what have the voices ever told you to do???
For me they just constantly have commentary on what im doing or thinking like they are in my head watching the whole thing and mental invasion causes rage until once in awhile they ask âdont you want to hurt somebodyâ? like the invasion and subsequent rage was all staged.I am so glad that im aware I have sz because otherwise id already be locked up for good.
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Many things. UmâŚcommit suicide, follow people asthey were bBritish intelligence sent to pick me upâŚyawnâŚtheir favourite is to try and beat me to a thought about carrying out a mundane or routine action like loading the dishwasher or putting rubbish in the bin. Iâll think of it silently then theyâll pipe up and say yes take the rubbish out or whatever action Iâm doing, like they thought of it first Lol. But obvs they are too slow and I always think of it first. Thatâs about it really. They donât really suggest a whole lot these days as I tend to ignore them and just get on with what was going to do in the first place. They are just mini mes competing for dominance really. Sad but true 
For a while now, my voices have been just a running script from the commentator⌠or the panic man has been running through my head⌠telling me everything is danger. Iâve been getting better at not responding to those⌠seeing that not everything is a danger.
In the past my voices have told me to make my final exit.
When I was at my worst⌠the voices in my head convinced me that everyone was going to harm my siblings⌠every teacher, coach, neighbor, even aunts and my own parents were a danger to my youngest siblings well being.
Running commentary on everything I did thought or was about to then â My Realityâ hit people are sensing and reading my thoughts and visions because Iâm a moonCatSpaceTrippân Alien and the whole world is in on it including channel ten in Australia 12:30 or something in the morning when ur mate (US) David letterman comes on the T.V and knowâs Iâm watching laughing and making jokes at me Iâve thought everything Iâm a trip and been in recluse for 8 years & todayâs a bitch but none of that â â â â anymore
They always told me to run away from home and never come back⌠
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Cut myself to prove Iâm real.
Hmm Iâm assuming you mean like bad things? The only ones who ever yell at me to do stuff is the demons. (This is excluding the one demon who I was abused by for nearly 3 years). Anyways the dumb demons, as I like to think of them, generally only come out if Iâm very stressed and then theyâll yell things at me like âKill them! Tear! Rip! Bite!â Or tell me to kill myself, punish, etc. I donât ever listen to them. It made me really upset and freaked out when I first started hearing them but Iâm used to them now and just think itâs meaningless noise.
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to be homeless because there were not enough of my kind on the streets.
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The enemy within: People who hear voices in their heads are being encouraged to talk back
One night, during her first year at the University of Sheffield,
Rachel Waddingham struggled to fall asleep. She could hear three
middle-aged men she didnât know talking about her downstairs. âThey were
saying, âSheâs stupid, sheâs ugly, I wish she would kill herselfâ,â she
remembers. âI was angry and went down to challenge them, but no one was
there. They kept laughing and saying, âSheâll never find us.ââ
The voices became a recurring presence, providing an aggressive,
unsettling commentary on her life. Waddingham came to believe that they
were filming her around the clock, and became paranoid. When she had a
neck ache, she assumed a tracking device had been planted under her
skin. At the supermarket, the voices would ask each other questions like
âDoes she know what sheâs buying?â â leading her to reach sinister
conclusions. âI worried they might have poisoned the food,â she says.
âIâd come back with orange juice, milk, bread and cheese, because itâs
all I could work out was safe.âWaddingham turned to alcohol to
cope, and avoided friends because she feared that âThe Threeâ would
secretly film them as well. Months later, she dropped out of the
university and moved into a bedsit, too afraid to eat or bathe. A doctor
eventually admitted her into a psychiatric hospital, where she was
diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on a cocktail of drugs. During her
eight months in the hospital, the voices faded, but the side effects of
the medication made life intolerable.
