Voice hearing and Voice Dialogue
A Conversation between Robert Stamboliev and Dirk Corstens
Link to PODCAST
TRANSCRIPT
Robert Okay, welcome. Welcome to our podcast. My name is Robert Stamboliev. I’m working with Voice Dialogue, and I’ve been training people for many years.
We’re going to have a conversation about Voice Dialogue and voice hearing. Dirk Corstens is a psychiatrist and an expert in how to work with voice hearing.
Welcome, Dirk. Do you want to say a few words about yourself?
Dirk Thank you, Robert. Yes. I work as a psychiatrist. I have my private practice after working in all kinds of institutes for 40 years.
In 1992, I was working with Marius Romme, who we’ll talk about later, on the subject of hearing voices. That was also the period when I met you.
Robert That’s right. Yeah.
Dirk Quite recently, we met each other again when our film, My Word Against Mine, was screened and won a lot of national and international prizes. The film features voice hearers and conversations I have with them and their voices in a Voice Dialogue way. It’s a very impressive film, I think.
At the same time, around February, we finished a big research project in Manchester. It was led by Eleanor Longton, who is a psychologist and a voice hearer. In this project, they compared 150 voice hearers who received the treatment, talking with voices, with 150 voice hearers who didn’t receive the treatment.
My role was to supervise half of the therapists together with Eleanor Longdon. Another two people supervised another group of therapists.
The results appeared to be very good, even better than CBT, cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis, which this research team has been working with for almost 30 years. So it was a very successful outcome. It also appeared that this can be used in daily practice in mental health institutes.
Robert That’s wonderful.
Dirk Yeah. So it’s quite a journey from 1992 to 2026. I’m very glad that I learned about Voice Dialogue. It really became something we could use with voice hearers.
Robert That’s so interesting. It’s something that started as an intuition.
I think it was in 1987 that Marius Romme had the intuition that perhaps the voice hearer, the client Patsy, was actually right — that she was actually hearing the voice and that it was not simply some hallucination.
Then he did this show. He was with Sonja Barend on national television, as a social psychiatrist asking the public for help with that.
Dirk That’s so fantastic. That’s really Marius Romme. That’s really social psychiatry: being humble in the sense that you know that you don’t know the answer, and then going to the general public for the answer.
In this show, they asked the audience for help, and 700 people reacted, which is unbelievable. That was the start of the Hearing Voices Project, that I joined almost five years later.
Dirk But you have a history with Marius Romme too.
Robert Yes. I have a role in this whole project, and I’m happy to share it.
Not so long after that show, they really realised that voices exist. People actually hear voices, and you cannot simply get rid of them.
Then the next question, of course, was: how do we deal with it? If we cannot sedate them with medication, then we need to learn to cope with them.
I think Marius started looking in alternative circles and other therapies for something that could help. At some point, he came across the book by Hal and Sidra Stone, Embracing Our Selves. He was in communication with them, I think, by writing and telephone. Then he approached me in Amsterdam.
At the time, I was teaching Voice Dialogue in the spring of 1988. He registered for a course, which was also courageous. He didn’t stay in his ivory tower.
He came with his partner, Sandra Escher, and they did a two-day course with me in Amsterdam. They were actually going into their own, let’s say, voices — inner voices. They were not hearing voices, but they were experiencing the method.
After that, he asked me, “Would you be willing to do an experiment?”
I said yes.
The experiment was to have ten voice hearers each have ten sessions of Voice Dialogue with me and also with a colleague of mine, a dear friend, Jeroen Koolbergen, who passed away some years ago and who was a clinical psychologist. There were also a few other people with a background in therapy who acted as facilitators.
Over the course of a year, we facilitated about ten people. They were interviewed by Marius and Sandra before they had the Voice Dialogue sessions, at some point during the process, and again at the end.
The results were very positive. So it was like a mini-study. For some people, the number of voices diminished. One man had 56 voices and ended up with six or seven.
They all learned to cope better with the voices.
