Hearing voices

In another thread, under ice asked:

under ice wrote:When a person with DID hears voices or conversation inside, is it something that you actually hear with your ears, like an auditory hallucination as if there were actual people speaking to you or with each other in the same space? Or is it 'mental' conversation? Can you actually tell this inner conversation from actual physical people talking?

Good question. I hear mental conversation that I can tell from conversation out loud, although sometimes I (or "I"?) reply out loud. Sometimes I think I hear someone speaking to me or calling my name but no one is there; I am not sure if that is someone in my system talking, or not.

I've been wondering about this, thanks for making a thread. I hear mental conversation but it's not clear, only a few sentences can be clear or there is a sort of monologue. I used to have these conversations a lot more when I was younger, but they were either real situations that were playing like a loop inside my head, or imagined conversations with people I knew in real life. It verged on compulsive sometimes.
Only once I've heard non-existent speech that sounded like someone is right next to me and I got scared badly, but I was very little then.

I experience the voices contributing mental conversation and comments as distinctly not me, but someone else talking: someone in my head, other than me, who is aware of and responds to my external environment. I entered therapy in January because, during an extremely delicate phone call, I heard a 3rd party comment and realized there was an eavesdropper in my head.

I'm Farely new at this. It is unorganized right now. I acknowledged the presence and are now coming through often and sporadically. I have mental conversations. When I can speak our loud I do because it makes it simpler to hold a conversation amongst us. Some of us talk, some push their emotions on me and I have one that likes me to sit back and observe. She is very strong and can take over quite easily however she does let me stay and watch.

Last night I had no idea that one came through until I asked a questions and reLized that I was not present for about 5 min.

DID is weird.

When I'm doing good, and when I'm also safe, I hear them in my head if I want to, and if they want to. Some alters are more clear in some situations. Some fade totally away in some situations.
When we were a kid, we would also get nothing in our head and it would be like "shh she cant hear us" and 3 4 different types of music to shut me out if I got curious. If I could hear anything at all it would be non-finished sentences, unclear monologues, people talking about me etc. But you gotta push through that prove them you want to know and can know. Tell them you're their friend. Ask them to speak a little louder. Tell them you think you should stick together. Whatever helps. Just keep encouraging the talk whenever.
I experienced the loops of imaginative conversations and twisted versions of earlier happenings too. They were often things that they would have said /wanted to do or wanted to be in my place, fantasies they had, like wishful thinking or being acknowledged for something they think is important to them etc -although it's hard to think back clearly.
We are a group of people who live in this head and that is also how we talk a lot, and how I perceive them talking in my head. It became even easier to understand them all once we learned to gather inside, and learned to take turns with talking. If it doesn't work we will make notes everywhere and journal expressively so that they become aware of my issues and maybe want to help or answer anyway in the end.
I also have some alters that cannot talk. They often have others speaking for them or they can learn to show things in dreams or daydreams if they cant journal. Otherwise it will be hard to connect to them, I have that with one.
Also when the truth about us became known to me, I heard the inner voices a lot louder than the outside people and couldn't stop it.
I have thought that I was hallucinating, when f.e. I am having flashbacks because those sounds can be so invasive. People calling my name, I experienced that too. In my opinion it were the alters because I haven't experienced it anymore ever since I got to know them.
What I wanna know is, how long do I have to keep doing this? I'm so sick of it. I just wanna live normally and be happy and capable.

TheCollective wrote:When I'm doing good, and when I'm also safe, I hear them in my head if I want to, and if they want to. Some alters are more clear in some situations. Some fade totally away in some situations.
When we were a kid, we would also get nothing in our head and it would be like "shh she cant hear us" and 3 4 different types of music to shut me out if I got curious. If I could hear anything at all it would be non-finished sentences, unclear monologues, people talking about me etc. But you gotta push through that prove them you want to know and can know. Tell them you're their friend. Ask them to speak a little louder. Tell them you think you should stick together. Whatever helps. Just keep encouraging the talk whenever.
I experienced the loops of imaginative conversations and twisted versions of earlier happenings too. They were often things that they would have said /wanted to do or wanted to be in my place, fantasies they had, like wishful thinking or being acknowledged for something they think is important to them etc -although it's hard to think back clearly.
We are a group of people who live in this head and that is also how we talk a lot, and how I perceive them talking in my head. It became even easier to understand them all once we learned to gather inside, and learned to take turns with talking. If it doesn't work we will make notes everywhere and journal expressively so that they become aware of my issues and maybe want to help or answer anyway in the end.
I also have some alters that cannot talk. They often have others speaking for them or they can learn to show things in dreams or daydreams if they cant journal. Otherwise it will be hard to connect to them, I have that with one.
Also when the truth about us became known to me, I heard the inner voices a lot louder than the outside people and couldn't stop it.
I have thought that I was hallucinating, when f.e. I am having flashbacks because those sounds can be so invasive. People calling my name, I experienced that too. In my opinion it were the alters because I haven't experienced it anymore ever since I got to know them.
What I wanna know is, how long do I have to keep doing this? I'm so sick of it. I just wanna live normally and be happy and capable.

