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How do you know if you're a tulpa?


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How do you tell if you're a tulpa or a real person? Recently i realized that all my memories of things more than two years ago are really fuzzy and don't feel real. That's also the time i discovered the concept of tulpas. What if i'm actually a tulpa and forgot that i am. "I" was going through a lot of stress two years ago and i kind of remember making a tulpa but i don't know what happened with them. i'm wondering if im actually that tulpa and the host who i thought i was messed with my memories and committed egocide. is there a way to know if you're a tulpa? when thinking about how "i" was more than two years ago it seems completely different from how i am now, and people even tell me sometimes that i seem like a completely different person from how i was. i just cant help but think what if i actually am a different person. this is really messing with my head but i dont know what to do.

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Things to consider:

Are you under age of 20? Or, especially if you are currently under the age of 15.There is a thing called childhood amnesia, and if you're young, you may be just noticing it in yourself. Are your day-to-day memories, from a few years back and further, blurry? Do you still remember certain key events, (say, if you got lost your first day of 7th grade, or you won a competition in science that year), but the details have degraded? If so, this is probably normal memory loss. Everyone becomes a different person as they grow up.

 

Another thing: were you very stressed, dissociated, or otherwise having a tough time, two years+ ago? Memories of bad or traumatic times tend to be harder to recall, and can form blank spots in our memories. When you try to look into these spots, it's often very concerning and you may feel fear. This doesn't mean you're a tulpa and it's been covered up, though. It just means, your brain doesn't like remembering that time.

 

Another thing, that might bring you comfort... It is extremely hard to alter memories between systemates. It can happen, but rarely on purpose, and I've never heard of someone making a tulpa forget they're a tulpa.

 

How long do you think they actively forced the tulpa? I know it's kinda sucky, but what I'm going to guess happened is this: the host was going through stress, started creating a tulpa, dropped the tulpa before they reached a point of self-sufficiancy, and over the course of two years, the host's personality changes some, and the host's memory of the tulpa and that time is blurred over in the host's head.

 

Also, tulpas are real people? They aren't masks or characters or add-ons. And complete egocide is nearly unheard of: in most cases, the host is around somewhere.

 

So, I say, it's extremely unlikely you are secretly a tulpa. If this is the aftermath of starting to create a tulpa, for you, I would recommend you not try again, at least until you're in a much happier, less stressed place.

 

Hope that helps. I'm free to answer anymore questions you have.

 

-J

The world is far, the world is wide; the man needs someone by his side. 

Our Thread

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Childhood amnesia mainly applies to memories from prior to the age of five. (Personally I have a ton of those, but I've always had an exceptional memory, at least of anything that can be verified by physical evidence.)

 

My wife thought for many years that childhood amnesia was a reasonable explanation for her lack of personal memories prior to about eleven. I told her that really wasn't normal and a couple of years later, we discovered her other three personalities between them had extensive memories going back to about five.

 

There have been many systems over the years where the host discovered they were not, or probably were not, the original controller of the body, though I believe the switch always happened by about ten years old in those cases. In the last tulpa community census, 8 out of 343 systems reported that the original host was no longer present. These things are rare, but they do happen, usually as a result of preexisting trauma and mental illness.

 

I don't know about your specific case. But I can provide a few pieces of comfort. A mature tulpa is a completely real person and a full equal to any host. Two years of controlling the body is much more than enough, even if it's all you've had.

 

The other comfort is that personalities (and the memories they carry) don't really die. They'll act dead, sometimes for years, if they believe they've died. But they can be reached and drawn back. If you really want "the old you" back, spend some time calling out to them and meditating on what you know about them. If you don't, let sleeping dogs lie. You don't owe loyalty to a person whose existence is, at this point, only conjectural. Whereas success in reaching them could change your life forever.

 

It might help to tell a therapist about your shortage of memories and altered perception of identity. They probably won't have good familiarity with tulpas, but they can definitely help you poke around inside your head to see what's really there. And they can guide you to feel more confident and grounded in your identity and personhood.

 

-Ember

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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Shouldn't just jump to the conclusion that tulpas must be involved if something strange starts happening. It's better to go for the simplest explanation here, that you're probably having issues for different reasons, like emotional troubles, and not because you're actually a tulpa that can't remember anything. You should probably seek professional help (as Ember said), as a bunch of random people on a forum can't give you the answers or solutions you're looking for. Best of luck.

