Day 3 of the Australian Journey 2012: Hearing Voices in Melbourne
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Day 3 is the final day of
the Hearing Voices Conference. I'm going
to finish telling about my keynote address and also the workshop that I did and
other connections that were made. One of
the most remarkable events occurred at the panel on the last hour of the day
when Ron Coleman announced that a young woman who was being tortured by her
voices had nowhere to go to get help and no money. He told the audience that she could come to
his farm in Scotland and stay for free as long as she wanted if the assembled
people would all contribute money toward her ticket. He announced that he was going to put a jar
by the door and everyone could contribute what they could. I learned later that the money had been
raised and she would be on her way to Scotland in three weeks! That was amazing. I was so impressed that Ron Coleman had a
farm where people could go to work on their voices for free. I wish I had such an environment and the
funds to make it work. We've (Coyote
Institute) been casting about for funding to create a safe house in
Brattleboro, Vermont, for people who are going through a psychotic experience,
but so far, we've raised very little money.
Apparently, we don't move in the circles of people who have extra cash
to donate. We'd like to change that, of
course.
Today there were a number
of concurrent talks by aboriginal elders about their culture and how they
managed voices and people who hear voices.
As I said in yesterday's blog, it
was so inspiring to have aboriginal people fully integrated into the conference
and presenting their successful strategies for voice management.
I tried to make my
workshop completely experiential since I had given enough theory in my
keynote
address. I started with a guided imagery
process in which people travel through a portal to the dimension in
which their
voice resides and in which it has a physical form. I mentioned that
all voices must be attached
to physical images. No disembodied
voices allowed for they are frightening.
If a voice has a physical form, we can modify that form to make it look
ridiculous if it's being too scary. In
one of the Harry Potter movies, students in "Defense against the Dark
Arts"
learned to turn their worst fears into ridiculous looking versions as
the fear
came out of a cupboard. The spell word
was "Ridiculopathy", or something like that.
In the exercise, people were asked to enter into the world where their
voice lived in a body and find it. A
number of strategies were proposed for how to do that. My favorite is
to follow a path through the
woods, around a pond, up a ridge, and to see it standing in the middle
of a
meadow, though there are many more. Then
the person asks for the voice to tell its story. Many voices are
boringly repetitive. They just keep saying over and over, "You
should kill yourself because you're not even worth the air that you
breathe,"
or something similar and equally inane.
However, rarely do we get the story from the voice about how it came to
be in the person's mind in the first place.
We want to know where it came from, where it was born, who were its
parents, and all the interesting details of its life. We want to know
how it came to the conclusion
that led to what it's been saying. We
want to know what other beings agree with it.
Who are its friends? What
coalitions has it formed? We actually
want to start a relationship with the voice in which dialogue occurs and
change
can happen. If the voice is stubborn and
refuses to change or even to converse, we have to find other voices to
stand up
to it. We have to start finding stronger
voices to drown out the mean ones.
Following this exercise,
each person told their experience to another person so that sharing
could take
place to an audience. In our work with
voices, we are striving for increased narrative competence -- better
story
telling skills. It's important to have
an experience and then to be able to come back and tell a coherent,
congruent,
understandable story about that experience.
Next I asked each pair to let one of its members become the voice so
that a dialogue could take place. Like
most exercises taken from improvisational theatre techniques, I tell
people to
just trust their gut impulse and say whatever they are driven to say.
Don't worry that you aren't sure what the
voice would say. Just say whatever you're moved to say. The
conversation lasted 10 minutes or so and
then we switched. Finally, one person
volunteered for the last exercise. She
had three voices and picked three other people from the audience to play
her
voices and one to play her. She took
them outside the room and briefed them on what her voices were. Then
we started the "skit". This woman's voices had been gone for 10
years. They were trying to return and
were demanding her to let them in again.
She was refusing. They promised
to show her a good time. They promised to
tell her to get naked in front of lots of people. She continued to
refuse to let them back into
her head. The actors and actresses did
an excellent job of portraying the struggle she had been experiencing.
Finally we discussed what had been happening in
the workshop and ground it into aboriginal thought about extraordinary
realities and our capacity to negotiate them.
I mentioned the problem with some young people of our day trying to
journey in other dimensions without guides.
That's why we have elders, I said.
Elders and teachers are there to help us navigate extraordinary spaces
and to give us the stories to understand what's going on so that we
don't get
too far away from the ordinary world and not know how to get back. More
later.
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