For me, that meant I had to adjust the way I used traditional Voice Dialogue, which is very much about sub-personalities. I had to become flexible.
Most of the clients we encountered who heard voices did not see them as sub-personalities. They would say, “It’s my spirit,” or something like that.
I think I was able to work with that because I’m also trained in energetics and because, when I was younger, I experimented a lot with psychedelics for spiritual development.
So I wasn’t particularly surprised to encounter people in an altered state of reality or people hearing voices. I could just hang in there and communicate with them.
Dirk But did you publish the results?
Robert No, they weren’t published. What happened was that they asked us to present the work at congresses, which we did. I made an overview. I think the first one was in 1989 in Maastricht.
There were a few congresses where Jerien and I both shared our findings.
Marius took it step by step. The next step was to say, “Well, then we should train our staff in this.”
So for several years, I went to Maastricht, to the RIAGG. Every time, we did a demonstration session, and that’s where we met, Dirk.
Then I started training the people who worked there. Sometimes I would do a demonstration session.
The way I work with voice hearers is, let’s say, flexible. I use the principles, but I never get into a discussion with the client about whether it is a sub-personality instead of, for example, his grandfather. You hang in there and adapt to the reality of the client.
Dirk Yeah. I remember the first time I joined you, Marius and Sandra.
Marius told me and some colleagues, “Next week, we are going to work for five days with Robert, and you have to provide us with clients.”
Okay, so we did.
It was really, really fantastic.
I saw you working with the woman and the snakes, for example. I saw your enthusiastic way of working with her snakes. After the session, she told me that this was the best conversation she had ever had. But she also said, “He doesn’t believe that I have snakes.”
Which was nice, because it helped her a lot in the sense that she could accept that someone else could be curious and, at the same time, have another perspective on reality. I think that was very helpful for her.
But I also saw really big changes with other people, sometimes in only one session.
So that experience of those five days, which we repeated, I think, a year later for two days or so, was the reason I became very enthusiastic.
Because we had tools to work with the voices.
Robert Yeah. So that was really when the ball started rolling.
Then you studied Voice Dialogue with us in Bergen.
Dirk Yeah.
Robert And I think you also did a course here in Schoorl.
Dirk Yeah, I met Hal and Sidra.
Robert Yes.
Dirk Yeah. That was a very, very impressive week.
Robert I’m also curious, because I worked with you guys until about 2000. We’re now in 2026. So how did it develop further? Did you draw some conclusions? Is there a model?
Dirk First, I had two very positive experiences with two different clients.
I described this work in an article in a Dutch journal. I remember the reviewer, the editor, told me, “This is really great work, but can you leave Voice Dialogue out of it?”
And I said, “No. It’s either with it or not.”
So then he accepted that I would describe Voice Dialogue in that article. That was in 2003 or 2004.
You can imagine how controversial Voice Dialogue was at that time. I knew the editor a little bit, and he was generally quite an open-minded person. But he found the description of Voice Dialogue a little too far removed from the evidence-based world we were in.
Robert What do you think is the reason people are a little bit scared, or that established science finds this concept of selves difficult?
Dirk I think that changed over time.
But at that time, therapists were also afraid of psychosis. They were afraid of voices.
At the same time, alongside Voice Dialogue, you saw, for example, schema therapy coming up, which is also working with parts. I think when the schema therapy movement became more accepted, writing about Voice Dialogue became much more acceptable as well.
But I didn’t answer the “why.” I think they considered it too vague.
Energy. What is energy? The word energy — I think if you see you working, you see energy.
And I think if you see me working too, that’s—
Robert Absolutely. I saw the movie. I really, really liked the way you were doing that.
That was energy work, and also using principles, because you would sometimes shift into just a slightly different mode, or you would go along with the voice, but at some point you would confront the voice.
So it was very intuitive and energetic, I would say.
Dirk Yeah.
The next article was in 2007, together with Eleanor Longdon and Rufus May. We presented five cases in an English journal, and people became interested. I was invited to a roundtable.
