So the specific sentence that made us stumble and immediately run to Wren was this:
Recent therapeutic approaches to AVH have gained attention by encouraging voice-hearers to talk to their voices. This may involve āempty chairā work, role-play, or dialoguing with a computer simulation of a distressing voice. Such techniques exploit person-like qualities of AVH and treat them as entities that can be conversed with meaningfully. Talking to voices has not always been encouraged for various reasons, including fear of reinforcing beliefs about the reality of the experience. However, promising results in long-term voice-hearers suggest that dialogue may be considerably beneficial for some.
We've done some more digging since. More detail about these therapies is given in Relational Therapies for People Who Hear Voices (Thomas etĀ al., 2025). There's Relating Therapy, which:
[ā¦] involves the longitudinal exploration of the clientās ārelational landscapeā and identifies patterns of non-assertive relating [ā¦] and in-session role plays are used to practise assertive ways of responding, in which the therapist may play the role of client or voice.
There's AVATAR Therapy, where:
[t]he voice-hearer is supported to create a digital representation of the embodied voice (ie, the avatar). [ā¦] They then engage in a series of dialogues with their avatar which is voiced by the therapist using real-time voice-transformation.
And then there's Talking with Voices, which:
[ā¦] considers voices as representations of parts of self with a psychologically protective function underlying their often negative content. Therapy involves psychosocial education and coping enhancement, an exploration of voice identities and characteristics in relation to life history and significant real-life others, and in-session voice dialogue exercises in which the client focusses on the voice and verbalises what it is saying to allow the therapist (or āfacilitatorā) to directly question it.
(Special shout-out here to the Hearing Voices Movement, which we first encountered via Sarah K. Reece when exploring our own plurality and trauma history.)
The important bit here is in the TwV approach and how it considers voices "representations of parts of self with a psychologically protective function".
This is the same base assumption underlying the theory of structural dissociation (yuck), but if you reframe it a bit, it also underlies various people's conception of plurality:
voices represent parts of the whole,
the parts want to protect the whole,
you can converse with them for the benefit of the whole.
So once the daddy schizophrenia research and mommy attachment theory like each other again and start talking to each other again (it is bewildering just how few cross-references there are between the two areas, given that both experience voice-hearing), we might finally start seeing some official therapy guidelines that recommends treating "parts of the personality" as autonomous beings with beliefs and motivations.
Of course that assumes that the parallel plural movement doesn't beat them to the punch.
