The voices in my head | Eleanor Longden

Translator: Iris Xholi Reviewer: Helena Bedalli The day I left home for the first time to go to university was an important day, full of hope and optimism. I had done well in school. A lot was expected of me and with great joy I entered the student life of lectures, parties and stealing traffic cones. Now, appearances, of course, can be deceiving, and to a certain extent, this snappy, energetic mix between lecturing and traffic cone-stealing was polished, but well-crafted and compelling. Inside, I felt deeply unhappy, insecure, and completely scared: afraid of other people, of the future, of failure, and of the emptiness I felt inside.

But I was able to hide it and from the outside he looked like someone who had everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I fooled myself, and once the first semester ended and the second began there was no way anyone could have predicted what was about to happen. I was leaving a seminar when it began, singing softly, spelling the song as I had done hundreds of times before, when I heard a voice say softly, "She's leaving the room." I looked around but saw no one, but the clarity and determination of that comment was unmistakable.

Trembling, I left the books on the stairs and ran home, and I heard it again. "She is opening the door". This was the beginning. Zeri had arrived. And the voice continued to persist, day after week, continually, showing whatever it was doing in my third self. "She goes to the library". "She's going to the conference." He was neutral, passive, and after a while, strangely sociable and calming, although I noticed that the calm exterior sometimes changed and occasionally reflected my unexpressed emotions. If I was nervous and tried to hide it, which I often did, having learned to hide what I feel, then the voice would sound frustrated.

On the contrary, it was neither disturbing nor bad, but already at that moment it was clear that there was something to communicate to me about emotions, especially distant and unattainable emotions. That's when I made a fatal mistake: I told a friend about the

voices

and she was horrified. A limiting process had begun, the realization that normal people didn't hear noises and the fact that I began to believe that something was really wrong. This fear and distrust was contagious. Curiously, the voice began to sound less benign, and when she insisted that she receive medical treatment, I agreed, which was my second mistake.

I spent a while telling the University doctor what I recognized as a real problem: anxiety, low self-confidence, fear for the future, and what was in front of me was a boring indifference until I mentioned 'noise'. At that moment she dropped her pen, turned around and began to ask me questions with genuine interest. And to be honest, I was desperate for interest and help, and I started telling them all about the strange commenter. And I kept waiting for the voice to say, "She's digging herself a hole." I was then referred to a psychiatrist, who, according to the doctor, took a closer look at the presence of the voice, interpreting everything I said through a lens of madness.

For example, I was part of a student television channel that featured campus news, and during a meeting that was taking longer than expected, I said, "I'm sorry doctor, but I have to go, I'm doing the 6 o'clock news." of the clock." It already appears in my medical report that Eleonor has delusions of being a television news presenter. At that moment it happened that events began to take hold of me very quickly. I was then admitted to the hospital, the first of dozens to follow, and then diagnosed with schizophrenia, followed by a toxic and exhausting feeling of shame, despair, and wandering about myself and my future.

But as I was encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom, the fear and resistance to it began to intensify. This means that you take an aggressive attitude towards your mind, a kind of psychic civil war, which caused the number of

voices

to increase, becoming more and more threatening and resistant. Without hope and without help, I began to lock myself in my terrifying inner world in which the voices were destined to become my followers and at the same time my companions. They told me, for example, that if I proved that I deserved her help, then they would help me change my life and go back to the way I was before, and they gave me a series of strange tasks, a herculean task.

It started with small things at first, for example, he pulled out three strands of hair, but over time it became more extreme, giving me orders to hurt myself, a rather drastic task: "See that teacher over there? And how about ?" That glass of water? Then he empties the glass on the professor in front of the other students." What did he do? And needless to say, I was suspended from the faculty. A vicious circle of fear, avoidance, mistrust and misunderstanding had already formed, and this was a battle in which I felt helpless and unable to create peace or reconciliation.

Two years later, the deterioration was dramatic. The state of my mental health has been. a catalyst for discrimination, verbal abuse, physical and sexual assault, and my doctors have told me: "Eleonor, it would be better if you had cancer, because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia." I was diagnosed, given medication, and released from the hospital, and I was so tired of the voices that I tried to punch a hole in my

head

to get out of there. Now, when I look back on those desperate years in my life, I have the feeling that someone died in that place, but at the same time, someone else was saved.

A lost and broken man began that journey, but the person who emerged was a survivor who would become the man I was born to be. Many people throughout my life have hurt me and I remember them quite well, but these memories pale in comparison to the people who have helped me. Others like me who have survived, those other voices-listeners, friends and collaborators; the mother who never gave up on me, who knew that one day I would return to her and that she would wait for me no matter how long the wait for her was; the doctor who worked with me only for a short time but who strengthened the belief that recovery was not only possible but inevitable, and during the periods of my decline, he told my family: "don't give up.

