There is so much I want to say about this... so much I can't even begin.
A friend of mine posted this great Huffington Post article last week that was inspired by Elanor Longden's TED talk (below). Watch it. Please. It is worth the 15 min of your life that it will take.
Longden is a Board Member of intervoice, The International Hearing Voices Network. The basic principle of the organization is that hearing voices is "a normal though unusual variation in human behaviour" and "the problem is not hearing voices but the inability to cope with the experience."
Wow. This is one of those concepts that seems so simple and so obvious, but really hit me over the head this morning as revolutionary. I know, the first question you will ask, especially if you know me, is "OMG do you hear voices?" Yes. I do. But come on, we all do. We all self-talk at some point, and yes that is a version of hearing voices. Do I hear different voices of different people and daemons and such? No. I don't. But I do have an very active voice that can include destructive, especially self-destructive, ideas.
And over the years I have learned to keep these very, very hidden because I knew they, like my mania and my depression, were wrong and that people didn't like them... and wouldn't like me if they knew about them. And worst of all, they threatened to crack my perfect exterior where I always had everything together.
Instead, Longden and intervoice argue, respect these voices and learn to listen to them correctly. They may not be expressing things they way they should, but they are expressing something incredibly important about you (me!) and your experiences. In other words, they are trying to tell you something, they just really suck at it so don't take them literally.
I am not doing this talk justice at all. I think it was just so full of perfect wisdom that instead of writing my own thoughts I want to literally transcribe her words here and have you read all of them. So, instead of that... please, watch the video.
"Don't tell me about what people have told me about yourself, tell me about you."
Labels: depression, TED, voices