When I had my first psychotic episode I learned that I can control my voices and make them say “I’m a bannana.” Didn’t really think about it much after that. Look back on it now I realized how strange it was. It’s not something I’ve read or heard about other people doing. Just to clarify the voices I was controlling were in my surroundings like cars driving by or an AC unit.
If it’s through a sound I can start off by controlling them but then they get out of control and start in their own… it mainly happens through classical music
Sometimes yeah. I feel like it’s better when I am in control of my voices. I think it’s the whole problem with me that I assume voices are something separate from me and my brain. But I am often thinking they are in my environment, usually from other people, whether they are near me or long distance, either one.
1 Like
I can’t control mine. They talk to me all day. I watch tv to try to drown them out.
They’re their own beings so I don’t control what they say any more than I would control what anyone says. But I can control (most of the time, which is an improvement) whether or not I listen to them, and/or how I react.
2 Likes
I can argue with them…its my brain I should be able to shut them uo …but it doesn’t work…
2 Likes
I can only control the voices in my head fleetingly. … very annoying that I can’t keep it up
Kate xxx
just with meds i guess
Early on in this illness my mind was like a prison that I always tried to escape from, and never could. with some teaching,help,knowledge,therapy, I am now the warden of this prison, and my prisoners “imagination” can’t escape me.
1 Like
they say the longer you are aware of your illness or have had it, the easy it gets to control your reaction to them even off meds - at least I read that in some study.
The spirits talk to me constantly but for the most part I have learned how to banish the evil ones. Every now and then a new one will show up thinking they are going to degrade or berate me, and I have to work at getting them to leave me alone.
1 Like
I do by getting a little annoyed and thinking “This is not real.” and then busy myself with an activity.
1 Like
Like @flameoftherhine i argue with mine as well. Ive accepted the usual ones as parts of my psyche and personified them which just makes me feel better about them i think, so i can argue back and speak as derogatory about them as they do me, picturing them as entities as opposed me thinking im arguing with myself. seems to help lately but persistent audibles are a somewhat new phenomena for me being that my paranoia has been non existant thanks to meds, they have only gotten loud since i dont have the delusions and paranoia to distract me. I try to keep the arguements non verbal as best as possible but slip up occasionally and get the “who are you talking to?” from time to time from someone. I just plan on keep my dog around a lot and say im talking to him, lol.
I dont have voices i hear music playing in my head. It hasn’t happened for months on my new medications.
You shouldnt just assume everyone has voices just because you do. Schizophrenia exists on a spectrum everyone presents with different symptoms.
1 Like
Never even thought of that.
I couldn’t exactly control what they said, but there was a trick that gave some sense of control over them that I have mentioned before.
If I’d turn on the vacuum cleaner, and stick two fingers in the end of the hose, such that the pitch of the noise changed, my voices’ tone would change as well. From an ordinary conversation tone of voice, they’d turn to shouting, or screaming, though the content would not necessarily be influenced directly. Once I found it works like this for me, I used it when I felt they were getting pushy or arrogant or powerful… It gave a sense of being in control over them, which was a relief for that eased the feeling of them being able to hurt me in some way or another.
I can speculate why this would work, and two reasons seem plausible to me. It is known that there is some top-down influence to all perception, that is to say that some background beliefs you have shape how things are perceived, expectations and some general knowledge of the world works. When vacuuming with a loud vacuum cleaner, ordinary people in the vicinity would raise their voice and this expectation of how things work ordinarily may influence the perception of hallucinations. (I read Schizophrenia has been summarized by some as distortion of top-down/bottom-up processes of perception and belief, such that this makes some sense to me. Similarly, I once had the queer experience of having the source of my voices change from external to internal once my belief that they were neighbours changed into a telepathy delusion. Seems similar to me.)
Other thing I can think of is that hallucinations are extreme over-attribution of meaning to background noise. I don’t think this is the case at all times, but when I’m not hallucinating 24/7, my hallucinations do seem to be triggered by noises in the environment many times. The sound of a car passing by would go with a bout of hallucinations etc. Undefined, (white) noise-like sounds seem to do the trick best for me. It would make some sense to me, that at least when hallucinations just start to appear, they will need triggers like these. I.e., external stimuli with no clear meaning that get attributed anomalous meaning, again, perhaps due to top-down influences like expectation or anxiety.
I’d hope everyone suffering from voices finds a way to notice some control over them. It empowers us when we can feel helpless at the mercy of typically rather evil beings. Such a relief that can be.
i get music hallucinations, conversations, commentary hallucinations and just recently a voice telling me to die. i dont have any control over it.
Sometimes if I get angry and tell them “Stop it!”, then they calm down a bit or stop doing whatever they’re doing.
I can’t control them, though. I really wish I could.
i had my voice for 5 month.until one day i feel like i been controlled by a evil spiril.i started to ignore it.after 3 days it disappeared