A voices group is a place to define yourself, for yourself. People do this through self education and self exploration.
A Voices Group provides a compassionate, respectful, non judging environment for this deeply personal work. To meet regularly with allies who share your experience and are working on many of the same goals, is immeasurably encouraging.
Any person with a less than common trait, needs to find others, who share that experience, so they can feel less ‘outside’ their own community.
This is a big part of why all civil rights work and all human rights work happens. This includes: women’s rights, gay culture, deaf culture and all varieties of counter culture.
All these movements spring up for the purpose of self-empowerment and to help create of unity and courage among their own disenfranchised group. These efforts often become a force for social change.
“Your life becomes the way you encourage another person”
A way to help ourselves let go of negative views of ourselves, is to help others do the same. In our groups we encourage new members. This helps them, but it also helps us.
Often groups become a community of friends and they may decide to work together to change the common culture’s view of voice hearing.
An example would be helping the mental health services through outreach education and dialogue. Mental Health workers often have set ideas about voice hearing. This is a kind of job risk, because very often, the only voice hearers they ever meet are in extreme duress. People whose lives are not upset by their voice hearing experience do not seek help for it, so the medical profession doesn’t always know that such people exist. This daily experience of medical professionals, meeting only voice hearers who are actively tormented, creates an unintentional bias or assumptions about what voices hearing is and means. So using our compassion in conversation with mental health workers, is a way to help facilitate social change.
It is hard work to remain poised and compassionate when you feel like someone is discriminating against you or stereotyping you, but it is in these precise moments when we are creating the most lasting positive change. However awful it can feel at the time, this is when we really flying the flag of freedom for all people.
For example, one of our group members was upset by her experience with a social worker at an ER. The worker had told her to ‘just ignore the voices’. But our group member was at the ER. , if ‘just ignoring’ her voices was working she wouldn’t have been at the emergency room.
Later, discussing the experience in group, she decided to send the emergency room, a voices group flyer and a poster for our group. She did this to assist the social worker and begin a dialogue about different ways to encourage those who hear voices. She also asked the social worker to let people know about our group.
In this way our groups often begin to help not just ourselves, or those of us in our group, but the community as a whole.
Over time, these small heroic efforts and compassionate dialogues will facilitate our culture in developing an enlightened view about voice hearing, until it is no more considered an ‘illness’ than left handedness is an ‘illness’.
1. Assist in the founding of voices groups all over America Voices groups are a way to develop mastery of the voice hearing experience. It is also a way for people to emancipate themselves, to free themselves from the restrictive perceptions of those who perceive voice hearing to be only a symptom of psychiatric illness.
It is very common in the early stages of voice hearing to require help of many kinds. Whatever works for the individual is 100% supported by voices groups and HVN-USA. Our goal is to encourage people as they follow their own innate wisdom.
2. Networking among ‘patients’ and ‘non-patients’ Many people hear voices in a way that does not torment them or require psychiatric help. Our goal is to facilitate conversation between those who hear voices that are predominately helpful and those who hear voices that are predominantly traumatizing.
3. To Serve as a hub of U.S. communication, education and assist in the networking needs of
Statewide Voices Networks, Voices Groups, Voice Hearers & Allies.
We would like all voices groups to be able to post their contact information and quarterly updates or newsletters through this website.
4. Provide trainings
5. One day, as the number of voices groups grow in the USA, we hope the USA will have it’s own national annual conference. Then people won’t have to go to the UK to learn about voices groups and networks! We hope to be able to invite Marius Romme, Sandra Escher, Paul Baker, Julie Downs, Ron Coleman, and Karen Taylor. Mike Smith et al, to the USA.