Supporting A person Who Hears Voices

Developed in response to requests from participants who have already participated in our introductory workshop Accepting Voices Part 1: Introduction.

If you have not already participated in that workshop then you will need to do so first.

This workshop continues from that one and focuses on using the ideas and tools introduced there when supporting an individual who hears voices – whether as part of your work, supporting a loved one, or just in life generally.

HV Workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES
Part 2 | Supporting a Person Who Hears Voices
Tue 8th August 2023
9:30 am to 5:00pm

Church of The Holy Trinity
Trinity Square
Toronto

FEE: $200

This workshop is:
A full day workshop
In Person – no online.

Full Description of the workshop follows below the registration box.

REGISTRATION

Are you ready for this ?

If you have NOT already participated in out popular workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES part 1: Introduction
then you’ll be as lost as a lost thing and wonder what the heck we’re talkin’ aboot if you come to this one first.

Click the link to go there first: https://recoverynet.ca/2023/04/17/hv-workshop-accepting-voices-part-1-jun-2023/

If you have already participated in out popular workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES part 1: Introduction
then you’ve been introduced to..

• Introduction to Hearing Voices Approach
• How difficulties with voices are linked with difficult life experiences
• The Wormhole
• A Map For Reclaiming our Power

and, if you’re wondering: what’s next?

Then, you may be ready to explore more and take a next step.

A Dialogue…

1. Learning with and From Each Other

Participants will share from their experiences so far applying ideas from the first workshop, there will be four key elements.

1. The Wormhole

Practical ways of working with The Wormhole when supporting a person who hears voices

2. A Map for Reclaiming Our power

Practical ways of working with the Map
For Reclaiming Our Power as a tool or framework for supporting a person who hears voices, especially if they struggle.

We will focusing on the first segment , and the first three steps within it.

These are the basic elements are what a person who hears voices will need from us in order they can feel safe with us, and choose to trust us to support them.

OVERWHELM & ISOLATION
Need To Feel Safe

1. Meeting someone who takes an interest in me as a person.

2. Amongst people who offer a sense of hope, show a way out, and normalize the experience

3. Meeting people who accept voices as real.

3. LISTENING

The importance of listening in healing and building relationships that can support trust, connecting, learning and healing.

We will share, explore, and practice with, ideas about listening including:

• How to have better conversations
• Actually listening – distinct from “Active Listening”
• Non-diagnistic listening.
• If you want to become a better listener…
• Suspending judgement
• Intentional listening
• STFUAL, eh?

4. Talking With Voices

We will share ideas and resources around, and begin to explore ways we can start to listen with and talk with voices that we don’t hear but that the person we support does; including them in the conversation.

5. Choices we can make when Reporting in Encounter Notes

Especially for those who do this in their work and are required to keep notes or rport on encounters, we will begin to explore the choices we can make, including the language we use; and some different ways we might report on encounters

HV Workshop: Accepting Voices Part 2 | Aug 2023

HV Workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES Part 2 : More Accepting

Who is it for ??

Workers

If you work supporting people who live with difficult-to-hear-voices who are told what they experience is “not real” and who themselves are dismissed and dehumanized and called names like “difficult”.

Supporters and carers

If you support a loved one who struggles, and you struggle understanding ways you might best support them.

What if everything you’ve been led to believe about people hearing voices is wrong ?

Or, if not completely bollox, then it at least limits your ability to:

• understanding a person’s struggle with experiences like difficult-to-hear voices and others that get called “psychosis” and dismissed as “not real” ?
• support them in navigating their struggle and finding ways they might heal, learn and grow?

Who this workshop is designed for…

Leaders

If you are in a leadership position and seeking ways to develop capacity at individual, team and organization level to support clients in ways that fully honors:

• Truly understanding trauma and the many ways it can manifest, and in ways that are fully congruent with other approaches like harm reduction and health promotion.
• Centring our interconnectedness and shared humanity; and drawing on them as resource and source of power and practical action for bringing change that supports community and healing.

