Schizo type voices/ meds (Trigger Warning)

There has always been a very odd voice, since the beginning of all my DID stuff. I don't think it is an alter. It says weird things when I talk to it and seems illogical and crazy.

Trigger warning (violence) It will tell me to kill myself or that it is going to kill other people, or that I have killed other people.
End Trigger warning

This stuff has been really confusing this past year for me because it has been hard for me to tell who is saying what and at times it has been very distressing.

Trigger warning (death, violence)
I had a traumatic event where a friend died. This schizo type voice has said that I/we did it. Some of the alters have sided with this voice and others have no clue either way, or some as a sick joke have gone along with it to cause trouble for me.
End Trigger warning

I recently started on a mood stabilizer, my mood is calming down. Things are getting clearer. I don't think the voice is tied to my bipolar dx, but maybe.. I dont know.

I have talked with our therapist about it. It is hard to talk about, because I am scared that what it says is true. It really makes me question reality.

I know that an anti-psychotic will provide some help here, but I don't know how it will affect the alters... It is hard enough for me to talk about this DID stuff, but I feel when I start talking about this voice to my new psychiatrist he will try to dope me up and make my treatment all about this one voice.

Has anyone used an anti-psychotic? Did it make everything really foggy and make it hard to think? Did it negatively affect communication between alters?

I haven't met with this new psych yet. I did do an intake interview with a therapist at his clinic. The therapist decided after meeting me one time and with me showing him my diagnosis of DID and Bipolar 2 from my psychologist, that I don't have DID, but an anxiety disorder.

This kind of $*&% is so ridiculous. His reasoning was that an anxiety disorder is the same as a dissociative disorder. WTF is wrong with this guy?

So I don't have high hopes for this clinic and what their psych will be like...

I believe that I experience both disassociation issues as well as psychotic symptoms. I can definitely relate to being nervous of the whole full-disclosure thing in therapy. For me it's because I'm so afraid I'm going to somehow screw up my own treatment. I also feel very overwhelmed by the idea of trying to tackle both disassociation and psychosis. One or the other wouldn't seem too bad, but the idea of trying to sort and tackle both makes me feel like throwing in the towel sometimes.

I also have a voice that seems very irrational and antagonizing. However I'm not sure if this is some kind of abuser introject or a self-persecuting alter thing, or if it is a sign of paranoid psychosis. The other night my mother gave me a piece of the chicken dinner she was cooking, to let me taste-test how it was going so far. This voice said, the moment my mother handed me the chicken, "She poisoned it." I didn't believe this and ate the chicken anyway. However I was sitting there full of intense, irrational anxiety that I might start dying or something because what if it was poisoned. So I'm actually sitting there all anxious and wondering if I'm about to die. Of course it wasn't poisoned and I didn't die. Then later I couldn't find some spare change I knew I had put somewhere, and the voice insisted, "She (my mother) took it." And I felt so flustered and irritated that I snapped back, "Right, just like she poisoned the chicken," and that seemed to shut the voice up.

My plan is to just try to be brave and tell my therapist everything as I feel up to it. The only possible hope for ever getting better is to be as open and honest as I can be. But it's definitely a struggle.

Years ago I was put on an atypical-anti-psychotic called Zyprexa. I was on it for a few weeks (per witnesses) but I only remember the first day taking it. I can't remember the rest of the few weeks, nor can I remember the time period following when I stopped taking it. Was it because of D.I.D. and I am an alter/host who went away? Is it because the dosage was so strong that it practically put me in a mental coma? I don't know. Witnesses say I was vibrant, happy, active, not foggy, out of it and sleeping all the time. But for all I know, I was only pretending to take it. It seems like something I would do.

I think no matter what it's scary. Strong supervision you can trust is probably a must-have safety net.

Sorry if my post makes you more nervous, just trying to give honest feedback on what happened with me.

Now that I think about it, it may very well be an abuser introject, but I'm not sure. Something my biological father often drilled into my mind when I was growing up was that my younger brother was out to get me. My brother and I had some typical sibling rivalry phases, but other than that, my memory is that my brother and I were always very close. My biological father however often insisted to me that someday my brother was going to grow up, be bigger and stronger than me and beat me up. So for all I know I have abuser introject who does something very similar as far as constantly telling me that others are going to get me / are out to get me. But then the voice is so similar to paranoid psychosis that I just don't know.

Some voices are not alters. Hearing voices that say very frightening, ego-alien things is common in obsessive compulsive disorder, severe depression, and severe anxiety. Anti-psychotic medication can help, but so can anti-anxiety medication. These are temporary aids. Also talk therapy helps, if it is done specifically to lower anxiety. That generally means no trauma work until the anxiety subsides to a tolerable level!

When I began therapy my anxiety was extremely high and I had a lot of obsessive thoughts, the same rather pointless thoughts over and over again, to the point where some days I could get nothing done because I was so completely distracted by the thoughts filling my head. It turned out those thoughts were (DID jargon) passive influence. They were day-dreams coming through to me from one of my alters who was unaware of the outside world and had no idea anyone was "tuning in" to her. There was a feed-back loop: anxiety made the obsessive thoughts worse and obsessive thoughts made the anxiety worse. Interrupting the looping was hard work! Ultimately what helped me most was doing internal system meetings. I finally made direct contact with that alter! Then the passive influence mostly stopped.

