The Clients’ Voice

Members of the group, Brigitte, Sue, Meiti and Veronika give their account of belonging to the group.

We would like to introduce ourselves as members of the Power To Our Journeys Group based at Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, Australia.

How did we get together? It was our experience of narrative therapy that provided the basis for connection with each other. Through this therapy we had the opportunity to change our relationship with the voices and visions that were troubling to us and traumatising us, which opened spaces for us to break from the prison house of isolation and to join new connections with others who are engaged in similar projects to change their lives.

We get together as a group once a month and invite Michael White to join us to keep a special record of our conversations and to ask questions that assist us to express our thoughts on various issues. After each of these meetings Michael puts together our documents which serve as a record of our evolving knowledge and of the development in our skills of living. These documents are a powerful resource to us in our work to recover our lives and in assisting us to deal with crisis.

The handicap of silence
Our reason for joining in the writing of this document is to share with you the extent to which our lives have changed through our involvement in the Power To Our Journeys Group. This group has played a significant part in rekindling our love of life and in assisting us to achieve a quality of life that we could never have predicted. It is our hope that others who are struggling with troublesome voices and visions will find hope in what we have to say here, and join us in spirit by searching for others whom they might connect with in similar ways.

Acknowledgement of our experience
The Power To Our Journeys meetings provide a forum for us to talk about many of our experiences of life. This includes our experiences of what others refer to as auditory and visual hallucinations, or, if you like, the psychosis. it is our preference to refer to these experiences as voices and visions.

Over many years of our difficult connections with psychiatric services, we have found little opportunity to speak openly of our day to day experiences of the voices and visions that have been so troublesome for us, or for that matter the voices and predictions about the sort of tactics they might resort to in these attempts. Then as we prepare to take new steps in our lives, or venture off into new territory, we can refer to this knowledge. This provides us with the opportunity to put things in place that will support us through these changes and to prepare counter-tactics to have at the ready should the voices and visions attempt to harrass us. We are then more able to recognise such attempts and step back and say to ourselves, ‘So that is what you are up to’ and then take the sort of action that will deprive them of these moments, an opportunity to weaken their influence in our lives.

The knowledge that we have these options at these times provided an antidote to the insecurity that the troublesome voices and visions gave us.
We have been silenced time and again by many psychiatric workers who have consistently refused to acknowledge our experiences of these visions and voices. At times we have been bewildered by this at a loss to understand it.
At times we have linked this silencing to the fear we see in the eyes of others. Perhaps they experience this fear because we put them in touch with how vulnerable they may be in their own struggles in life and with a realisation of how thin the line is between where they stand in life and where we stand.
At other times we understand that others believe that to make space for us to talk more openly of our experiences of voices and visions is counterproductive. We know that still others are caught up in weird theories about our experiences and talk about our lives in ways that substract from our sense of self respect and make it impossible for them to hear what we say about our experiences.
We meet others who are so caught up in a professional career and institutional considerations of a hierarchical nature that it is impossible for them to be with us in healing ways.
Needless to say, this silencing has profoundly negative consequences for all our lives. All of us felt abandoned because of this. We have not felt joined with by others at those times in our lives when this was what we have longed for most. At times this very silencing has contributed to a sense that we might be going mad and it has made it impossible for us to change our relationships with our troublesome voices and visions that have been so dominating of our lives and as well, with the voices and visions that have been more supportive of us.

Changing our relationship with voices
We just cannot here emphasize strongly enough how important it is to have the opportunity to speak of the troublesome voices and visions in a forum that contributes to a powerful exposé of their purposes and their operations. These troublesome voices and visions can be quite vicious, and from time to time give us an incredibly hard time.They have at their disposal many well established tactics for tyrannizing our lives:
to frighten us, to get us into a panic and to drive us to desperation.
In developing an exposé of the purposes and operations of troublesome voices and visions we become clearer about the extent to what they want from our lives is not in our interests and we become increasingly knowledgeable about the strategies that they utilize to achieve their purposes.
This exposé disempowers them, and opens up opportunities for us to become much more aware of the knowledge and skills that we can put to work to frustrate the attempts of the voices and visions to capture our lives.
By meeting together to extend this exposé and to further pool our knowledges and skills, we have been able to further change our relationships with the voices and visions so they become less dominating in our lives.

This has not been achieved without work, as we extended these exposés, we have put more effort into the monitoring of our general sense of well being. Doing this is a commitment that we have made to ourselves and each other, and it has opened new possibilities in our lives. For example we know that we are more vulnerable to the voices and visions when we are stressed out or over-streched, and we can make predictions about these occasions and conditions upon which these voices and visions may attempt to get the upper hand.

The negative voices and visions are wreckers
So that you might understand more fully how important it has been for us to find a space in which we can talk of our experiences of voices and visions and to put together these exposés, you should know what ‘wreckers’ these voices and visions can be.
Jobs, friends, interests, hopes, status – these voices and visions took so much and tried to ruin what they couldn’t take. We grieved for the losses. Our families grieved for themselves and for us over the loss of the potential that we could never fulfill. It is not that others didn’t support us, they tried to help, but there was a limit to what they could do. Many of our relatives became frightened and despairing. We lost friends to exhaustion and terror. Some of us became homeless for years, just going from place to place.

There were friends and relatives who managed to hang in, but we didn’t know how to help them understand or to know what to do, and even if we had we would not have been able to act on this knowledge. We had our hands full just staying alive. As we began to realize what a burden we were becoming, we retreated. We just went away or isolated ourselves by going into ourselves so that we were alone in the company of others. This was all that we could do to protect our friends and relatives from the trauma.
In the end, this isolation served the interests of the troublesome voices and visions, not our interests.

Lightness of being
But we no longer grieve. We have found that a lot of the grief was about the loss of a status that we no longer have a desire for and that in fact we are glad to be free of. And now we are finding the opportunity to talk openly with friends and relatives about the pain that they experienced in relation to what we went through during the hard times.
Although it is true that some friendships died, those that didn’t have been renewed and enriched by these conversations. Our own experiences of our lives have changed significantly and this is accompanied by a different happiness that has to do with how we approach the smaller things in life. We are more able to appreciate our own thoughts and find that we have a sense of living well when we are able to get out of bed in the morning and catch a bus or tram.
We are experiencing more just being in the flow of life. We know more about what makes some places healing places to be in. Our membership in the Power to Our Journeys group has contributed very greatly to this lightness of being. We are together in solidarity. We are secure in each other’s company, knowing that we have gained knowledge through successfully managing the difficulties we have experienced at these times.