Introduction (Hi!) and Can Anyone relate?

Hi, I'm new to the forum and just coming to accept a schizoaffective diagnosis after years of bouncing between other diagnoses. I'll make this quick.

Coming from a pretty emotionally suppressive household, I never told anyone about the thoughts in my head or the voices I heard. I was always an anxious child, even as a 4 year old, and I had quite an "imagination". I was playful with toys because their voices were real, and I liked to sit on the porch and have conversations with the cars who also had voices. It sounds imaginative, but it just never really went away. As I got older and depression came, suicide came, and eventually mania and paranoia in college, I thought maybe I should tell someone about my voices. I withheld again because mainstream psychology (like the stuff that gets published on WebMD, although it's since changed) tells you you have to hear voices 24/7 and completely externally for your diagnosis to be "valid". As someone with access to research databases through university, I've found an amalgamation of articles which are now studying internal and external voices as two separate and legitimate hallucinatory experiences. This gave me a lot of validation, as I hear both.

So I'm wondering if anyone else here has experience with internal and/or thought-like voices? How are they for you? For me, it's almost like an intrusive thought but louder, not my voice, random, and can change tone, pitch, and intensity. My external ones usually happen when I'm out with people or around people. Neither of them are constant for me, unless I'm in a deep state.

I have mostly internal voices with very few external ones. I hid mine until I was 26 for fear of prosecution but then I admitted all to a psychiatrist after a major mixed episode I have ten external voices which my medication controls for the most park.
Phere to answer any questions.

Hi,
I hear mostly internal voices too, every week basically, and mostly in a religious context. When the voices are external, I am usually too deep into psychosis. Yes, internal voices are valid, I hear mine since I was a teenager and it held the same dangers an external voice could have, it gave me orders, it threatened me and I essentially believed it was God talking to me. I no longer hear that voice, but yeah, definitively understand your experience.