thinking, and disorganized behaviour.

In a very long term trend, I've started to understand and actually share my emotional states and experiences with others I connect to. To start a real conversation is usually the hardest part, and after that it is easier to share. Real conversations have a different outcome than hypothetical ones. Sharing one's understanding with another has a profound ability to lessen the impacts of suffering.

Thanks for watching.

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I have schizophrenia every day. Even though I was diagnosed in early 2000s, I experience and manage symptoms daily. So here are "100 Symptoms!"

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