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Dealing with the Voices of Alters

Learning to communicate

Shirley J. Davis
4 min readNov 15, 2023
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

As anyone who has dissociative identity disorder (DID) can tell you, one of the worst symptoms is hearing the voices of the other alters as they vie for attention. These voices can be overwhelming, leaving multiples shocked and dismayed.

This article will focus on how hearing the voices of other alters changes one’s life and things you can do to ease them.

Runaway Thoughts

It is easy to understand why multiples hear the voices of the others when you consider that everyone, even singletons, hears the voices of their thoughts. Indeed, hearing the voices of alters ringing in your mind isn’t always unpleasant, especially after many years of learning to cope with them.

Sometimes, people who are seeing a therapist for DID are at first misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. However, the voices that people living with dissociative identity disorder experience are not the same.

Those living with schizophrenia tend to hear voices from without that are sometimes telling them terrible things and are highly disturbing. However, those living with dissociative identity disorder hear their voices speaking from within, and although they might ring negative and are sometimes loud, they are harmless.

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Shirley J. Davis
Shirley J. Davis

Written by Shirley J. Davis

I am an author/speaker/grant writer in the U.S. My passion is authoring information about mental health disorders, especially dissociative identity disorder..

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