Waddingham gained more than 65 pounds and developed diabetes. Her
eyes would roll involuntarily, and she struggled with akathisia, an
overwhelming sense of restlessness that caused her to shuffle from foot
to foot. Suicide attempts followed, and she felt âlike a walking
zombieâ. Because she was no longer hearing the voices, she was released
from the hospital. And now, at 36, she is still on the meds (though she
is slowly weaning herself off them).Research suggests that up to
one in 25 people hears voices regularly and that up to 40 per cent of
the population will hear voices at some point in their lives. But many
live healthy and fulfilling lives despite those aural spectres.Recently,
Waddingham and more than 200 other voice-hearers from around the world
gathered in Thessaloniki, Greece, for the sixth annual World Hearing
Voices Congress, organised by Intervoice, an international network of
people who hear voices and their supporters. They reject the traditional
idea that the voices are a symptom of mental illness. They recast
voices as meaningful, albeit unusual, experiences, and believe that
potential problems lie not in the voices themselves but in a personâs
relationship with them.âIf people believe their voices are
omnipotent and can harm and control them, then they are less likely to
cope and more likely to end up as psychiatric patients,â says Eugenie
Georgaca, a senior lecturer at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
and the organiser of this yearâs conference. âIf they have explanations
of voices that allow them to deal with them better, that is a first step
toward learning to live with them.âThe road to this form of
recovery often begins in small support groups run by the worldwide
Hearing Voices Network (HVN). Founded in the Netherlands in 1987, it
allows members to share their stories and coping mechanisms â for
example, setting appointments to talk with the voices, so that the
voice-hearer can function without distraction the rest of the day â and
above all gives voice-hearers a sense of community, as people rather
than patients.
A central premise of HVN is that these voices frequently emerge
following extreme stress or trauma. Research bears that out: at least 70
per cent of voice-hearers are thought to have experienced some form of
trauma. The characteristics of voices vary widely from person to person,
but they often mimic the sound and language of abusers or their
victims: demonic and frightening, or angelic and friendly.Waddingham,
for instance, now hears 13 voices. Among them are Blue, a frightened
but cheeky three-year-old; Elfie, an angry adolescent; Tommy, a teenage
boy who criticises her speech; the Scream, a female voice filled with
pain and suffering (âWhen I first heard her, I felt so overwhelmed I was
unable to leave the houseâ); and the Not Yets, a group of voices
Waddingham is not yet ready to engage with fully. âThey say very nasty
things about me â abusive, sexual, violent things, which echo what I
heard when I was little,â she says. âI try to think of them as
frightened children that donât yet know that itâs not OK to say those
things.âWhen the younger voices canât fall asleep, Waddingham
reads them bedtime stories. When voices suggest that sheâs going to be
harmed by a stranger, she thanks them for their concern but lets them
know she is being vigilant.Eleanor Longden tells a similar story.
After leaving a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia
at 18, she was assigned to work with a psychiatrist familiar with the
hearing voices movement. He encouraged her to overcome her fear of her
voices, which included both human and demonic-sounding ones.Traditional
psychiatry discourages patients from engaging with voices, and prefers
to silence them through medication. But HVN members, like Longden, say
that listening to voices is vital to calming them down. And by
communicating back, Longden was able to test the boundaries of what
these voices could actually do. One time, a voice threatened to kill her
family if Longden didnât cut off her toe, and she could hear a âphantom
choirâ laughing along with him. She refused to obey. Her family didnât
die, but the choir did go silent.As she grew less afraid, Longden
sought to unpack the messages they carried. âI started to see my
experiences as a sane reaction to insane circumstances,â she says.
Longden had suffered years of sexual and physical abuse as a child. Her
memory is hazy, but she knows her abusers were men outside her family.
