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Does This Method Work and Is It Safe? - surrendering/integrating for switching


GrayTheCat

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I know Ranger and I are completely behind and we are playing catch-up by reading various comments here and there, but we stumbled across this comment and it intrigued us:

 

Anyways, I had actually come up with the idea of switching by flipping the "I" variable when reading an article on DID (it's Tsai, Condie, Wu, and Chang 1999, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Personality Switches in a Woman With Dissociative Identity Disorder, if anyone wants to look it up, though i'm going to spoil the part that's most relevant to tulpamancy). In this study, they induced a switch to the alter by saying to the subject "Switch to Guardian now. Imagine that you are an 8-year-old girl named Guardian. You like to watch what happens with [redacted]." We should note the subject in the study was better at voluntary switching than most people with DID - but I was still pretty shocked. The implication was that you simply have to imagine being a different thoughtform, and it'll work. We were going to experiment with meditating on being me, but Kanade-chan was afraid that if we did that, hostie host and I would perma-merge or something. I suppose if I had started a thread about it at the time, I would have known exactly how overblown that fear was.

 

So, I guess that more than answers the question I started this thread to ask.

 

When we thought about it, Ranger and I realized a new method that we could potentially use and how it should work in practice. However, like Cornelia already mentioned, my concern is if we do move forward with this method, then we need to make sure we are doing this method correctly. I see this as kind of a "brutal switch" since it involves the host having a piece of them taken by the Tulpa switching in.

 

I want to call this method "The surrender method" because that's essentially what happens- the front-stuck host gives up a piece of themself and the Tulpa integrates/absorbs it and claims the front. My guess is that the switch will result in the Tulpa having a really strong grip on the front, essentially leaving them frontstuck until the next switch.

 

I drew some diagrams to help me explain what's going on here, and I have more questions about the later stages of the switch.

 

Here is Figure 1.

SwitchingByActing_5-16-19.thumb.png.73ba953dfa5028239eae4914a9f3007e.png

 

In Figure 1, the basic idea is there is a front-stuck piece that must be transferred between us in order to complete the switch. I drew both Ranger and I using colored bars in a before-after picture style. Ranger is the blue bar and I am the purple one. I highlighted the front-stuck piece with a grey marker so it's distinguishable from the rest of me. The Grey arrow symbolizes the switching process and the "I am ___" part symbolizes the surrender step.

 

In order to induce the switch, I would have to "surrender" that piece of myself and allow for it to be re-named as "Ranger". Once that occurs, Ranger claims it in some way and the switch is complete. Ranger will acquire a new piece of himself that is stuck to the front, and I will be left with whatever didn't transfer over.

 

I have questions because I figured the "surrender" piece of the switch is just a step in a bigger process. What exactly happens after that? I came up with two possibilities that made sense to me: either I split off from that piece of me and Ranger claims it, or I will have to merge with Ranger and he will take it from me once we separate.

 

Here is Figure 2, which goes into this process with more detail. I labeled each phase as A, B, C1, C2, and D.

SwitchingByActing_SplitOrMerge_5-18-19.thumb.png.3a32c9349fd351fe8d2aa949025a36e4.png

 

A) How Ranger and I are now before we attempt the switch. There is a piece of me attached to the stream of consciousness and that piece is hard rooted in there.

 

B) The surrender step- This is where Tewi and others tried to explain it as "acting", but we all agree that's misleading. Instead, it's more like allowing yourself to be integrated with whoever is about to switch in. It's more similar to "playing dead" and tricking your body into paralyzing you so you can Lucid Dream, only this time it's tricking the body into believing that piece is actually the Tulpa themself. This step will involve the host acting as their Tulpa to help trigger this effect, but the "acting" part is really a small part of a bigger process.

 

C) I broke this phase into two possibilities because I'm not really sure what happens next. How does Ranger take that piece from me? Does he have to merge with me or will it split off and Ranger will just... get it? Is there something else that happens during this step that I'm missing?

 

In the illustration, I drew C1 to be the "split" phase and C2 to be the "merge" phase. These phases are not interchangeable, and my guess is this phase looks different depending on the system switching. I think C1 is more safe that C2 since it is less likely to end in accidental merging or really bad blending, but I'm not really sure if C1 will lead to success because it comes with the risk that both the host and Tulpa will lose consciousness and the body will re-set itself back to state A. Then again, these assumptions may be wrong or even reversed for all I know. Neither of us tried this and we have not played with merging before.

