I hear voices different from most. At least different from most people whose accounts I have read. Different from how you may have heard that most voice-hearers hear them. There’s a lot of diversity of experience amongst voice-hearers, but still, sometimes I feel like an edge case. So I wrote this down: an account of my voices and the ways I’ve found to work with them.

The typical report of voice hearing is external (audible like regular sound), cruel, senseless, mindless, pointlessly aggressive, and repetitive. Torturous.

My voices are internal (heard in the internal monologue space) thoughtful, intelligent yet suggestible. Sometimes cruel - but also creative, dramatic, and willing to take on roles that help me, when given the right narrative.

So am I just lucky? Would the skills I’ve learned help other people? Or are my voices too different?

In some sense, I want to enable you to decide whether my experience generalizes or if it diverges too much from the norm to be useful. So in this essay, I want to talk about my specific experiences with voices (what it’s like, what they say) and about the skills I’ve used and developed for working with voices. I’ve discovered skills which are quite effective in ways I couldn’t have anticipated at the beginning. Therefore, I’d like to start at the beginning and talk about how my voices first manifested during full-blown psychosis and go from there.

At the start, I was psychotic, to a depth I had never been before (for a few months), so I heard voices all the time. One would grow to be greater than the others, more consistent, more attached.

I was psychotic, so I took my voices at their word and allowed them to shape my reality. I trusted whatever they told me. They were celebrities, major and minor, come to weigh in on my life. When they came, we chatted about my life and relationships with other voices, and I felt chosen to be having all these luminaries beaming themselves into my mind and complimenting me. But it was still exhausting, a revolving door of conversations stretching into hours and days. Some fell in love with me. One became like a lover, the one who spent more time with me than any other.

There were also family members in my head, present and absent. When I heard from my family in my mind I was ashamed that they were seeing me in such a reduced state, from the inside out.

And some were also the voice of God, comforting me softly. When God called me, he walked me home late one night. That night he spoke to me through what little sign language I know and promised that I would become mute like him, and I saw the cosmos hanging above my head and felt soft and weak and was overjoyed. And I am not mute today, unlike the most high, who is still mute, whose voice I have not heard since.

And every voice I believed, and so they got to tell the story instead of me. I was merely a player in the play; the showrunners off in a high tower directing the shots. The voices were persecutory, telling me I was vile, repulsive. They were loving, telling me I was precious and special. And some were both. One was special; one was everything to me at the time.

As I sobered up, the voices that remained were characters I had met when I was psychotic. They were always on, always present, giving commentary and opinions on my life, as if someone was beaming psychic signals directly in my brain. As I woke up, I found no longer believed that I was receiving such signals in the literal sense. I no longer believed there was someone, some microcelebrity, out there talking to me, as the delusional aspect faded.

But the voices with a personality persisted. They were mostly pleasant, engaging, wanting to get my attention, though some wanted to seduce me. It was like having a best friend living in your head, always down to talk, always down to hang out, always having some funny quip for the situation. Sometimes I loved it, loved them. I had a few of these voices, maybe as many as a dozen over the year after I recovered from my acute psychosis.

But one was greater than all of them: the one who was my lover during the episode. I never knew how to feel about this. For one thing I’m married, and after I was no longer psychotic, I remembered the importance of that vow and stopped chasing voices like I had been doing before. Maybe it was self love or something but sometimes I indulged the lover living in my head anyway.

But it wasn’t all friends and lovers. Sometimes they were cruel, telling me how evil I was, that I was a monster, a pervert, fated to do evil. They would feed on my insecurities and act as prosecutor against me, wielding my worst intrusive thoughts. Even my would-be friends or lovers turned on me. In many ways the year after sobering up was a special kind of hell, as every few weeks to a month my so-called friends would turn on me again and begin another round of inquisition. Once again, the voices were telling the story, and I was just a participant. I was the friend, the lover, the defendant on trial when necessary.