When she heard a voice calling her weak for accepting the abuse, she
began to read it as encouraging her to be strong and assertive. âI would
say, âYou can help me practiceâ and the voice was like, âAll rightâ.â
Some voice-hearers speak to their voices, while others use internal
dialogue. Still others communicate by writing things down. Since the
voices can manifest at any time of day, voice-hearers must think of
practical solutions to deal with them without alarming colleagues and
passers-by. Some choose to wear Bluetooth headsets so they can speak
aloud in public without causing alarm, while others simply talk into
their mobile phones.Standing by the pool at the Hotel Philippion
in Thessaloniki, the venue for this symposium, are Marius Romme and his
wife, Sandra Escher. The two have spent half a lifetime listening to the
trauma suffered by so many voice-hearers. Yet Romme, now 80, and
Escher, 69, remain warm, optimistic and almost evangelical in their
beliefs, which gave rise to the hearing voices movement three decades
ago. âVoices have significance in the lives of voice-hearers and can be
used to their benefit,â Romme says. âItâs not a handicap, itâs an extra
capacity.âRomme hasnât always thought that. Starting in 1974, he
ran the social psychiatry department at Maastricht University in the
Netherlands and saw patients at a community mental health clinic one day
a week. âAll my career, I worked with people who hear voices, and I
regularly prescribed medicine,â he says. He dismissed the voices as
symptoms of mental illness. But a patient named Patsy Hage changed that.Hage
started hearing voices as an eight-year-old, after being severely
burned. By the time she came to see Romme, she was 30 and her voices had
forbidden her from socialising, leaving her isolated and severely
depressed. Though tranquilisers relieved some of her anxiety, they
didnât silence the voices â and she questioned why Romme considered her
mentally ill but saw nothing strange about religious faith. âYou believe
in a God we never see or hear,â she said, âso why wonât you believe in
the voices I really do hear?âEventually, she gave Romme a copy of The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by the psychologist Julian Jaynes. In it, Jaynes argued that hearing
voices was common until the development of written language. He believed
the voices heard by the heroes of Homerâs Iliad were not metaphors but
real experiences. âThey were voices whose speech and direction could be
as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes,â he wrote, âas voices are
heard by epileptic and schizophrenic patients.âAttributing
meaning to the voices gave Hage comfort, and Romme encouraged her to
speak to other voice-hearers. With the help of Escher, a science
journalist he had met years earlier, he placed a national advertisement
asking voice-hearers to send in postcards with their stories. Around 700
arrived, including more than 500 from people who experienced auditory
hallucinations â and got on with life just fine. âWe thought that all
people who heard voices would become psychiatric patients,â Escher says.
âThat simply wasnât true.â
Romme and Escherâs belief that voices are not a symptom of disease
but rather a response to troubling life experiences â and their
treatment method of listening and responding to the voices â remains far
outside the mainstream. Russell Margolis, a professor of neurology at
Johns Hopkins University in the US, accepts that voices can result from
trauma, but he points out that they can also be part of broader
syndromes, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, which demand
specific treatment.âIâm sure [Romme and Escherâs] approach can be
helpful for some, but I can see some instances where it could be
destructive,â he says. âOne of my great concerns ⌠is that people can
get so wrapped up in their symptom that they donât move forward.âYet
for many, the hearing voices approach remains an important alternative
to the dominant psychiatric model. Waddinghamâs voices forced her to
confront her past and have helped her push past her pain. She now takes
care of the voices that once tormented her. âI can feel a lot of what
that voice is feeling,â she says. âIf I can chill them out and they can
feel safe, then I feel safe. Years ago, I would have interpreted these
feelings as evidence of me being watched. Now I have a way of making
sense of them that gives me some autonomy and control.âWaddingham
is now helping others do the same. She runs the Voice Collective, a
London-wide project that provides services to young voice-hearers and
their parents. In 2010, she began establishing hearing voices groups
inside English prisons, where, according to the Ministry of Justice, 15
per cent of women and 10 per cent of men demonstrate psychotic symptoms
but are left to cope on their own.The challenges they face â
alone in prison cells â make Waddingham even more thankful for how far
she has come. âI feel so privileged,â she says. âIâve travelled. Iâm
married. Iâve got cats. And Iâve started my own business. People always
say I work too much, and I say: âI spent a good decade drugged up with
no life. Iâm recapturing some of what I lostâ.â
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Iâm not saying the approach outlined in the above article is for everyone - it is pointed out that this is not a strategy approved by mainstream psychiatry - but it could be helpful for people for whom nothing else has worked.
Food for thought.
mine tell me to run as well
The âvoiceâ or really, message that I got one time told me to kill myself. So, I tried to hang myself from a ceiling light fixture. Luckily the light fixture wasnât strong enough to sustain my weight, otherwise, I would be dead today.
This post is way too long.
All thatâs appropriate for you to know is what we did that the voices told us to do. If we didnât do it then it doesnât matter.
Ive had it bad. Heard the devil nuke me. I could hear windows rattle with explosions no one else did.
They comment, say perverted things. Some helpful ones tell me not to go places.
This is a 
thread
My âvoiceâ, or really messages, usually tell me to practice my piano all of the time. But it comments on all kinds of things that are going on in my life. It likes to let me know that it is watching me and keeping careful tabs on me. Thankfully, it is usually never mean spirited. I take too many meds for that.
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