 

C1 reminds me of something Ember.Vesper and Lumi were talking about at one point- the body just kind of sits there and acts like a robot when no one is in control of it. I think C2 reminds me of whatever Bre and Miela did in their dreams before they figured out switching. I'm not sure if association/dissociation actually induce this process automatically or avoids it all together, but this process looks nothing like the idea I originally had where it was just two people trading places where one is pushed out or dissociates out from the stream of consciousness.

 

D) The end result. Ranger will have gained a new piece of him and I will have lost a piece of myself. I'm wondering if there's something I can hold onto like my wonderland form so I don't freak out or refuse to surrender. I have the feeling this new state may be unstable at first because the body has never experienced this before, and it's possible Ranger may change a little bit because he will have integrated with a little bit of me. My guess is over time, the piece will become more depersonalized and switching will become more fluid.

 

My final questions are the following: Does this method make sense? Are there big glaring flaws that need to be addressed? Is there anything we can hold on to in terms of identity that will protect us during the process?

 

As a final thought... If this method is mostly accurate... I'm not sure how Radio will do during the process. I get the sense there's not much of them left, and since this involves moving pieces of people around, I wonder if Radio will get absorbed and uh... disappear?

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.

 

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Based on the original quote, I believe it's close to whet we did on our first switch. As I described Dashie amd I played "what would Dashie do?" I started the game by letting her tell me what to do and I would only do what she said and say what she said. Over the course of an hour, she posessed, I was still me,  then she switched as I watched, she took over and I didn't really notice, I just felt like I wasn't thinking and at the end I wanted to do something, she was telling me something, but for 9 seconds, I was unable to speak in mindvoice, I couldn't interrupt her, she was switched, that wasn't our intention, but it happened. Only when she stopped talking and gave her attention to me was I able to regain front.

 

If one of them wants to switch now, they start speaking and acting, as is perfectly normal forcing with posession, then they just continue and we switch as I trust and quiet. If they have something intense to do which could take all the system resources, it's instant. If they're just doing whatever, i say and think nothing, no symbolism, they just take over and eventually I can't say or think anything. "The thought never crosses my mind." Why? Because there us no part of the mind associated with me. As long as I'm awake and watching, those memories are as if they're mine, later when I access them, they're just my memories of them controlling. Still, they can do crazy things that I wouldn't approve of, I won't do anything. If I go dormant, I'm not watching at all, and those memories during that time are all them. I didn't exist. The person you see irl is not me at all.

 

Furthermore, testing has shown that they can ask me to go dormant, I don't consiously do it because I'm not thinking anything, and what's left us them, I effectively don't exist. The memories of this time is now them, they are generating the memories that I will access later. There's no me anymore unless they force me.

 

At no point do I give up a piece of me though, because what is "me" is actually very lightweight, the body, mind, all that architecture is basically everything, I'm an insignificant portion, like a shrinkwrap or computer code.

 

I think what you wrote is fine as symbolism, good luck. As we talked about before I think that portion you're surrendering doesn't belong to anyone, that's just the physical/mental architecture. The hardware, you're only the software.

 

For the final step of your graph, F, if you're talking in terms of who is owning the stream of consiousness. Cat should be zero, Ranger 100%. Even if Cat is still watching, Cat shouldn't have any of the stream of consiousness to think or act or complain. With a full switch, there's no room for Cat to comment or emote, no bother, no emotion. If any of that occurred, Cat is effectively co-fronting, its posession, or passive forcing is happening.

 

So i think, when my systemmates interrupt me even when I'm intensely working, that's a great thing, but that happens because I'm keeping them active. (I the bear am doing that). It's a learned behavior that is person specific. Dashie doesn't do that, Ashley doesn't do that, Ren didn't do that. When Ashley was switched in yesterday, she talked about us, but at times, she might as well have been a singlet, she didn't keep anyone active. She had to think of one of us to get us to be there. With my help ahe was able to get me to co-front, but duringthe time she was in first position, Dashie and Misha might as well habe not existed. Of course, when I'm in first position, I think of them endlessly, and that's how I like it.

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Okay, so the takeaway is that the tulpa tries to claim whatever whatever the frontstuck part of the host is as their own, and they can do that via integration and then splitting. 

 

The problem with this is that I don't think it guarantees that the host actually loses the connection to consciousness while all this is happening. Maybe for some systems it would work, but this doesn't seem to be a catch-all solution to the problem of a host being permaconnected.