The bolded bit is very interesting. It makes a lot of sense to me that all the recalled and imagined conversations and alternative versions of conversations that used to play on my mind almost non-stop as late as in my mid-twenties may have been alters, because they were really noisy and distracting. They made me feel very dissociated.

Something like that still happens, when I get thoughts and mental images that are completely irrelevant and often bizarre, like this morning. This time however, I asked someone to stop because it was so tiresome to begin with. This was 'Boy' (and now I know he has a name too, we can call him P), an alter who just introduced himself to me a couple of days ago and told that besides doing many useful things he shares this weird stuff with me. He thinks it's amusing, and sometimes he makes me think that too.
At any rate, I was doubtful if telling him to stop it will help in any way. To my astonishment, he made it stop and even made sure I can't remember any of it! If I had only known this twenty years ago. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I want to erase memories just like like that.

Like TheCollective, sometimes I'll hear some more than others.

For my T I've divided them into four groups: those that talk, those that talk less, those that no longer talk and those that have never spoken.

I know in years past that they were louder. For a while, everyone got fairly quiet and even now, sometimes I worry about them when on a low-key day (it's weird not to hear everyone talking back and forth, you know?).

I have the loops of conversations, too. For example, C will tell me what she would have said if she had been out with the T. Or V will "replay" a memory and tell me how she wished she could have reacted.

Interestingly enough (at least to me), the people who know about the DID, I've asked them how everyone's voice sounds when they speak. To me, V's voice is very husky, like she hasn't spoken in a long time. Apparently, "my" voice changes to match that when she's out.

Wow, I didn't realize how much my experience matches with everyone else's.

I have mental conversations and I nearly always know they're coming from inside me. Some of my more distinct parts do not "sound" the same as my own thoughts. Others don't sound very distinct, but I experience those thoughts as not coming from the executive me, but floating up from elsewhere. I think the closer they are to the surface, the more they sound different. I do not know if I also sound different when they are out, as I never "listen" to my voice. I am definitely aware of using different vocabulary and styles of speech depending who is near the surface, though, both in my head and when their thoughts come out. The same is true internally...even those who do not have a very distinct "voice," have their own way of speaking that none of the others (including me) would use.

I sometimes speak out loud, instinctively, to the chatter in my head, when I am alone. On a few occasions when alone, someone else will pop out and say something that I don't know how it came out (like bypassing my usual filter). The protectors will often chime in during therapy without me having too much filtering. The more emotional parts often get blocked from doing so, but it has happened on occasion when I was "drowning" in my Poet, for example.

I also have always done imaginary, rehearsed and relived conversations where other parts chime in about how they would, will or would have handle a particular scenario. I never thought anything of it, but it is compulsive for me also. This sometimes happens as regards stuff we want to tell T and in those cases, T is just kind of this questioning image, ready to receive whatever they want to say, but not giving any feedback and only rarely asking for clarification. It's like we have created a container for those thoughts by internalizing our connection with him as an image.

Another thing that happens is that when I am typing my journal entries or on forums, I will have to reread and allow other parts to chime in and contribute. I stopped doing that for a while before my DID diagnosis, because some parts were deleting stuff and keeping it from getting reported to T. I often reread them after they have been sent, because I can't even remember what was written (beyond the general topics) and want to make sure everyone "knows" about what we've told our T in case it comes up in therapy, so we'll be prepared to discuss it. That (rereading correspondence) is also a compulsion of sorts that I've had for years without knowing why.

yakusoku wrote:Another thing that happens is that when I am typing my journal entries or on forums, I will have to reread and allow other parts to chime in and contribute. I stopped doing that for a while before my DID diagnosis, because some parts were deleting stuff and keeping it from getting reported to T. I often reread them after they have been sent, because I can't even remember what was written (beyond the general topics) and want to make sure everyone "knows" about what we've told our T in case it comes up in therapy, so we'll be prepared to discuss it. That (rereading correspondence) is also a compulsion of sorts that I've had for years without knowing why.

Yeah. That too. 10 times or what.

Me too!

I forgot to mention that now that I've realized that it's easy for me to reach P and tell what thoughts and impulses are his, we talk all the time. Well, not constantly but in comparison with all the time before last weekend, it feels like a lot. His replies come from very near. (The distances between alters is another interesting thing, I feel that there are rather long distances between some of them.)