How Can You Gain More Control Over Your Hallucinations?

Hallucinations are responses of the senses without the presence of real stimuli. Hallucinations are present in many of the mental illnesses that involve psychosis. These hallucinations are auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, or visual. Gaining some more insight into why these hallucinations happen and how you can control them is key to your mental health.

Hallucinations sometimes happen in response to hidden stimuli, as in hearing voices of people talking to each other and perceiving a response that you didn’t get its stimulus. If the voices you are listening to are harmful and make you react in some difficult way, it helps you to try to be mindful and understand that the hallucinations you heard are just responses to some stimuli.

It also happens that you hear voices and engage in hallucinatory conversations. You may talk to the voices, listen and respond. This might be taken as the theory of mind. Wikipedia defines the theory of mind as the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their minds).

These would also be part of the storming and norming functions of society. There are negotiations and reflections going on with the voices. You may also hear voices from the media, photos, images, and even inanimate objects which are known as delusions of reference.

Hallucinations have a credibility level. Some hallucinations have higher credibility that makes some real, while others have lower credibility and seem bizarre.

Hallucinations are the main parts of thought disorders where thought insertion, thought broadcasting, thought blocking, and thought withdrawal happen. They are typical causes of delusions that result in apathy, abolition, and anhedonia.

Another way of understanding the hallucinations you get is in terms of audibility and alienation. Alienation is the difficulty of the mind to claim agency of thoughts as self-generated. While audibility refers to thoughts that are misattributed as not occurring in one’s mind and lack ownership.

Hallucinations may be devastating for people who live with schizophrenia and psychosis. But with patience and more understanding, it is possible to gain more control over its harmful impacts.

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