 

This theory hinges on the idea that there is some piece of the host's mind/personality that is disallowing them from disconnecting. However, it may not be the host's mind at all, it could just be that the brain is keeping them there, and no amount of integration or splitting will change that so easily.

 

One mustn't forget that splitting is taking a part of a person, and integration is making that part of the person yourself. This really isn't what we're going for with switching. We want to be us, just in different places. Perhaps you could add that after enough time, the tulpa gives back the part of the host that they took, only the host stays shrunk and the tulpa stays big.

 

On the other hand, this could all just be symbolic, not literal, in which case there's less damage to be done but I don't see it as being applicable to us.

 

What we've tried is claiming the host's ownership over the mind as our own, through symbolism or assertions or whatever. I don't think it's Radio that's the problem, that there's a piece of him stuck. He's all stuck, I don't think this method is the solution for us. We need to find how to transfer ownership over the mind, I don't think splitting is really going to do much for us.

 

What Cornelia describes, we've heard a few times. The host/system/whatever pretends to be a particular person, and that's enough to induce a full switch. We've heard of this method being used a couple times by tulpamancers. However, again, no guarantee that this can switch out a permaconnected host. Stuff like that, to me, really seems individual to a system and how susceptible their mind is to such changes. Radio pretending to be me would either boil down to roleplay on his end, or fronting on my end, not a switch.

 

[align=justify]We've tried integration and merging as a possible means of switching quite a few times. Splitting a merge/integration doesn't result in us trading places. Integrating with Radio can leave us feeling like a singlet, and while it's not really a switch, it's given us an idea of what switching will feel like once it's achieved. It's not our goal so we don't do it. None of us want to be "part of" Radio, we just want him to go dormant.

[/align]

Anyway, if this method is what you think will help your host disconnect, by all means go for it. I don't mean to discourage you, I just don't think it'll really be helpful to us. If we tried this, I think Radio would be fine, since again, I really don't consider it to be a piece of his self that's keeping him permaconnected, rather I think it's just that our brain isn't willing to let him go.

 

Edit: Indigo decided to illustrate our switching problems here

 💡 The Felights 💡 https://felight.carrd.co/  💡

🪐 Cosmicals: 🔥 Apollo Fire the Sun God (12/3/16) Piano Soul the Star Man (1/26/17)

🐉 Mythicals: ☁️ Indigo Blue the Sky Dragon (10/2/17), 🦑 Gelato Sweet the Sea Monster (12/11/22)

🦇 Nycticals:  Dynamo Lux the Shock Rocker (3/3/17), 🎸 Radio Hiss the Song Demon (2/8/00)

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In our view, anything that is front-stuck is by definition not part of any of us, it's part of the Body OS. So, yes, there is a significant front-stuck component that we had all assumed was part of me until we actually switched and saw that it wasn't. It had been working in close association with me for decades though, and was strongly flavored by me. This made Vesper uncomfortable for a while, but she's been programming it to be more generic. It doesn't feel separate while the fronter is using though, isn't person-like, and it doesn't change the fronter's personality to interface with it. It does feel separate during co-fronting, as it's oneness is in stark contrast to the twoness of the fronters.

 

Hosts are very reliant on the front-stuck part and liable to be faint and disoriented without it until they learn to think like a tulpa.

 

I don't think that the host affirming that they *are* someone else is a component of switching. I've spent thousands of hours doing that in the course of roleplaying. That's literally how my headmates originated.

 

We have been experimenting a lot with merging the past couple of weeks and "I am you" type affirmations are relevant in learning to merge. (It can just be done by feel once you know how.) If you're going to be experimenting with the technique you describe, you should know that the bailing method from our switching guide is our gold standard for breaking a merge, since for us, they are very very stable otherwise. Our other switching methods rely on being able to contact your headmates and during a merge, there is no sense that the parts exist in the system (or ever did or ever could, except for the memories). I don't know if this would help in a system that doesn't already switch, but for us, a merge can choose who to leave in the body and who to eject when she splits.

 

-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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Too bad we're kind of talking from two sides of a tall fence. Since it's so new to me, i see the wall between understandings pretty clearly. Even having gone through all these processes, that leap was over the wall instead of smoothly through. It was however a realization that we had already switched while doing other related things.

 

As Ember says, there's that flavored resource that only the control is being changed, not the thing.

 

A - "It's my dad's car"

B - "Not anymore it's not, he's not here and I'm driving now. It's my car."