I believe Eleonor can do it ". Sometimes it snows until May, but anyway summer inevitably arrives." 14 minutes are not enough to recognize the merits of all those good people who fought with me and for me and waited for me to return from the agony and loneliness of the place where But together, we created a mix of courage, creativity, integrity, and an unwavering belief that this fragmented self of mine could become one and heal. I thought those people had saved me, but what she knows now is that they did something. Much more importantly, they gave me the power to save myself and, most importantly, helped me understand what I always suspected: that my voices were a significant response to traumatic life events, especially during childhood, and as such not.

They were not my enemies but a source to understand my emotional problems that needed to be resolved. At first this was quite difficult to believe, especially because of the aggressiveness of the voices and their threats, so an important step was learning to separate a metaphorical meaning. of what was already there and how to really capture it. throughout. For example, I learned to interpret the voices that threatened to attack my house as my sense of fear and insecurity in the world, rather than as imminent danger. At first I believed them. I remember, for example, standing guard outside my parents' room one night to protect them from what I thought was a real threat of voices.

Because I had serious self-harm issues, most of the sharp objects in the house were hidden, so I ended up armed with a plastic fork and sat outside the room waiting to spring into action as soon as something happened. It was more or less: "Don't mess with me. I have a plastic fork, can't you see?" Strategic. But a later and much more fruitful response would be to destroy the message behind the words, so that when the voices tell me not to leave the house, I can thank them for alerting me to the insecurity I felt, because I had.

If I had been aware of it, I could have done something positive about it, but I had to reassure them and myself that we were safe and had no reason to be afraid. I set boundaries for the voices and tried to communicate with them in an understandable but respectful way, establishing a slow process of communication and cooperation in which we could learn to work together and help each other. Throughout this process, what I came to understand is that each voice was closely connected to some aspect of me, and each one carried the weight of emotions I had never been able to process or resolve, memories of trauma and sexual abuse. anger, shame, feeling of guilt, feeling of inferiority.

The voices replaced this pain and gave it voice, perhaps one of the greatest discoveries was understanding that one of the most violent and aggressive voices actually represented the part of me that had been hurt the most and, as such, required care and attention. the greatest goodness. Equipped with this knowledge, I could finally put myself back together, where each fragment is represented by a different voice, gradually leaving drugs and returning to psychiatry, but this time from the other side. 10 years after the arrival of the "first voice" I finally graduated, this time with the highest bachelor's degree in psychology that the university had ever given, and a year later, with the highest master's degree, which we must admit is not and so bad. for a crazy woman In fact, it was one of the voices in my

head

that gave me the answers during the exam, which can technically be called copying. (Laughs) And to tell the truth, sometimes I liked his attention.

As Oscar Wilde said: "The only thing worse than talking about it is not talking about it at all." It also makes you very good at eavesdropping, because you can hear two conversations at the same time. So it's not so bad. I have worked in mental health centers, spoken at conferences, published book chapters and academic articles, and I have argued, and continue to do so, for the importance of the following concept: that an important question in psychiatry should not be what's wrong with you. , but more than that, what happened to you. And all the while I was hearing voices, which I eventually learned to live with in peace and respect and which ultimately reflected a growing sense of compassion, self-control, and self-respect.

And I remember the most moving and wonderful moment when I was helping a young woman who was traumatized by the voices, I became fully aware that, for the first time, I no longer felt that way but that I could finally help someone. but who was I am now very proud to be part of intervoice, the organizing body of the international "Hearing Voices" movement, an initiative inspired by the work of Professor Marius Romme and Dr. Sandra Escher, who have identified hearing voices as a strategy of survival, a sobering action in a crazy situation, not as a symptom of schizophrenia to be endured, but as a complex and meaningful experience to be explored.

Together we have envisioned and created a society that understands and respects those who hear voices, supports the needs of people who hear voices, and values ​​them as citizens with full rights. This type of society is not only possible, but is being formed. To paraphrase Chávez, once a social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot humiliate a man who feels pride. You can't oppress people who are no longer afraid. For me, the achievements of the Hearing Voices movement are a reminder that sensitivity, friendship, justice and respect are more than words; They are obedience and faith, and that faith has the power to change the world.

Over the past 20 years, the "Hear the Voices" movement has created a network in 26 countries on five continents, working together to promote the dignity, solidarity and empowerment of people with mental disorders, to create a new language and practice hope, where, at the center of which is an unwavering belief in the power of the individual. According to Peter Levine, the human animal is a unique being endowed with an instinctive capacity to heal and the intellectual spirit to use this innate capacity. In this framework, for members of society, there is no greater honor or privilege than to accelerate this healing process in someone, to be a witness, to extend a hand, to share the weight of someone's pain, and to maintain hope. for its improvement.

And unlike survivors of stressful and difficult situations, we should not live our lives forever marked by the bad and harmful things that have happened to us. We are unique. We are irreplaceable. What we have inside can never be colonized, distorted or taken away. The light never goes out. And as a wonderful doctor once told me, "Don't tell me what other people have said about you. Tell me about yourself." Thank you. (Applause)