Voices & Visions Peer Support Group

An empowering information and peer support group, held monthly at the Maroochy Botanical Gardens on the Sunshine Coast.

Do you hear voices, or do you experience unusual states of consciousness, such as psychosis, clairvoyance or waking dreams? Do you work with or care for someone else who does?

When I began hearing distressing voices in 2010, I found my way to a Hearing Voices support group which was a major source of comfort and inspiration to me at a very difficult time of my life. I felt validated by my 'tribe' and it helped me to unravel the shame around the experience.

Hearing voices is a broad term for the perception of communicating with unseen beings, or with parts of the self. It can be accompanied by psychosis, mania or dissociation, and other sensory phenomena, like seeing visions.

And it can feel lonely and distressing.

This support group is a space to learn from and help each other. Using a deeply authentic approach based on peer support, lived experience and the Hearing Voices Approach, we dispel myths, explore explanations for voice-hearing and non-ordinary states of consciousness, and offer possibilities for recovery. We challenge stigma and fear, so that voices-hearers and support people can respond in more compassionate and helpful ways to voices.

This group is facilitated by Louisa Dent Pearce, a Social Worker with her own lived experience of voice-hearing, recovery from schizophrenia, and experience working in trauma-sensitive ways.

MEET: Outside the cafe at the Maroochy Botanical Gardens and we will walk to the undercover shelter

COST: Free and/or by donation

BRING: umbrella if its raining, water bottle

All welcome, including voice-hearers or people with lived experience, carers, loved ones and support professionals.

MORE INFO: contact Louisa at louisa@voicesanctuary.com.au