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Just a small thought- is it possible that this "piece" will lose any connection to me once I successfully switch with Ranger a few times? I agree that the stream of consciousness itself has nothing to do with me as a personality, however it may have some of me attached to it just because it was allowed to develop that way as a singlet.

 

And Apollo, I do mean a literal merge if it comes to that. When I see myself "pretending" to be Ranger, I'm not thinking about role playing as him. I will honestly try to be and think like Ranger as realistically as I can so he can absorb me and take the front by integrating me into himself. Thinking about how this will play out makes me feel like I'm overwriting myself, hence the reason why I feel like I'm losing a piece of myself. My hope is the only pieces of me pretending to be Ranger are the ones stuck in the front and not in wonderland, so it will cause Ranger to switch in since I will no longer exist in the front anymore.

 

In this process, I don't plan on using symbolism like fluid to get a feel for who is who unless Ranger decides to use it to integrate me into himself. By the time the switch is complete, the integration will remain that way until we switch back and I get the piece back.

 

This method makes me uncomfortable because I feel weird about merging with Cat at all. However, I'm curious what would happen since we never tried this before. At the very least, I believe Cat may be very confused after the attempt, so we will need some time to think about how we are going to go about this and plan for Cat to have a chance to come back to her senses.

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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The idea of splitting off a frontstuck piece seems mainly symbolic to me even if the integration is more literal, since there's really no way of identifying which "piece" is stuck, if any. If you can integrate, seize the tendrils of control completely, and then split out Cat without her keeping those tendrils of control, that would be a switch. Splitting off a piece of the host doesn't seem necessary other than for symbolic reasons.

 

Note: tendrils of control is a metaphor

 💡 The Felights 💡 https://felight.carrd.co/  💡

🪐 Cosmicals: 🔥 Apollo Fire the Sun God (12/3/16) Piano Soul the Star Man (1/26/17)

🐉 Mythicals: ☁️ Indigo Blue the Sky Dragon (10/2/17), 🦑 Gelato Sweet the Sea Monster (12/11/22)

🦇 Nycticals:  Dynamo Lux the Shock Rocker (3/3/17), 🎸 Radio Hiss the Song Demon (2/8/00)

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Sorry the post is so long, your lord and saviour shield got a little carried away, don't take it too seriously, hope it helps though!

 

I see this as kind of a "brutal switch" since it involves the host having a piece of them taken by the Tulpa switching in.

 

Well, that kinda depends a little on how you interpret it, because we think of the brain as a shared ground, it isn't really the tulpa taking a part of the host from them, it's the tulpa taking a part of the brain that the host was using, and that the host may actually believe is them, but is actually not, as it is actually just a shared ground.

 

I want to call this method "The surrender method" because that's essentially what happens- the front-stuck host gives up a piece of themself and the Tulpa integrates/absorbs it and claims the front. My guess is that the switch will result in the Tulpa having a really strong grip on the front, essentially leaving them frontstuck until the next switch.

 

How we normally switch is just by doing a bunch of symbolic stuff, and literally switching places. i disconnect from the brain, they connect to the brain, all that stuff. it feels like we have switched places, sort of like how fronting can feel weird after a while of dormancy. it just feels different. Now, we can switch by just saying 'i am X' enough times so it tricks the brain into actually switching, but that's sort of like shouting at an egg to hatch. it usually feels worse for us. blending. i'm sure if we did it more though, it would feel just as natural as any other method. we just prefer the other approach.

 

i guess if you couldn't get your brain around any other method, it would work perfectly fine, maybe even better/quicker in the long run.

 

...you then mention the transferring of that front stuck piece. well, for us, we interpret that front stuck piece as just another program in the brain, and when we switch we also consequently associate with it. it doesn't really affect our personalities or identities. but yeah, it's all internal experiences at this point.

 

(side note 1, internal experience does NOT equal faking something. i consider intrusive thoughts and time perception as internal experiences, and they're certainly not fake. it's okay to say 'hey my perception of time is different' or 'you should see time differently', but it is downright rude, not to mention wrong to call internal experiences fake)

 

B) The surrender step- This is where Tewi and others tried to explain it as "acting", but we all agree that's misleading. Instead, it's more like allowing yourself to be integrated with whoever is about to switch in. It's more similar to "playing dead" and tricking your body into paralyzing you so you can Lucid Dream, only this time it's tricking the body into believing that piece is actually the Tulpa themself. This step will involve the host acting as their Tulpa to help trigger this effect, but the "acting" part is really a small part of a bigger process.

