What do possession and switching feel like?

[Guest]

I have been thinking that there are different flavors of switching, and different techniques to attain those.

[Ranger]

Usually a mix of laziness and being on mobile I think. We actually go the extra mile and remove the line breaks before and after the ends of quotes, although it's invisible outside the editor.

 

Sorry, I was rushing and didn't have time to format the post. I fixed it.

 

Anyways, I've never heard of what you're saying, so it must be from old switching guides or something.

 

I was looking at this Reddit page.

 

What we do doesn't require any intentional dissociation, though it causes a form of dissociation. It doesn't require meditation, hypnosis, possession, or time. It seems really odd to us that so many other systems are spending hour upon hour trying to deny the body, deny the senses, and stop thinking.

 

We've already assembled everything we could think to say about switching in a single post of our PR, with the expectation a few people might read it and comment somewhere on how it influenced their efforts, even if they regard our advice as complete rubbish.

 

-Ember

 

That post is really interesting; I want to spend some time seriously analyzing it, compare what you guys said to what Tewi and Reisen said, and create a new attempt to switch with Cat. Anyways, it wouldn't hurt to put it in submissions if you want to contribute to the lack of switching guides since I think it has a chance of getting approved (especially since the GAT should be up and running soon).

 

My opinion is switching isn't a thing our body wants to do, or we simply have the wrong mindset headed into this. It makes sense to me that mindset could be a determining factor here, and tweaking our perspective could make a big difference. If not, then perhaps it will aid us once Cat gets better at meditating.

[Ember.Vesper]

it wouldn't hurt to put it in submissions if you want to contribute to the lack of switching guides

 

We really need some feedback before we can ethically offer our article as advice. If switching is as easy in principle as it feels to us, it doesn't make sense that other systems struggle with it so much. If our hypothesis that headmates of roleplaying origin form with stronger initial connections to the body is correct, our methods are too idiosyncratic to be of general use. If the connections we use aren't there, our article won't tell you how to build them.

 

On the other hand, maybe the necessary connections are widely present and don't usually need to be built. So we make our knowledge available in hopes of eventually finding out.

 

-Ember

[Breloomancer]

I have been thinking that there are different flavors of switching, and different techniques to attain those.

 

Actually, though I was initially sceptical about whether or not everyone was experiencing the same thing in regards to switching, but everything that I learn seems to point twords switching really being very similar between different systems. Even the survey by bduddy that was meant to give evedence to the contrary reinforces the idea that it's all one thing because all of the different types of experiences that people described (except for the ones that seem like just possession) were all things that I experienced, suggesting to me that they were all just different ways of describing the same thing.

 

I find it highly likely that there is only one form of switching

[Indigo Blue]

That survey was mostly just people confusing possession/fronting for switching. It didn't prove anything other than the fact that this community can't get its terms straight. It also totally excluded people who don't consider what they do to be switching.

[Breloomancer]

Sure, I'm not going to say that that is a good survey, I was just using that as an example because there were a lot of people in it (even if it was not a random sample it is still a lot of anecdotes). Every anecdote that I've heard seems to line up pretty well with each other really

[Indigo Blue]

It would be better if someone went more in-depth in a study of what actual switching experiences are like, and not just passing off possession as switching. For example, are there any hosts who are physically unable to control the body when they are switched? Any who can't feel the body at all and just watch it from a distance? How frequent is memory loss, if it happens? Are there certain checkpoints that they pass over time? All that sort of stuff

[Breloomancer]

Yeah. You should totally make that survey!

[Indigo Blue]

Lol no. I have a different survey in mind rn.

[Ember.Vesper]

For example, are there any hosts who are physically unable to control the body when they are switched? Any who can't feel the body at all and just watch it from a distance?

 

For months, I couldn't control the body at all while switched out. I'm just barely starting to be strong enough and clear enough to do a little possession sometimes. And my stronger emotions are starting to come across on our face, though not to nearly the degree that Vesper's and Iris' do when I'm fronting. Vesper could shut me out in an instant though.

 

I think I might learn how to not feel the body when not fronting sometime after Vesper and Iris learn how to not feel the body when not fronting. Switching only makes a tulpa's range of experience available to a host, and using even that range takes practice. If something in the mental realms is unavailable to a tulpa, it is unlikely that the host will be the one who discovers how to unlock it.

 

-Ember