The voices in my head

They've been narrating my sexual fantasies and calling me names since I was 9, and that's ... OK.

By Cary Tennis

Mar 18, 2000 | "I am two fools, I know,/For loving, and for saying so/In whining poetry." -- John Donne, "The Triple Fool"

One hot summer night in 1962 in Bradenton, Fla., upstairs in a green wooden house on the Manatee River, I awoke from troubled sleep to find a chorus of voices taunting me. I lay in my bed and believed I was going to die. I was 9 years old.

I did not know what to do so I got out of bed and went into my parents' bedroom. My father was awake, sitting at the desk he had made of a hollow-core door laid across two filing cabinets. On the floor were stacked copies of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in which he had published an article about commanding an LCT (landing craft, tank) during a typhoon in the Pacific during World War II. He had his glasses on and was typing on his black, portable Royal typewriter on Manatee County School System letterhead. I went up to him and put my hand on his arm.

"I can't sleep," I said.

"Why not?"

"I keep hearing voices."

"What are they saying?"

"Nothing. They're just yelling."

He seemed to pause and think for a moment. "Well, why don't you try this," he said. "Just tell them to shut up."

My dad had a degree in psychology from the University of Chicago.

"What if they don't shut up?" I asked.

"Oh, I think they will."

"What if they try to hurt me?"

"They can't hurt you," he said. "They're just voices."

So I went back to bed and told the voices to shut up. To my surprise, they did. After a while I was able to go to sleep.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thirty years later I was living in San Francisco and still hearing voices. They were not the psychotic auditory hallucinations of a madman. They were more like subvocal conversations running constantly, like rogue signals leaking into a radio transmission.

At times, of course, I wanted to hear voices; I was performing in a kind of abstract and jumbled, impressionistic spoken-word style at the time, and it helped to be able to unleash wholly irrational streams of verbiage like a madman. But I also felt threatened by this uncontrolled activity in my mind, and was seeking a way to find serenity in the midst of it.

I was also about to get married. I had led a complicated love life up to that point and I wanted wise counsel. On the advice of a former girlfriend, I went to see a Jungian therapist in an institute in a big, old converted Victorian house across from a hillside park.

The Jungian was a slight man of Indian descent, with skin of a deep copper color. He wore gray slacks and a light-blue, button-down shirt with a navy blazer. His hair was jet black and his eyes were steady. He had a little goatee. He sat behind a desk in a small, high-ceilinged office. His voice was kind but matter-of-fact. He asked if I had been in therapy before. I said no. He explained that what I told him would be confidential except if it appeared that I was a danger to myself or others, in which case he would be obliged by law to tell the police.

"Are you often anxious?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

I explained to him that I was about to get married and I was fearful about two things: that I would be missing out on all the women who might await me if I stayed single, and that I was going to have to make a living and I was afraid that might interfere with my writing.

Then he asked, "Do you hear voices?"

"Of course," I said, a little defensively. "I'm a writer."

He looked at me without expression.

"Is that a problem?" I asked. He didn't seem impressed or amused.

"Let me ask you this," he said. "Do the voices tell you to do things?"

"Not really," I said. "I mean, sometimes they try to tell me to do things, but I don't obey. And sometimes they tell each other what to do. They're characters."

"So you hear multiple voices?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you remember when it began?"

"When I was 9," I said.

"And these voices -- do they ever tell you to harm yourself or others?"

"No," I said.

But I was lying. Because one voice was saying, "Strangle the little Jungian with the beard."

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