Multilingual people who hear voices often experience voices in languages they do not fully understand, challenging the dominant theory that voice-hearing arises from misattributed inner speech. In-depth interviews with ten multilingual voice-hearers in the UK, analyzed using constructionist reflexive thematic analysis, reveal a spectrum of such experiences with complex emotions and subtle distinctions. The relationship between language experiences, voices' languages, and associated emotions is intricate and individual: voices can both reflect and distort or shift the contexts, domains, interlocutors, and feelings linked to each language. These findings have implications for therapeutic and peer support for distressed voice-hearers and open new avenues in voice-hearing phenomenology and aetiology.
Unregulated negative emotions like fear and anger, especially when repressed by trauma sufferers, can cause dissociation by disrupting the link between body and mind. Mindfulness practice, combined with other holistic approaches, can help trauma sufferers regulate these emotions and build emotional resilience. The argument draws on the mind-body problem as a philosophical foundation, and examines the relationship between mind/consciousness and body/the unconscious in relation to selfhood through psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, and mind-body medicine. The text uses the Buddhist concept of dukkha to frame suffering and emphasizes the importance of working with negative emotions for healing.