Published: December 2021, Issue 40

Keywords:
Networks, Movements, Emotions, Greek Hearing Voices Network, Humberto Maturana.

Greek Hearing Voices Network

A few words about us

After a series of visits by Jaqui Dillon, Peter Bullimore, Cate Crawford, Tori Reeve and Linda Whiting, during which they gave talks about alternative approaches to voices and paranoia, the Greek HVN was founded in 2010. It represents a partnership between individuals who hear voices or have other extreme or unusual experiences, professionals and allies within the community, all of whom are working together to change the assumptions made about these phenomena and create support, learning and healing opportunities for people across the country. But this is something more than collaboration. It is a vivid, autopoietic system that aims at producing meaning and therefore life. And that’s how it started: from the quest of meaning deriving from the sorrow, the self-awareness and the radical stance of a young woman, Marianna Kefallinou, who met a creative, rebel, open minded person Peter Bullimore. And the spark was there. In our history this was our Big Bang moment. Meaning and dreaming… And then voice hearers entered the meetings, some professionals came, family members, students, persons coming from a community that has been violently attacked from neoliberal politics that aim to destroy the community. So these meeting turned out to be something more than a network of people. It proved to be a dreamland; a movement that aims to keep people connected.

Abstract

Voices, loved and idealized,

of those who have died, or of those

lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;

sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return

sounds from our life’s first poetry -

like music at night, distant, fading away.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

According to Maturana, love, as “a fundamental emotion in constitution of the history of humankind”, broadens our mind for reflection, creates the possibility of choice, heals and serves as the starting point and source of recovery. We aspire to give the current presentation as the outcome of an emotion-driven reflection process within the Greek Hearing Voices Network. The process aims to bring out the way in which core values of the Network's culture as a movement are underpinned by terms like “co-evolution”, communities of learning and practice, “partner-like cooperation in developing common goals,” “solidarity,” “development of self-help potential”, learning networks. The process started on the beginning of March 2021. We don’t know yet where this will lead us. What we know is that questions create motion and emotion. What raises our spirit? Who talks through a person? Which voices are deployed? How can the voices teach us? How can we make use of all the voices if possible? How are the voices linked with others? Some voices will remain unsaid like the «sounds from our life’s first poetry». We know that “the community is a potential school, a collectivity that teaches, shows and shapes, a collectivity within - or with - which people can learn and teach in turn”. We also know that “even in an emerging society of control, there is a dynamic that helps us cope with the fear of isolation, suppression and prohibition”. Finally, we know it is the love of Sandra Escher that still talks in our dreams. And we know all these because we are members of a community.