Thoughts vs Auditory Hallucinations

I know it may be a bit hard to imagine what auditory hallucinations sound like.

Believe me, I wish that no one would ever experience them.

Ever.

I wish it wasn’t even an option.

But unfortunately it is.

And I’d imagine it’s tough to wrap your head around.

Because it was for me.

I’ve shared this several times before, there’s an example of auditory hallucinations that are close to what I hear, here.

There are huge differences between auditory hallucinations and thoughts.

Or an internal dialogue.

I never knew they were two separate things until last year.

They all layered into themselves for me.

If I would’ve known, I would have been able to be on antipsychotics way earlier in life.

And maybe my symptoms wouldn’t have gotten out of hand like they did.

Or maybe they would’ve still.

Regardless, it’s an important distinction to make.

And I’ve had the luxury of being able to think the past four or five days.

Because the auditory hallucinations – voices, have been pretty quiet over that same time.

My thoughts are quite obviously thoughts now.

It’s not quite a voice but more of an internal conversation with myself.

Impossible to be a hallucination.

It feels like telepathy with myself.

An unspoken communication.

It’s not commenting or narrating.

It’s inquisitive, constructive and helps me make sense of things.

Not rip me apart.

Confuse me.

Intimidate me.

Or tear me down.

It’s like it comes from my head area.

Behind my eyes.

Not from around my ears like the hallucinations do.

It’s much softer and kinder than them.

Safer.

My auditory hallucinations do insert themselves into this internal dialogue stream.

Which was how I thought they were all thoughts.

Or ghosts.

It was really, really hard to tell them apart until now.

Until antipsychotics.

I thought the voices I heard, the tones and volumes, were me.

I just thought I hated myself enough to hear a constant, varying, overlapping stream of self loathing being spoken.

See, my auditory hallucinations hate me.

This whole time I was under the impression that if I willed it, the self loathing would stop.

It’s just a horrible thought pattern.

But I could never make it stop.

They get worse when I’m upset.

They say things like “kill yourself”.

“You’re fucking worthless.”

And “no one loves you”.

Over and over again.

I didn’t understand that these were voices until they faded with medication.

I was under the assumption I was at fault.

That I was the one plummeting into my darkness.

That I just needed to change my thinking process.

Whatever that entails.

I would try to not think of doom and destruction, but it never worked.

I would still have a thick film of timbres, tones and volumes berating me.

They always felt like they were out of my control.

And now I understand that they were.

But that understanding was not possible for most of my life.

For so many years I just thought I was a dud.

Unfixable.

Miserable.

It never occurred to me that these sentences, words or phrasing could be hallucinations.

Could be out of my control.

The silence I’ve been hearing this week is so new.

So amazing.

And almost intimidating.

I’ve now had days of quiet.

Maybe one external voice here or there.

But my internal voices have been very quiet.

Very quiet.

I’ve still been hearing the “radio” though.

But that’s completely tolerable and something I’ve experienced most of my life.

Besides, it’s much, much duller than it’s ever been before.

I don’t think it will ever fully go away.

Being under the impression that these voices were my thoughts made quite a few things unattainable for me for a long time.

I felt like I could never focus.

The hallucinations would take up over half of my attention at any given time.

I thought I would obsess.

I would turn over the same five phrases for days to have them merge into different self destructive phrases and obsess over them for days.

Only to have the process cycle and never end.

I didn’t think it could end.

I thought there was something wrong with me because I could never let things go.

Turns out that my hallucinations were the ones doing most of the obsessing.

The voices were the ones telling me what I can and can’t think about.

Not me.

They held me prisoner for so many years that I still don’t really know how I feel about myself.

I’ve been told so many things over the years that I just assumed I was doomed to sit and spin.

Turns out that the hallucinations and voices faded with medication.

I’m now figuring out that I was fighting off psychosis for most of my adult life.

My beliefs, patterns and ways of thinking have been bounced and filtered through my hallucinations for decades.

I haven’t had a moment to myself like this in I can’t even remember how long.

– Keren