Ask Dr. Tim: I still continue to hear the voice of my mother saying, “What is the matter…?”
Q
I am 58-years-old and I still continue to hear the voice of my mother saying, “What is the matter with you…why can’t you be normal?” For the life of me, as a kid I didn’t know what that meant. I seemed to be like most other boys my age in school. I had a lot of energy but so did most of my friends. To this day when something doesn’t go well I hear that angry voice being shouted at me. I have always been afraid to ask this, but doesn’t’ this mean I am “crazy”?
Buddy
A
Dear Buddy,
While this is not the format to try to provide a diagnosis, I do have a couple of comments. Going “crazy” technically consists of a number of factors. A psychologist or psychiatrist would consider all of these factors to determine your mental state and if you are “insane”:
- General appearance
- Orientation to person, place, time (do you know where you are and what day/year it is)
- Insight
- Judgment
- Affect (i.e., flat?)
- Mood (i.e., depressed or anxious?)
- Memory
- Attention/Concentration
- Thought Content (i.e., delusions: guilt or persecution)
- Perception (i.e., hallucinations: auditory, visual, smell)
- Flow of Thought (i.e., perseveration, tangential)
- Speech
- Interview behavior (i.e., aggressive, dramatic, evasive)
So as you can see there are a number of questions, which need to be answered in order to, determine insanity. If you think you have problems in several of these areas you may want to seek professional advise.
However, with your situation, if you do not hear an actual voice of your mother, say, coming out of the TV it is likely not an auditory hallucination. Long ago Sigmund Freud wrote about the “superego”. That is a critical aspect of us, which tends to be around much of our life. By the way, with some good psychotherapy you should be able to make peace with mom’s voice.
Dr. Tim