[Posted too soon. Continuing...]

Clearly this voice is aware of the outside world. "She poisoned it" refers to something right in front of you. This sort of voice certainly could be an introject, but not all introjects are alters and not all voices are introjects. Generally a voice expressing this sort of content is not considered to be a psychosis. (If you completely believed everything the voice said, that would be psychotic.) Are you able to dialogue with this voice?

Una+ wrote:Clearly this voice is aware of the outside world. "She poisoned it" refers to something right in front of you. This sort of voice certainly could be an introject, but not all introjects are alters and not all voices are introjects. Generally a voice expressing this sort of content is not considered to be a psychosis. (If you completely believed everything the voice said, that would be psychotic.) Are you able to dialogue with this voice?

I haven't tried yet, as far as engaging in a dialogue. I get so flustered and nervous when I have that sort of loud, intrusive thought that my knee-jerk reaction has been to try to ward it off, not talk with it. I don't want to consider its 'side of the story' so to speak, because its side of the story could make me outright neurotic if I lost that debate (again so to speak). In the example above, I could have wound up believing that I had eaten a piece of cyanide-soaked food or something.

I am finding that the voices become the most active at night or the more tired I am, and the more I try to engage them in dialogue, the more grim and messed up the whole thing gets. I get the very strong impression that they want me to stay out of their business and not engage them, but at the same time, I feel like they're engaging me in a way. So I get a severe mixed messages thing going on. I encountered one last night who wouldn't say anything at first, and then would only say towards the end, "You have no power here," and "Go away" and "Get out of here" and it was clearly trying to intimidate me based on the visuals I was getting. But then I feel like, why the heck did you show up in the first place then. I feel like I'm on an important mission to get to these entities, and then they push me away or lash out. And that's how it goes until I get so overwhelmed that I just want to space out and not think about anything.

I mean seriously do they want to be rescued or not. I don't get it.

Coppermoon
That voice has been very similar to those things you are describing! Very helpful!

Una+ wrote: Hearing voices that say very frightening, ego-alien things is common in obsessive compulsive disorder, severe depression, and severe anxiety

I have been having a lot of anxiety (probably more than I am aware of) And I definitely do some OCD type mental obsessions. I'm gonna have to talk to my therapist about this. I would really like to avoid psych meds as much as possible.

Una+ wrote: It turned out those thoughts were (DID jargon) passive influence.

This is very interesting, it really makes us think.

Coppermoon-
My reaction from trying to engage with that voice is very much like what you describe as well. It seems to get no where and when I have tried to see its point of view it also leads no where/ me being insane.

robotfun wrote:Coppermoon
That voice has been very similar to those things you are describing! Very helpful!

My reaction from trying to engage with that voice is very much like what you describe as well. It seems to get no where and when I have tried to see its point of view it also leads no where/ me being insane.

Part of me wonders, hypothetically if these voices are fragments/alters or something along those lines, could it be that they contain 'lunacy' for us in the same way that some fragments/alters contain rage, grief, fear, etc?

I mean, theoretically my understanding is that D.I.D. happens so that people don't go insane. But if something was so traumatic and overwhelming that we would have gone insane if our brains did not splinter it off and assign it to its own identity, then theoretically, could that result in the identity that had to hold onto the trauma for us - going insane?

Just a theory that came to me while re-reading this thread, not sure if it has any merit or not.

Possible Trigger Warning

I dont have DID, but is it really just one alter that holds all the trauma memory, or would it be split between multiple alters to keep any one from too much damage?

C-standard9 wrote:Possible Trigger Warning

I dont have DID, but is it really just one alter that holds all the trauma memory, or would it be split between multiple alters to keep any one from too much damage?

My understanding is that different alters can hold different trauma memories. I don't fully understand why there would be several alters without several different trauma scenarios, since I would have assumed that one alter deals with everything and then there is the oblivious host. But articles I've read seem to indicate that it can be sort of like a pass-the-torch phenomenon. As in, the Host is overwhelmed and so Alter A gets created, but at some point Alter A gets overwhelmed, so Alter B gets created to take over - and then on and on through the alphabet until trauma stops being introduced. But I don't know if that's exactly the case or if it can be the case, just not for everyone.

To answer C-standard9's question: Elements of a single traumatic experience can be divided between alters in a variety of ways. Each person's system has its own style of compartmentalizing (packaging) trauma so that it is manageable. However, and the reason we end up in therapy: this is a temporary patch, not a repair.

About these voices and their content. Robotfun, if you are able to dialog with the voice it may be an alter. Possibly one who never takes executive control, and may be a fragment encapsulating fear. To me, the content you have related so far does not suggest insanity; it does suggest overwhelming fear, anxiety, and a consequent attitude of suspicion. Overwhelming emotions, suppressed, often lead to cognitive distortions. Even if your therapist is fuzzy on dissociative disorders vs anxiety disorders, he is likely to be able to help you with this. Suppressed emotions and cognitive distortions are pretty much universal, hence the focus of most psychotherapies. Be open with your therapist about what the voice says, and let him help you with strategies for talking with the voice.

As a rule the voices we hear are not omniscient (not all knowing) so we are wise not to take at face value all they say. Listen carefully, ask questions, consider, weigh the evidence, and be guided by your own inner moral compass.