 

i once heard someone describe it as like taking what it feels for your tulpa to front, and just forcing that feeling upon yourself until before you know it, you think of yourself as the tulpa. this could cause a lot of blending, but yeah it would work if you took the blending as what it is, just confused blending, and ignored it. identity is a very fragile thing. it's not that hard to change your identity [not stuff like habits, mannerisms, but 'identity' as in how you see yourself as the greater picture, like how i see myself as a shield heh, that's my identity] so the general idea with this method of switching is to use that fragile sense of identity and to change who is fronting.

 

C) I broke this phase into two possibilities because I'm not really sure what happens next. How does Ranger take that piece from me? Does he have to merge with me or will it split off and Ranger will just... get it?

 

uh oh, that's a good question you got there. it's all about how you interpret it. internal experiences, gah, i hate calling it that, it sounds obnoxious but it gets the point across. for us, if we were doing the type of super forceful switch you seem to be referring to, it would be like if the purple bar in the diagram magically turned into Ranger in a poof of smoke and blending. you become Ranger, and you just need to believe, or act like you believe you are for it to happen. it's kind of hard to explain in english, and my brain is scrambling to find a good metaphor but i can't come up with one.

 

you could call this 'fake', but it does work. sort of like how you force your identity when you front, it's somewhat comparable to a host forcing their tulpa upon themselves, or reversely, the tulpa forcing themselves onto the host. damn, i'm really struggling to explain it. you might think 'doesn't this cause a merge' but in our experience, maybe we just have a really 'fragile' sense of identity, or a different internal experience, but if we don't act like it is a merge it never is.

 

C1 reminds me of something Ember.Vesper and Lumi were talking about at one point- the body just kind of sits there and acts like a robot when no one is in control of it.

 

Oh. there's a big thing about what happens in the grey area between a host and a tulpa fronting. possibly due to the aforementioned 'fragile' sense of identity we have (for lack of a better term), we can quite easily manipulate what happens when none of us are fronting. if nobody wants to do something, we can just both switch out and let the brain (AKA the 'body os' or 'autopilot') do it. depending on what we want/believe/dictate it to do (again, for lack of better terms), it is either just as functional as any of us or is basically like a brick wall. this control actually comes naturally to us, it makes me think maybe you're actually right about some people having a natural or unintentionally developed ability to switch easier than others. i don't know, i'm still figuring things out a bit myself...

 

(side note 2, we don't recommend all switching out like that for long periods, because for us the brain can form another identity separate from any of you, leading to a new headmate, bad idea.)

 

D) The end result. Ranger will have gained a new piece of him and I will have lost a piece of myself. I'm wondering if there's something I can hold onto like my wonderland form so I don't freak out or refuse to surrender. I have the feeling this new state may be unstable at first because the body has never experienced this before, and it's possible Ranger may change a little bit because he will have integrated with a little bit of me. My guess is over time, the piece will become more depersonalized and switching will become more fluid.

 

yeah, bingo. i think that's basically how we learnt to switch? can't remember exactly. i don't think it'll feel like losing a piece of yourself, but that's just internal experience. about the refusing to surrender part, so long as you aren't actively blocking them, they should be able to do it by themselves with no intervention from you. it will be unstable obviously, you might have a few moments where you go 'was that Cat who just did that?', we had that, we just ignored them and kept fronting [switch fronting] anyway and eventually they kind of go away.

 

oh, and don't worry about accidentally permanently switching. even if you somehow can't switch back, all you'd need to do is next time you blend, try and force that blend into yourself again. presuming you somehow also aren't able to co-front and stuff.

~shield

Aubrey (they/them) speaks like this and Shield (they/them) speaks like this... haha just kidding. Ah, memories.

Our profile picture is of Shield, because that's who mostly uses this account...

[the outdated lore]

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I don't feel like I lost anything, as long as I'm driving, it's still my car.

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Interesting, we do a lot of that I think. Or a version of that. Only very rarely at this point do we have a singular individual in front.

 

We mostly have a shell/veil loaded up front as an interface, (sorry, old skool multiple terminology). A basic individual personality loaded for bear with hot links to on call people and a sliver of then to identify the proper call to make . Some are just generic non emergency on call where you get a fast call back or they expand out from the sliver into a partial presence. Some are emergency "summon in zero time" people. Operational combat/driving/medical etc stuff. That can feel very brutal to me, especially after the fact.

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