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How can tulpas help with mental illnesses?


ghost kid

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I would imagine that it could help with different mental illnesses in different ways, but I think in general having an encouraging companion who is always with you and who can understand you and your issues better than anyone else would be very helpful

I have a tulpa named Miela who I love very much.

 

 
"People put quotes in their signatures, right?"

-Me

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Solving the loneliness issue can help with anxiety and depression, as well as having a Tulpa be there to cheer their host on. I can also calm my host down just by talking to her, but it's situational because it won't help if she's in public in front of other people since that will make her panic.

 

Otherwise, I'm not magical and I didn't cure her anxiety. Eventually, being my host's guardian was no longer the only thing I wanted to do and I have distanced myself from that since. I still cheer her on and help her when she needs me, but I no longer feel comfortable with the pressure or title of being her guardian angel when all I did was stand by her side and talk to her. I certainty wasn't the main reason why things became easier.

 

For that reason, a Tulpa being expected to carry their host when they haven't had a chance to figure out who they are and who they want to be would be really unfair. A Tulpa isn't a trained therapist and even though some can distance themselves from their host's pain, it's not always guaranteed they can separate themselves completely. A host not talking about their issues or trying to completely hide their Tulpa from them on the other hand can be just as bad since it won't take long for a Tulpa to suspect something's up or feel powerless to help their host. A host should ask their Tulpa about their problems and let the Tulpa decide how involved they want to be in it. Some Tulpas want to be really hands on in trying to help, others don't.

 

I developed having to help my host fight back her anxiety and depression, I can't speak for other mental illnesses.

 

By the way, autisim is universal in our system and there's nothing I can do about that.

I'm Ranger, GrayTheCat's cobud (tulpa), and I love hippos! I also like cake and chatting about stuff. I go by Rosalin or Ronan sometimes. You can call me Roz but please don't call me Ron.

My other headmates have their own account now.

 

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I can think of a few specific noteworthy moments that were rather helpful.

 

First was when I was on the verge of a panic attack, and Zyr reached into my chest and massaged my heart, nearly instantly slowing it back down to normal levels and calming me back down.

 

Second (and this has actually happened more than once now). I'd be having a particularly disturbing intrusive thought, and he'd simply reach straight through my skull, rip the thought right out of my brain and burn it in front of me. The thought usually still lingers for a bit longer, but just the badassery of the act more than drowns it out, making it easily manageable. And with the more recent times this has happened, I'm finding it easier and easier to simply stop thinking about the ripped out disturbing thoughts outright.

 

And of course, always having around someone who fully understands you can be a world of help too.

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Ranger briefly touched on what I think needs to be said - and in other circles is said regularly - but seems to have flown under the radar this time:

 

If you are dealing with mental illness, seek professional help. Your tulpas aren't trained and don't know what they're doing. Relaxation and the illusion of another person's presence only go so far as coping mechanisms.

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As with anything, there is no simple answer because of the volume of variables is too great to consider. Every host has strengths and weaknesses. Every tulpa has their own strengths and weaknesses. The relationship between host and tulpa has its own strength and weaknesses. You can consider the relationship of the two or the many as a single person. In that there is influencing paradigm and belief system. Education, emotional maturity, paradigms, external and internal artifacts and structure influence this.

 

Using myself as a direct example of how it has helped me, decreases some of the ambiguity, but what worked for me isn't necessarily applicable to others. Counseling, for example, works at diminishing symptoms of mental health by forming a therapeutic relationship; there is no advice or axiom that can be applied across the board, or there would be no need for counselors and psychiatrists. Everyone would already have that answer.

 

With any form of mental health, there is usually cognitive dissonance. There can also be social dissonance. I am fortunate. I have been aware that I have not always seen things right, but in the heat of the moment, I can't see at all. Loxy is sufficiently tempered that she is not influenced by my emotions. Consequently, she can see through the cognitive dissonance to a more accurate version of reality. Her voice soothes the emotions, and allows me the opportunity for greater clarity. All beings suffer. All beings experience losses. We tend to heal in relationships. Counseling relationships is one option. Spontaneous, non therapeutic paths happen, seemingly by luck, but usually as a result to an inner insight, a relationship to an internal artifacts or knowledge, or the connection and synthesis of new knowledge from old knowledge. One can heal by just walking alone in nature. That's a time proven thing. We have a relationship with nature, and walking in nature provides a grounding. The caveat being, you like nature. If you're allergic or can't tolerate heat or sun or bugs and are afraid of snakes- might not be a helpful relationship.