Rufus May made a film back then with a famous actor, Ruth — I’ve forgotten her family name. It’s called The Doctor Who Hears Voices.
Funny enough, Rufus didn’t have experience with Voice Dialogue at that point. He went into a discussion with the voice about the interpretation. It’s beautiful to watch in the film because you can see that it doesn’t work.
Later, he attended Voice Dialogue courses, and he still uses it in his practice.
Then there was a roundtable where Rufus and I were invited as people who work in a relational way with voices. Other people do that too, but the Voice Dialogue approach is about relating directly to the voices.
In other relational approaches, it is more about learning to become assertive or learning to ignore voices. We go straight into the protective qualities of the negative voices, for example. That’s very different from all the other approaches.
Avatar therapy is now also very popular. It does help, which is okay — helping a person become assertive — but they don’t go into the positive qualities of negative voices.
Robert I think that must have to do with the identification of the therapist.
If the therapist is identified with, let’s say, the fixer or the helper, then of course you want to help the client, but you’re going to become directive.
If the facilitator or therapist is identified with the mind, they will want to understand what is going on.
So in Voice Dialogue training, there is always this refinement: from where does the therapist work? From where in oneself?
That in itself is a very interesting topic. From where do you work, if it is not only the helper and not only the mind?
Dirk Which is understandable.
A voice hearer who suffers from his or her voices wants you to stop it. They are desperate.
So a psychiatrist who has medication as a toolbox believes that he can help the patient get rid of the voices, which is sometimes true, but most of the time it doesn’t work at all.
As a therapist or Voice Dialogue practitioner, you have to accept that people want to get rid of their voices on the one hand.
But you also have to persuade the person to investigate what is happening and find ways to relate to the voices differently. That’s the core of the work we do, I think.
Some people who see me working for the first time ask, “Is this hypnosis?” Or they say, “Hey, this is relational therapy,” which is true.
I think that makes it so different from other approaches.
In the research project, we don’t only talk with voices. We take some steps beforehand that are important to mention.
In the protocol, there are 28 sessions. Sometimes that is more than enough, but most of the time it is not enough. But in a research project, you have to limit yourself.
The first phase is to help the voice hearer cope with overwhelming voices and develop a personal toolbox.What can you do when the voices become too overwhelming during our session?So you help the voice hearer develop a personal toolbox to stay calm or return to a safe situation.
That’s the first few sessions.
The second phase is to develop a construct. That means trying to relate the voices to the life history of the person. You try to find what problems lie underneath the process of voice hearing. When you have rounded that up, you know much more about the voices and how the voice hearer is coping with them.
Then you can start relating to the voices directly or indirectly.
Robert Okay.
Dirk After that phase, we have a phase in which we close the sessions and transfer what we have learned to other people — family members, for example, or other support workers.
Robert Okay. So that’s what you call the construct: finding out when the voice came into somebody’s life?
Dirk Yeah. And what or who the voices represent.
Often the voices are related to people who did something in the life of the voice hearer.
Often the problem is aggression or sexuality or all kinds of troubles that you can perhaps solve, instead of having to diagnose schizophrenia or use all this disempowering language.
Robert It’s really empowering.
Dirk And we did some research projects.
The latest is with 300 people, but we also did one with 50 people. We interviewed both the therapists and the voice hearers.
Both were very enthusiastic about this empowering way of communicating with the voices.
Robert Yeah. Thank you. That’s clarifying.
I have another question.
I understand that something like one in eight people, or one in ten, hears a voice. I’ve read different numbers.
Dirk Yeah, me too.
Robert And of these many, many people, one-third have some problems with it, and two-thirds do not?
Dirk Yeah.
Robert So in the research, are you working only with people who have problems with it?
Dirk Yeah.
Robert Okay.
Dirk That would be a very interesting group, the two thirds that have no problem with hearing voices. .
When Marius and Sandra started all this, they organised conferences. At the first two conferences, there were almost no people with a psychiatric background.
Robert I came into this in 1988. I did several workshops with people who hear voices, and there were some extraordinary experiences.