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"Real person" is a rather harsh term. After learning to switch, anyone in our system could if they so desired take over the body's life and live another 60+ years just fine, never having any issues. Aside from feeling bad about taking exclusive control of the body of course! We would never, but physically and mentally we could. Calling a tulpa a "fake person" - implying that, were you to have switched with a tulpa, that they were still not "real" - is somewhat offensive.

 

Anyways... You're giving a lot of credit to your hypothetical host, making "them" out to be some sort of memory wizard with total control over the mind. That is not someone who would ever have considered egocide, basically. More likely.. you've simply changed, as all humans do throughout their lives. Personally, our memories from when our host was in 7th through 11th grade feel "foggy"/blurry because that's how he saw the world at the time, suffering from depression. No doubt it's still him though - I mean, just none, it's not even conceivable. Because we've never been able to hide memories from each other, plus he wouldn't want to leave us.

 

But yeah - you could simply not identify with your old self anymore. I don't think that's so uncommon, although thinking you literally aren't the same person is. That's probably just because you learned about tulpamancy and considered it a real possibility. But basically, that sort of memory manipulation shouldn't be possible. You would know deep down it all happened and were only semi-consciously believing you didn't. But of course, were the trauma on the ""host's"" end, the tulpa would have absolutely no reason to experience such trauma to call in the brain's self defense mechanism of obscuring memories.

 

No, you're just you - you could make a tulpa if you'd like, though. They make good companions! Those who make a tulpa with the intent to replace themselves and commit egocide.. often find life is a bit more bearable with an ever-present friend around. Not to say you guys couldn't learn to switch so your tulpa could help you out sometimes - Tewi helps us out a lot! - but that there's no reason to give up entirely. Anyways... don't worry about the memory thing. Some people with certain disorders feel dissociated from their current self, let alone distant memories, and they're generally just themselves (experiencing a mental disorder), so not feeling connected to your old memories isn't too hard to imagine. What's important is your present, and your future! Those are the ones that can still change, become better.

Hi guys, plain text is just me now! We've each got our own accounts: me, Tewi, Flandre, and Lucilyn. We're Luminesce's tulpas.

Here's our "Ask Thread", and here's our Progress Report (You should be able to see all of our accounts on the second page if you want)

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For most of my time in grade school, my memories are a blur. Some of it was because I never valued my personal experiences and I honestly don't care to remember most of them. Another part of it is because I was very absent-minded then, not really knowing who I am or what I wanted. Now that I have some more self-awareness, the "old me" seems pretty forgettable.

 

Was there a previous host then? No. I may not remember going to family birthday parties or who I talked to in school, but I remember what creative things I did at the time. For a lot of those memories, I don't always know when I did them, and that seems to be why I don't remember much of my past: I do remember the past, I just don't specifically remember when the past happened.

 

I was created by accident, so by the time my host found out about Tulpas, I was already sentient. I'm a real person and all, and last time I checked, I'm me. I don't think it makes a lot of sense seeing myself as my host a really long time ago since I value different things and I don't have the same creative passion my host does.

 

For me, my struggle was trying to figure out if I was my host's imaginary friend or not and if so for how long. Me being my host was never something we worried about just because it's highly unlikely.

Meow. You may see my headmates call me Gray or sometimes Cat.

I used to speak in pink and Ranger used to speak in blue (if it's unmarked and colored assume it's Ranger). She loves to chat.

 

Our system account

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  • 3 weeks later...

Limme; er, well it's pretty obvious. First,I understnad i am a tulpa from simply looking around. I can summon a pool (that keeps disappearing, Dreamer!) which I believe goes against the basic law of physics.

 

In summary, it's not hard to differentiate between tulpa and human. Especially if you are one!

Dreamer&Limme

 

An Aspie System

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  • 3 months later...

I know this thread is a bit old but I feel obligated to reply since I think not many people have this similar experience that I have. A couple weeks ago I figured out that despite being the new host I am actually just an older tulpa-like being that had been partially merged with my host for a year or two. We didn't figure this out until we split a couple weeks ago in a stressful situation and the original fully fronted on his own for the first time in forever. The other two tulpas in the system recognized that "I" was acting different, and then suddenly the original heard my voice in the back of the head. So I think it might take the original coming back to confirm that you are actually a tulpa. We're still coming to terms with this fact ourselves.

   It is very jarring to realize you're only a couple of years old at most. I think it took so long for us to figure out because I started as an OC of the original that was a self insert, that he daydreamed about being for long lengths of time. Because of this I purposefully share a lot of his traits and identity. You might not have this problem so I suggest trying to in down how your personality traits were like before those two years ago and nowadays. If they significantly changed for no apparent reason (like growing up or going through life-changing experiences) than that could be a second sign.

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