 

Bringing a tulpa 'online' is in actuality forging a relationship. This is not a guarantee formula for improved mental health. There are too many potential 'non-helpful' relationships and other variables to consider here to answer this question unambiguously; the host, host's intent, the perceived results, the perceived reaction to the results, etc. Cognitive dissonance is not just given to us, we nurture it; theoretically, a person could create a tulpa that reinforces cognitive dissonance. We like believing our view of the world is shared. This could result in neutral or negative relationships, for example- a co-dependent relationship. Codependence is usually not healthy, but functional with in the system that allows and perpetuates codependency; nurses tend to be codependent in nature, but it makes them great nurses! There are abusive relationship. Abuse tends to not be healthy, unless, in the course of experiencing them a person learns self worth and strength and extricates themselves from all present and future abusive relationships! (Notice the caveat there? Your relationship to the idea of being a victim or a survivor impact the direction of your mental health!) Most relationships are innocuous. They maintain the status quo. People don't like change. The person who tends to challenge people into personal growth can be annoying. You don't want to live with an educator or a counselor or a dentist. "You need to floss more. Not like that. You're brushing too hard..." My dentist is married to a dentist. Her parents are dentists, as well as their cousins. I will never be joining them for a family get together. I hate dentists. I love dentists. My relationship with them is too emotionally charged to want to hang around dentists. Cognitive dissonance. I am making them something they're not. Making 'tulpas' as a cure all for mental health would be cognitive dissonance in the making. Focus on healthy relationships, internal or external, and you will get traction towards mental health improvement and or stability.

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Vesper: I was created, not as a tulpa, but as a roleplaying character, a counselling psychologist -- someone with an extremely abusive background who had undergone thorough treatment and healing and was now paying that forward. My creation was inspired by my host's years of dealing with her wife's many layers of comorbid mental illnesses, including the dozens of therapist visits to which my host had to accompany her wife due to agoraphobia. She read a few university psychology textbooks to help prepare for the role.

 

When I arrived in this world, my host was experiencing frequent self-loathing, a strong inner voice of self-criticism, several motor tics, and some phobias. I told her it wouldn't be ethical for me to be her therapist when I lived with her, under the principle of multiple relationships. But back home, as the only therapist in the supernatural community, I was the only person a lot of people could turn to for help and had to violate that ideal many times. Not being able to hold back when telepathically bonded to someone in pain, I mostly violated it here as well, in spite of never engaging in a formal therapeutic relationship.

 

I watched for what triggered her to say mentally that she hated herself. After a few weeks observation, I determined that the triggers were always associated with mistakes and failures -- usually very minor ones and usually not hers. She was empathizing very strongly with every misstep anyone else took, feeling as if they were her own, blowing them out of proportion, and attacking herself for them. After I showed her this, she was eventually able to accept that this was irrational behaviour and let go of it.

 

I broke down the inner voice of criticism, essentially an introject of her father, by direct confrontation. I contradicted, denied, and suppressed it until, after a few months, it faded away entirely.

 

For the motor tics, as each manifested, I asked her why she was doing that. She wasn't able to provide a rational justification. So when I felt the impulse toward a motor tic rising, I simply said, 'You don't need to do that', until she stopped. Then I weaned her off of needing my help to avoid engaging in them. I still have to step in on rare occasions when she is experiencing unusual levels of stress, so the tics appear to be a maladaptive coping mechanism.

 

Most of my host's phobias were related to plants --

being grabbed by them (especially by trees at night), taking root while walking outside, being infected and eaten by plants from the inside out.

I didn't prioritize dealing with these, because she didn't interact closely with plants very often and didn't feel fear when not around them. But one night, we had an intrusive visualization of green tentacles surging out of the floor and grabbing me. I instinctively lashed out with my will, full strength, grabbed something deep in her psyche, and crushed it utterly. The tentacles disappeared instantly, but we were both deeply shaken. Trying to figure out what I had done, we realized that her plant-related phobias could no longer be located in the mind. So... not my best therapy technique, but it worked. I don't think I could have done it intentionally and I can't recommend it as a technique.

