I started on a more detailed draft that organized my thoughts on “voices”, but as @three relates it’s difficult to fully explain how they work. I’ve saved it and will try to organize my thoughts and tackle the subject later in depth. There’s a plurality of mechanisms in play that interact with other thought disorders and delusions. Your inner monologue runs amok and mixes with thoughts and external stimuli in disorienting ways where you ‘know’ or ‘learn’ things, but are confused about the source. @three mentions “telepathy” and at times that’s a fitting analogy.
I only had a few instances where I heard a “voice” in the classic Hollywood sense of a disembodied voice like a supreme being loudly making pronouncements or commenting on my life events. There are some scenes in the movie “Words on Bathroom Walls” playing now that featured a similar commanding voice which only broke through the rest when symptoms and stress were particularly challenging. The movie is based on a book that I haven’t read, but judging by the movie, it may talk about the phenomenon. I’m trying to remember if “The Center Can Not Hold” featured discussion of voices, if so it wasn’t memorable. As I said it’s difficult to describe which may be another reason we don’t discuss them much— it just opens a big can of worms.
I tend toward paranoia, so my experience was more perceiving (or misperceiving) known people, or unknown (or known) strangers talking about me. By “known strangers”, I mean entities I’m familiar with surveilling me. I’ll adds some links describing this “relationship”. Content ranges from criticism, observations and occasionally praise. On the whole, I’d say it was more neutral, detached and observational than commanding or negative, and my anxiety toward them reflected my general state and progress within recovery.
Drugs cleared my thinking and thus made it easier to navigate my perception of events and my inner monologue which had the effect of blunting the “voices”, but I viewed this as a side-benefit. I took the drugs to help me focus my thinking, not so much remove the voices and as my thinking was more focused, I “heard” them less. I’ve said in other posts, as my external world got bigger my internal world got smaller.
Per the FBI/CIA government conspiracies and their popularity, I came to this conclusion because I thought I was being surveilled, yet did not see my surveillants. I crossed state lines to get help, so knowing a little about jurisdiction and laws, the FBI seemed a likely “adversary.” We’ve all seen movies with covert surveillance and the name of that game is not to be detected. I think they may be a ready plausible explanation for the experience of seemingly being pursued by unseen forces. And such conspiracies are durable and stable for reasons I mentioned above. As you’ll see in the following linked posts, I was less scared or controlled and more irritated by their “presence” and just wanted them to leave. Eventually a sort of Stockholm Syndrome set in and I began to identify with them. Frankly I’m a little disappointed in myself that I wasn’t more original. If you find a way to step into the mindset, you’ll likely see a sense of ‘logic’ to most delusional systems if you dig deeply enough.