One of my psychiatrist mentioned the difference between “Inner voice” and the “voice of auditory hallucination”.
She said: Inner voice is the voice you can control. Auditory hallucination is something you can’t control.
From what I understand, inner voice can pause when we want to.
It’s not entirely true for me. I don’t have auditory hallucinations but I have inner voices that I can’t control, like I could think other people’s thoughts…
Add: I also have my own inner voice that I control.
When I was a child, my inner voice, or “self talk” as I heard one shrink describe it, was nonstop. I was always thinking something. In conjunction with the stress buildup prior to my psychotic break, I began shouting thoughts out of my head with great frequency. What I’m saying is that the silence I experience so often now is likely made much worse by the illness. Then there’s something separate called “poverty of thought,” but that includes, according to my last shrink, psychomotor retardation, meaning the nerve impulses are deadened and the same amount of brain effort produces less physical motion (I presume), so you move a bit like you’re underwater. So that’s how you can tell the difference.
Schizophrenia makes life more difficult. I can understand what you are saying, ChestRockWell, by “the same amount of brain effort produces less physical motion…”. We would need 1000x (for example) more effort to achieve what a normal person could easily achieve.
I think inner voices/persistent thoughts are not easy to control and getting to the source of the thought-voices can really help quiet them , but controlling negative thoughts isnt easy to do it takes practice .
Knowing this was very helpful for me.
For me currently I only have my own inner voice. It feels like the auditory voices that I can’t control have gone away. As if a door has been sealed off
I was always thinking and talking within myself as a child. It didn’t feel lonely then but it does now looking back - not having friends to talk to instead. If I had had friends I don’t know if I would have connected with them or not.