I worked with a woman who, in her daily life, was a paranormal therapist.
She would have a voice that woke her up at night and told her to go to a certain bridge because somebody was about to jump.
It was like a spiritual voice.
Dirk A spiritual medium.
Robert Yeah. A spiritual medium.
It was amazing, because I’m so happy that I don’t need to know what it means — whether it is true or not true. I’m pragmatic.
But I do feel energy. And this part of her that was giving her these orders was so powerful.
It was standing in the room, in the training setting. She said they were from some planetary system. I can’t remember the name now, but they were from these planets, and they said, “We.”
There was such power and authority in these voices, and everybody in the room was impressed.
The problem for the client was that the voices wouldn’t respect her night’s rest. She would almost become burned out because of the intensity of these voices.
But from the point of view of “What is a human being?” I found that very interesting.
I’ve had more experiences with people who are not suffering from their voices but are simply dealing with them, sometimes while being somewhat out of balance.
And these voices also like to be brought into the relationship. They like to be interviewed.
Dirk Yeah, yeah.
We did this research project in the early days in which we compared voice hearers with a psychiatric diagnosis and voice hearers who had never been patients.
Perhaps I met the same woman, but I met 15 of these people. Most of them were indeed paranormal therapists. It was amazing to hear about the experiences these people had.
It was also remarkable that, for all these groups, the first time they started to hear voices had a tremendous effect on them. It was frightening to hear somebody calling you or telling you things.
But in this non-patient group, as we called them, people found their own way. They didn’t stay afraid of it. And they could be more open about the experience. It was not so negative.
Recently I met people in Brasil and there is a big movement on spiritism. This is also voice hearing, but in a completely different way. And I hope to present something about this spiritism in the next world congress on hearing voices in Denmark, together with a Brasilian psychologist who knows a lot more on mediumship. Its such an interesting perspective and experience. It looks like other voice hearing experiences but is much more positive and helpful in a way for other people. It is so interesting.
Robert That is so interesting. I suppose it is also cultural. In some cultures, like Brazil, people may be more open to these experiences, which perhaps makes it easier to live with hearing voices than it would be in Holland.
Dirk The funny thing is that when you read about Brazilian Spiritism, they refer back to France in the nineteenth century, where Spiritism was described very precisely. Those ideas were then brought to South America, particularly Brazil. People still refer to that French Spiritist, although I cannot remember his name today.
I also know from other research that around 1900, Spiritism was very popular and was taken seriously as a subject of research. We even used a large research project from that period to demonstrate that hearing voices is a very common experience.
That was also my conclusion after speaking with many non-patient voice hearers. In our own country, too, there is a subculture of voice hearers for whom hearing voices is regarded as a gift—a way of helping other people.
Robert So it has a positive connotation.
Dirk Yes.
Robert That is interesting.
It makes me enthusiastic about this topic again. For me, it originally started as a way of exploring consciousness, and that was what attracted me at the time.
It is wonderful that Voice Dialogue can also be used in psychotherapy and coaching to help people, but fundamentally it is an exploration of consciousness. That is what Hal and Sidra Stone were doing as well: getting to know the different parts of themselves and how these parts developed throughout their lives. The core is the exploration of consciousness, with the beneficial effect that it can also help people.
Dirk I hope that the film and our work with people who might otherwise be considered psychiatric patients will encourage voice hearers to seek out Voice Dialogue therapists, and perhaps help them avoid becoming psychiatric patients in the first place. That is a dream I have.
Robert Wonderful. At our institute we train people in Voice Dialogue, both in Holland and elsewhere. Do you have any advice for Voice Dialogue facilitators who want to work with voice hearers? Do they need specific training or something additional?
Dirk I think you have to be prepared to encounter very negative voices, and you need to learn how to deal with your own anxiety about that.
It is quite normal to feel anxious when a voice is extremely negative or even attacks you, which sometimes happens. You have to know your own parts very well and be able to deal with your own reactions. You also need to be able to enter into the same kind of energy.