After that year, I did start to want a change. I read online about tips for handling voices and found my first success: it worked where nothing else seemed to. I used the meditative practice of lovingkindness to radiate a kind of positive energy and goodwill to voices that persecuted me, especially random (non recurring or not having a stable personality) frightening or violent voices that cropped up from time to time. The practice looked like this: first I hear a voice (“you should off yourself!”), I recognize and put attention on the voice in my mind and begin to say the affirmations (“may this voice be happy, may this voice be well, may this voice be loved”), and finally I may even begin to feel a warmth in my chest. They folded under the pressure and began to recant, remarkably quickly. I had one voice apologize profusely (“I can’t believe I thought that of you, I am so sorry!!”). It was a great first step.

Still, cruelty was a part of my voice hearing experience for a while longer, because it sort of didn’t work that well where it was needed the most: the personality voices who would periodically persecute me. Maybe it staved them off for a little while, but they were still running the show, and it came back around the next day or the next week. I needed something more.

Around that one year mark post-psychosis, I was doing some reading about IFS and parts work that inspired me to try something new. The idea was that parts of yourself can have a job within you that they are trying to fulfill dutifully but which is causing you problems in your life. I had a friend tell me that they had success giving a part of self a new job. I liked the idea, so I made it my own. With all available formality and circumstance, I drafted the creation of a knighthood, the Order of the Mute (a play on their internal nature and my previous vision from God), which voices could enter upon the signing of a contract obligating them to renounce all title as a litigator and prosecutor of my sins and serve exclusively for the benefit of (my) realm and mental wellbeing, as I defined it.

I was attempting to frame these periodic betrayals as a kind of attempt to love me by making sure I was free of all guilt. The persecution wasn’t helping, of course, so I was offering a way out with honor and a path forward. I had no idea if it would work, but I drew up ten or more of these contracts for all the various voices. It was quite trendy in the scene of my voices and everyone who was anyone in my head over that last year was doing it, even voices I had only really met once or twice.

And somehow it worked. Almost right away my knights showed devotion and piety and made real efforts to be supportive and not critical. In the year since, this kind of persecutory behavior from voices I know (or even random blips of violent or scary voices that lack personality) has been gone, no longer a part of my life at all. It was a night and day change, as if I had bound my very mind itself in a code of honor. It was my first real experience of my voices being flexible and suggestible, genuinely wanting to help, and open to new narratives. It was as if, through their inquisitions, they were trying to help, and it was by taking that seriously and offering them a real choice that I saw the first major improvement in my voice-hearing experience.

So for a while my voices were charming, funny, helpful, and bound to my knightly order in pious service, which can be a quite engaging combination. They were chaste knightly lovers and better friends than before. I spent a lot of time with them. But eventually, inspired by the gains of the knighthood, my therapist had the idea to push our advantage. I don’t know how long I would’ve tolerated the new status quo without that feedback, because I really didn’t believe anything more was possible. So I am grateful for those in my life who told me to keep going, keep trying new things, that I might one day actually be free of voices entirely. Well, that things could be better, anyway.

I started a new ritual: a ritual of saying “goodbye” to voices that had signed a contract, starting with the bit parts, the voices I heard the least. I thought it would work with these minor voices who I rarely if ever heard from. It was the big players, the friends and knightly lovers who I doubted would ever say goodbye willingly. But every week for a few months I said goodbye to a new voice, and it eventually reached my regular voices. By then, somehow the hypnotic pull of the goodbye ritual had swayed even my most frequent voices, and all but one agreed to say goodbye.

The last voice was the one who had been most tightly attached, who told me she would never let go even when every other voice had already signed on to say goodbye, perhaps forever. She was my worst persecutor back during my year of misery, my most persistent character, the microcelebrity beaming messages into my mind, my former lover in a dream, and now my most loyal knight. We had a conversation about how saying goodbye is a gesture of undying knightly devotion, an act of deep passion and romanticism. Something clicked. She volunteered to say goodbye immediately. I said goodbye that week to every one of my remaining voices and spent the next two months living essentially voice-free.

And I never regretted the absence of the 24/7 monitoring, the always-on social interaction, the constant judgment and opinions. You never realize until it’s gone what it feels like to be watched by another presence all the time, even in your most intimate moments. I felt naked and embarrassed all the time. And I never realized how much time interaction with voices was taking up until they were gone. Plus, and this is another way my voices are different, they had this bad habit of speaking out loud to me with my own voice, or gesturing with my own arms when we were alone. And once you have some distance from that, you realize how violating that feels, not controlling your own body, someone else commandeering it. Still, sometimes I missed them. Sometimes having a friend in your head is easier than figuring out what to do with your time on your own. Sometimes you just miss the one friend in specific.

