“Normalizing Hearing Voices, Paranoia & Unusual Beliefs”- February 2023 Supervisors of CPS & CPPS Community of Practice

January 2023 CPS & CPPS Supervisor’s Community of Practice

“Normalizing Hearing Voices, Paranoia & Unusual Beliefs”
with Peter Bullimore

February 23rd, 2023 from 1:30 – 3:00 pm CT

 

Facilitator:

Peter Bullimore

The chair of the National Paranoia Network, Pete Bullimore, is testament to how effective accepting and working with voices and paranoia can be.

Pete heard his first voice aged seven. “I heard a child’s voice telling me to keep going, that everything would be OK. It was reassuring, a bit like an imaginary friend,” he says. But as bad things happened in my life the voices increased in number, eventually turning sinister and aggressive. “They told me to set myself on fire, to slash myself and destroy myself, often 20 or 30 voices all shouting at me at once,” he says. By his mid-twenties Pete had lost his business, his family, his home, everything. “The voices just encompassed my life; I curled up in a chair and didn’t wash or eat. “I was locked in a world of voices, paranoia and depression, and it was probably the most frightening time of my life,” he says.

Pete spent more than a decade after that on heavy medication, but the voices never went away. He had to get out of the psychiatric system to recover. It was only when he came off the medication and met people who share his experiences at the hearing voices network that he was able to stop being so afraid of the voices and actually start listening to them. He changed his relationship with his voices and worked through the meaning of his voices and paranoia. He now runs his own training and consultancy agency delivering training on hearing voices childhood trauma and paranoia internationally. He is a guest lecturer at fourteen Universities in the UK. He has set up Maastricht Centre’s at the Radbone unit in Derby and the Hartington unit in Chesterfield in collaboration with Derby NHS trust; he has now launched a Maastricht Approach center in Bradford and a National Maastricht Center in Telford

“I wouldn’t want to get rid of my voices now, they’re part of me,” he says.

Description:

Workshop will include:
1) How common is it to hear voices?
2) How voices can be experiences in different ways
3) Three phases of hearing voices & understanding the metaphor of voices
4) Thought stopping
5) Short term coping strategies for voices hearer’s
6) The history of paranoia
7) Identifying the role of neglect in paranoia
8 ) The three stages of paranoia
9) Understanding the body state information
10) Working with unusual beliefs
11) Decoding beliefs

 

Feedback Survey/CEH Information:

We invite you to please fill out the evaluation survey link (click here) if you attended this community of practice gathering or if you watch the recording. The survey will close at 4:30pm on Thursday, March 9th. Certificates of Participation will be sent to those completing the evaluation form by 4:30pm on March 16th, 2023. No evaluation surveys will be accepted for CEH credit after the evaluation survey’s closing date/time.

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