Listening to voices vs listening to doctor

Continuing the discussion from Have you any problem to how society works?:

Separated this out as a new topic.

I had this same problem a couple of decades back. It seemed like the doctor was making sense, but the compulsion to listen to voices and believe in the delusions was so overwhelming. I can tell you that not once in over 20 years has a single thing the voices have said would come to pass have actually come to pass (alien colonization, etc). I’ve discovered they have no power over me at all. They’re just noise I push to the background.

Your doctor is giving you good advice. Every time you hear a voice, ignore it. Tune it out. Don’t talk back. Don’t treat it like anything other than what it is – a bit of unimportant noise. You’ve got better things to do with your time.

Peace.

Pixel.

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I know this topic is probably meant for someone else but I just wanted to say that that is reassuring to me. I don’t hear voices but I get thoughts implanted in my heaad and only one has come sort of true. I guess the things I see haven’t come to pass like I haven’t been bitten by a rat or dragged into a dam by the grey man.

Thanks, this does help.

I will try to just see it as noise.

Over the years I’ve talked to SZs who thought they were having stuff revealed to them in advance by voices, which was proof that the voices were real beings. Over time they realized that it was all obvious stuff they were capable of figuring out on their own, but that they had attributed to the voices having some sort of incredible abilities instead.

Pixel.

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as long as u don’t say bad things tonight

I find it’s harder to deal with the physiological/emotional responses that come with things, but easier to ignore thoughts or what the entities say.

Like a couple years back one of them thought that my mother had poisoned my food and tried to warn me. I was able to ignore that and was able to eat (and didn’t die, of course). I was able to think it through and conclude that my mother wouldn’t poison my food, because it would be obvious, and she would go to prison for committing homicide, so she wouldn’t do that.

But I still had the fear response, and that feelings sucks, and it takes more effort to overcome that feeling than to dismiss notions like poisoned food. A surge of fear actually hurts in a weird way, in my chest, and it’s hard to just ignore something like that. Would be nice if my body listened to ME instead of entities or paranoid intrusive thoughts.

It’s incredibly hard at the outset, but over time it becomes easier, and then it finally becomes habit. It’s so automatic for me now that I barely notice the intrusion from voices/thoughts on the days I have them.

Pixel.

a good thing to do is occupy your mind…
i find that the less i have to think about the more the voices try to intrude…it;s almost as if as soon as my mind is running in neutral they’ll start up.
if i’m busy thinking about things or conversing out loud with real people though they tend not to talk other than offer some crappy pearl of wisdom which is always untrue.
once you get a handle on the fact that voices lie 24/7 then you begin to take back control.

my voices have lead all my delusional states in the past but i don’t let them even start these days…i refuse to be lead anymore…whenever they drop a bomb like so and so hates me or they’ll do impressions of friends or family saying horrid things… i just think it out.
how honest have they been in the past?
have they ever been on my side?
how likely is the scenario they are trying to paint?
i always come up on my own side against the voices in the end these days…i’ve had too much experience of complete and utter ■■■■■■■■ from them for 15 years…
no, never believe in voices.

there is research that pertains that voices come from the parts of your brain that are active while you are in r.e.m. sleep so in effect parts of your brain are dreaming while you are wide awake.
in our dreams our brains create all sorts of characters, animals, people demons, angels…they can walk talk, touch, feel emotions, be emotional, eat, drink…just like you do in reality while you’re awake.
not many people are able to differentiate between dreams and reality while they are asleep and this may be why the sz mind finds it hard not to believe in what the voices say or delusions because the sz mind s stuck in a waking dream because those parts of the brain that are active whilst in r.e.m. sleep are still active in the sz brain whilst he/she is awake.
it may also be why the stereotypical sz doesn’t move around a lot in an energised fashion…the brain sends out paralysis chemicals when we dream to stop us acting out our dreams and there may well be a component of this in the sz brain while he or she is awake…think of catatonic sz for example.
for the sz brain it is a continuous waking nightmare…i think that pretty soon sz itself will be reclassified as a r.e.m state disorder…a true neurological nightmare if you will.
nobody knows why some sz voices are friendly and some nasty but one day they will figure it all out until then…
do not trust the voices…
they are merely dream characters made up by your brain in r.e.m. state and carried over to your waking life…quite why the characters remain consistent is yet another mystery to be solved .

A somwhat related phenomenon is that of confirmation bias… In my case, the voices were speaking 24/7, making both vague and not so vague threads and predictions throughout the day. The vague ones turned out to come true some times. Well, it seemed that way. What happened though is that with those predictions in the back of my mind, I was kind of actively looking and searching to confirm these. They would tell me, ‘when you come home, we got something in store for you.’ Notice that such a statement does not have very clear criteria for what counts as a confirmation of it. I would go home, and I would start looking for anything unusual going on. In a state of heightened attention and the background confusion that comes with psychosis, you are bound to find something unusal. The mere fact of paying too much attention to anything can make it appear unusual. In turn, the vague criteria of the prediction make for anything to be able to confirm it.

My experience in SZ thinking is that it is often like this, I will find what I am looking for. And the problem lies not so much with what I find but with the fact that I am looking for it in the first place. Catching myself in the act of doing the above, this was hugely empowering to me. It became rather addictive to patrol my thoughts for such tendencies, for every time I noticed myself doing this, it felt I was winning over the voices.

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