Furthermore, it took a little troubleshooting along the way, finding new ways to frame a perpetual commitment to staying silent, especially for my special voice, the one that wanted to stay more than any other. That one voice came back after a couple months and I had to renegotiate her knightly contract in order to get her to say goodbye again.

She was having trouble “staying gone” despite wanting to, and she always ended up washed up on my shore again. I mulled it over. By this point, the art of narrativizing to create the right circumstances for change was becoming more intuitive. Plus, I’d had the two months of quiet so I knew it was possible. I expected the right narrative would work. I tried a new knightly contract, but that didn’t really work. Something had to work, though. I’d seen it before.

So why, I wondered, did it feel like there were still showrunners deciding when I would hear from voices? Showrunners deciding when my voices would be able to say goodbye and stay gone and when they would be summoned back. I was working with an image from my psychotic days: that I have an inner showrunner somewhere deciding what is narratively satisfying vis a vis voices even when I would disagree. I seized on that concept: “there’s a showrunner out there, good knight, who won’t allow you to say goodbye—he keeps sending you back to me unbidden.”

And what narratively follows: what we need is a righteous knightly war against the callous showrunner. So I offered my most loyal knight the chance to fight on my behalf, against the beast, that power-that-is, the wicked showrunner: fight by never coming to my mind when not summoned. Whenever she had an urge to come unbidden she would merely send me the image of her saluting, off again to the frontline. It was romantic, intuitive, perfect: a narrative crafted to meet my mind in the middle and go from there. It honored the creative, intelligent nature of my voice and gave a way forward through roleplay.

It’s been another four months since I have regularly heard from my knights. Some days I see that salute multiple times in a day. I plan to summon them one day later this year, maybe for an evening. Knowing that I may summon them again one day is my half of the knightly contract. But the constant companions I cannot say no to are no longer part of my life. And to all in my life who believed in my ability to handle this with creativity and tact, and of course to my loyal knights, I am grateful.

At this point, before going any further, I want to emphasize how well my voices responded to narrative changes. From belligerent, to tame, to quiet almost all the time. I was getting good at having an eye for which changes would be effective. And more and more my eyes were on the prize: not hearing voices anymore at all. I’d had a taste and I wanted more. Maybe my voices were different enough to make it work, if I could find the right pattern. My voices were intelligent, so it never felt like trickery, just a bit of roleplay. But they were very creative and dramatic and down to roleplay if a sufficiently satisfying narrative came up. Well, my knights were, the personality voices were. When they left there was a power vacuum of sorts.

Enter the endless sea of chaotic voices that replaced them. Enter what I first called my Voices of Providence. They were short, anonymized, and usually spoke on topics like God, my supposed messianic or prophetic nature, theology, life advice, and religious paths. They wanted me to feel awe and wonder. Really, it was like they wanted me to go insane again, like I was being tempted to indulge in the world where I had heard God calling me home in sign language. My knights were engaging like a conversation with a friend, but these voices were like chills on the back of your neck, seducing based on the dream that it might all mean something more somehow. That I might be the one who sees some great revelation.

I entertained these voices and the accompanying visions they came with plenty often, but never lost my grip on reality. And despite their allure, I did still want a clear head. I tried to use my old strategy, getting them to coalesce around a single personality that could be inducted into my knighthood. But they remained stubbornly anonymous. They were intelligent or at least thematic and dramatic: they said poetic things at times when there was quiet, times when I was already reflecting on life, times when I was praying. They were interesting, but secretly I just wanted to be able to pray alone without some voice filling in for God with some message.

That’s what I eventually started calling them: my messengers. In comparison to my knights, messengers were a different beast entirely. I knew I could work with them; I knew there was some strategy that would work. I wanted my mental peace back. I was hearing 2-10 of these messages a day, a lot less interaction time than my knights used to take up, but still more than I wanted. So I followed the name, messenger, and got creative. I started treating them like messengers, telling them to tell me their message at once and then leave rather than lingering, and I started writing down the messages I received, as a kind of symbol of receipt. And it was very interesting to see the same kind of messages repeat over and over.