Learning Objectives

After this workshop participants will be better able to play their role in creating spaces and relationships in which people hearing voices are more likely to find themselves…

1. Meeting someone who takes an interest in them as a person.
2. Amongst people who offer hope, show a way out and accept how I experience the world, and stand with me.
3. Meeting people who accept voices as real.

And better able to form and maintain relationships with those they support rooted in healing, connecting towards finding health and learning and finding their place in the world.

What’s in it?

• Explore more deeply into ways you can use ?The Wormhole and the Map for Reclaiming Our Power in your efforts to support individuals who struggle
• Share resources that you can share with those you support, including..

1. Who hears voices ?
2. Talking With Voices

• Introduce practices you can share and practice with those you support

1. Managing interruptions from voices
2. Talking With Voices

• Share and learn together- stories and experiences you’ve already had from learning tp practice differently.
• Connect with others learning to work in support of those who struggle to move towards healing, connecting and finding their place in the world.

• Join with a community of practice that is informed by the International Hearing Voices Movement and individuals who experience voices.

REGISTER NOW

Register ONLINE NOW at our Eventbrite page.
You can use the direct registration box embedded from Eventbrite below..

Facilitators

Kevin Healey

…hears more voices than you can shake a stick at, so many that even his voices hear voices, and has done so for longer than either he – or they – care to remember but its over fifty years.Founder and coordinator of http://www.recoverynet.ca, Toronto Hearing Voices group, Anglophone Canada’s longest running, and of the Hearing Voices Café.Creates and delivers innovative, taboo-busting talks, trainings and workshops that enable people to find new language, and simpler ways to understand surprisingly common human experiences that we’ve made fearful and taboo, so making life even harder both for those who struggle and also for the rest of us to understand.Shows how we can make simple sense of trauma, pain, psychosis, taboo, and butt-hurt voices, and how they interweave and interconnect our inner-struggle with living in an outer-world that is fast becoming unfit for humans who built it and in which we keep creating results that nobody wants. After you’ve heard him talk you may join those who say they don’t hear voices but now wish they could.

Dave U

For many years Dave would only say only one word, now he authors articles at http://www.recoverynet.ca and moderates online support groups for voices to talk directly with each other round the world, he codesigned this workshop – in fact there’s a lot of Dave in this workshop – if you come you’ll get to meet him/ them.

Enjoys creating memes: out of things voices say, about living in a universe that mostly comprises what he refers to as The Weird, and his own wry observations on the human obsession with calling each other horrible names, categorizing and crushing each other into boxes that don’t fit.As Dave points out, voices have stories too.

Dave’s favourite pastime is pretending to be a jelly while swearing a lot.

Next is remarking upon how “voices” and “humans” behave in ways that are often very much the-one-is–like-the-other. Dave doesn’t really have a bio – like other superheroes he has an “Origins Story”, and like “The Truth…”, at least some of it, is already “ Out There…”

Venue

Please note:

The venue is 1st floor up two flights of stairs.

Accessibility will be difficult is stars are a challenge

There is a non-gendered disabled washroom facility on the ground floor.

Other washrooms are also available in the basement, down other flight of stairs.

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About “Hearing Voices”

Why we choose to use the term hearing voices, what we mean by it…

Hearing voices is intentional, ordinary language descriptive of a range of human experiences that in Western cultures has been mystified and made taboo, and that we have been taught to fear – and yet which are also remarkably common, likely much more common than you think. No everyone uses this language, all kinds of people live with experiences they might call voices, some choose other languages.

Hearing voices does not presuppose neither that a voice can only come from a human body, nor must be heard by more than one person, or more especially must be also heard by someone called a “mental health professional” .

Hearing Voices as Approach also refers to broadly emancipatory ideas and ways of working that accepts such experiences as very real and meaningful- if sometimes difficult to live with, and that seeks to share ways we can learn to live with such difficult experiences and support and connect with each other.

This approach also includes many other similar experiences that can be hard to live with and harder to talk about and make sense of.

When we learn to put aside our fear of both ourselves and each other we generate possibilities, to create new roles, to connect with each other, and to find richer experiences of being human and co-create a world that’s easier to live in for all of us.