I think that is very important when working with strong negative voices—for example, voices that represent predatory behaviour. You need to have some affinity with, or access to, that kind of energy yourself.
It is also important to genuinely believe that hearing voices is a natural and normal human experience. If you approach someone primarily as “a person with schizophrenia,” it does not work. It really does not work.
You have to be firm, but without denying your own fear. Your fear may also be giving you useful information.
Robert Because that can also be an advice. Sometimes it may tell you that you should not go further at that moment, or that you should wait.
Dirk These are things you can learn.
You also have to learn to negotiate around your own safety. It is not only about the safety of the person or the safety of the voice; it is also about your safety as the facilitator.
If you cannot trust the voice or the voice hearer you are working with, then you have to work with that issue of trust. That is different.
Robert Do you have an example? This is one of the reasons it takes longer to learn Voice Dialogue than some other methods: it has to become embodied.
If you are working with, for example, a “killer” part, the facilitator needs to have access to that part in herself or himself. You mentioned predators. What kinds of voices might a facilitator encounter?
Dirk I have a beautiful example, which I also described in our book, and I have a video of it.
There was a man of around 50 or 55 years old who had been a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion. He was British. For a British man to become a sergeant in that army, you have to be very hard boiled. He was, in that sense, a professional killer.
He had participated in all kinds of secret missions. At some point, one of his best friends was killed during a mission somewhere in South America. He was unable to save him. After that, he became psychotic and entered psychiatric care. He began hearing voices, although during our conversations it became clear that he had actually heard voices throughout his life.
His voices were extremely strong.
My perspective was: “This man is a professional killer. I have to be very good at negotiating, and I have to negotiate around my own safety.”
He was very motivated to work with his voices, and we worked with him during a three-day course, so we really got to know him.
When we began the Voice Dialogue work, it became clear that he was actually more afraid that the voice would take him over and make him hurt me than I was afraid that he might do something to me.
So we negotiated very carefully about what would make it safe for him to allow his voice to speak with me. My colleague Eleanor Longden was there as his secondant, in a sense, helping him remain grounded.
Once he, the voice, and I all felt safe enough, we had an extraordinary conversation.
This voice, which initially presented as a very critical, almost killer-like voice, became extremely open about what had happened. It explained how it had been trying to protect him and help him survive, rather than encourage him to kill himself.
It became a truly remarkable conversation.
It helped him enormously. I followed up with him a few months later, and it had genuinely been a transformative experience for him—and for me as well.
Robert Were you able to access that killer part in yourself?
Dirk Yes. At a certain point, I was no longer afraid to experience that part.
I think that was very important in allowing us to work together. I could remain firm because I was no longer afraid of his energy.
And I knew something about soldiers: when a soldier tells you that a deal is a deal, then a deal is a deal. That gave me strength. I could feel the soldier in myself—the part that says, “If I promise something, I will always do it.”
That was what made me feel safe enough to work with him.
Robert So actually, I hear three things.
First, you have to be able to match the energy.
One is that you have to match the energy and also take care of your own vulnerability — to be in touch with that.
And actually, the third one is to set a good limit.
Dirk Yeah.
Robert Well, it seems like we’ve covered quite a few topics.
Dirk Yes. I hope that Voice Dialogue practitioners will want to learn how to work with voice hearers, because I think there is a lot of potential.
Robert Yes. I feel very motivated for this, especially after seeing that beautiful documentary, My Word Against Mine, and hearing from you about the research that, after all these years, is now really gaining momentum in England.
So, from our side, we will take some steps as well.
Dirk Great.
Robert Thank you, Dirk. I think this feels quite complete. We’ll add some literature and other resources to the video for people who want to read more or find the film.
Dirk Okay. Thank you very much, Robert.
June 22, 2026
Referral Guide: For more information on hearing voices, a referral guide with a listing the organizations where voicehearers can truly find support and the film My Word Against Mine, please visit the platform mwthm.ceruttifilm.nl