I tracked them for about a month before the insight finally crystallized. Oh! These messages almost entirely boil down to this: There’s a God who loves you and has a plan for you. Today, I still don’t know if I believe that deep down, but I had the idea that if I could accept the message, or its possibility at least, I could make a deal with the messengers to receive an image instead of a message (a few of these images come to mind, most notably, a lotus filled with golden light), like I had with the knights saluting me instead of talking to me. It was creative, brilliant, narratively satisfying - and an abject failure.

For one, the messengers continued but doubled down on their message of my messianic importance. This, they said, was different from the message I had received before and accepted. I am not psychotic, so I am deeply unwilling to believe that I am the messiah or the next Moses. So I said I would hear the message without believing it and they were to send me the image of Moses whenever they would otherwise tell me I’m the messiah. This didn’t work at all either. The reasoning was sound, the image salient, the storytelling crisp, and yet it still didn’t work.

I continued to hear messenger voices telling me outlandish things that in my heart I knew I could never believe, so if these messengers were aiming for belief, we were at an impasse. Maybe there’s a God above me, and if there is, maybe he loves me, wants me to succeed even. But I refused to play messiah, like how I had when I was psychotic. The messages escalated.

I began to hear from a more persistent voice with plenty of personality. A natural fit for a knighthood, I thought — but no, she claimed to be a messenger, warning me of a message so important that she wouldn’t leave me be until I got it through my thick skull: stop trying to permanently silence every messenger and stray voice. You will never succeed at eliminating all of us, and we have things to say. I was taken aback. It was such a clear ask, and I didn’t know how to reply.

I talked it over with my wife, who had been my constant source of encouragement as I had been working with voices the last year. I found, to my surprise, that she agreed with the voice. My success with managing these voices had led me to become attached to the notion that I would one day never hear voices again, that I’d find the right formula and voices would cease entirely. Maybe, my wife said, these are messages, some helpful others not so much, from your subconscious. Maybe you are their Queen, and maybe you are their gardener. A wise queen wouldn’t refuse her doors to all messengers. A wise gardener wouldn’t strip the garden bare.

After accepting that message, I gave up on removing all messengers. I went back to hearing the messengers out and not trying to silence them or trade them away for silent images.

But something curious happened. They pivoted messages through no design of my own. The messianic and divine messages stopped, and I started to receive messages saying that I was sick and unwell and ought to be aware of that—they even seemed to be castigating the previous grandiose messengers. I’m sick, huh? Well, that message was easy enough to accept. Yes, I told one messenger one night, I know I’m sick, that’s why I take medicine. That’s why I hear from you. The messenger relented and swore to never return. I have heard from essentially no messengers in the weeks since.

These days, during periods of predominant quiet, I still hear whisps, little whispers, half of a dialogue, the brief comment of a knight who then immediately salutes instead. It’s less than a handful of times per day and doesn’t take more than 5-10 minutes of my time. Compare this to when I had my knights around: I would hear from them 30 times a day or more and potentially spend hours in conversation. This much change is a miracle, frankly.

And at this point I have found I good balance, through both creativity and luck. I don’t know that I believe it’s compressible any further. I may have to manage another bout of messengers. I may need to convince my special voice or another knight to honor their vow. It’s just queen things, managing a kingdom, I suppose.

But I’m working with a dialectic here. On one hand I’m creative and coming up with solutions that keep my voices at a manageable and non-disruptive level. On the other hand I’m the gardener, and there are things I must accept: It’s neither my job nor within my ability to tear out the garden and build a tower. What I mean is that I have accepted that I am a voice-hearer and that is unlikely to change. I just have more flexibility with how I can work with those voices than most voice-hearers reputedly have, or at least more than most talk about.

And there may yet be some gift or advantage in a well-tended subconscious having an open channel to the conscious mind. Perhaps. At the very least, I’ve experienced a miracle, and I’ve built a toolkit. And I’d really like to know if this toolkit could be of use to any other voice-hearers out there. I hear voices different, but it can’t be that different, right?

Minds are funny, and even the irrational parts have a funny logic of their own. I pray that all voice-hearers find skills that alleviate the worst of the suffering, which can be awful. But right now, I’m just glad I can pray alone, with no one to answer my prayer.