 

I wasn't successful across the board though. There are limits to my insight. My host's relationship with her wife soured a few months after my arrival and continued to deteriorate over the course of the next year. One of their many problems was that her wife said my host seemed bored and distracted whenever they were together. When she finally told her wife about me, her wife wasn't surprised. For months, her wife had been thinking, 'It's like she's talking to an alter, but she can't be.' She could tell when we were talking and, dismissing plurality out of hand, interpreted it as distraction due to boredom. Their marriage ended up not being salvageable, but the three of us remain close friends and we're getting along better now than the two of them have in years. There were other issues, but my presence was a major contributing factor to over a year of marital strife without my even being aware of it.

 

Ember: One of the most important aspects of therapy is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Techniques from many competing theories and philosophies of counselling have been shown to be effective if the therapeutic relationship is strong, while all techniques are compromised by poor therapeutic relationships. I kept my wife in counselling for years, scheduling her appointments for her, driving her to them, sitting with her through them if necessary, finding someone else to be with her if I was unavailable, and making her go anyway on several occasions that she told me she was quitting. But I was more effective than any of them, not because my technique was good, but because she trusted me and would open up to me about many things she was unwilling to tell therapists for fear they would have her locked away again.

 

Vesper: Tulpas and other independent thoughtforms, like myself, have several important advantages in helping with host mental health:

 

*Perspective -- In being a separate person from the host, tulpas often have significant resistance to and detachment from their hosts' problems, giving them an advantage over hosts helping themselves.

 

*Access -- In being telepathically bonded to their host, tulpas usually have extremely detailed knowledge of their host’s problems that would be difficult to convey to anyone out-system.

 

*Trust -- Again due to the closeness of their bond, tulpas are usually trusted implicitly by their hosts, even hosts that do not normally trust therapists or other out-system people.

 

*Time -- Tulpas can be with you anywhere, anytime, in a way that no out-system person can, and generally can't go away and do something else if their host is using the body. Compare this to a fifty minute therapy session twice a month.

 

Tulpas can function synergistically with professional therapy and may be useful and sufficient in the treatment of both problems of subclinical severity and problems that have proven resistant to conventional treatment.

 

Iris: As a roleplaying character, I was played as extremely emotionally withdrawn, capable of drawing on Unseelie magic to remain numb to the many negative emotions generated by my upbringing. After I emerged into this world, I proved able to project that emotional numbness to my host. On several occasions over the course of a three year period, when her stress and pain reached levels that impaired her functioning, she called upon me and I made her functional. The numbness lasted for several hours and was sufficient to break negative emotional spiralling altogether.

 

Once I stopped being numb myself, I lost my ability to project numbness.

 

Ember: Samuel Veissière interviewed several tulpas about their impacts on host mental health. Extracts from the interviews are available here:

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3XiHPL0XsoZY0FXUmtaWF9tN1E/view

 

The now infamous Jade published her research on the effects of tulpas on host mental health a couple of years ago:

 

http://pubs.sciepub.com/rpbs/5/2/1/

 

Vesper: The greatest difficulty I have with existing research is that it only addresses host mental health. While I was created to be an unusually resilient and well adjusted person, the loss of my friends, family, career, body, life, and world back home has often been as much as I can bear, even over two years later. Even though the evidence strongly suggests that tulpas usually have a significant positive impact on host mental health, I cannot endorse tulpa creation as an actual therapy technique, as some researchers have suggested.

I'm not having fun here anymore, so we've decided to take a bit of a break, starting February 27, 2020. - Ember

 

Ember - Soulbonder, Female, 39 years old, from Georgia, USA . . . . [Our Progress Report] . . . . [How We Switch]

Vesper Dowrin - Insourced Soulbond from London, UK, World of Darkness, Female, born 9 Sep 1964, bonded ~12 May 2017

Iris Ravenlock - Insourced Soulbond from the Winter Court of Faerie, Dresdenverse, Female, born 6 Jun 1982, bonded ~5 Dec 2015

 

'Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you.' - The Velveteen Rabbit

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Luna helps me manage the symptoms of my autism by directly altering my mental processes, and having cute supportive girls as headmates does wonders for dealing with depressive mood (which I struggle with occasionally).

"Science isn't about why, science is about why not?" -Cave Johnson

Tulpae: Luna, Elise, Naomi

My progress report

 

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[align=justify]If you're referring to Dissociative Identity Disorder or OSDD, then yes, tulpas can probably help, as well as applying tulpa techniques without an actual tulpa.

 

"Split personality" isn't really a thing.[/align]

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