Jump to content

Merging Risks and Our Odd Merge Incident


Ranger

Recommended Posts

Last night, we had an unpleasant and unpredictable experience with merging. The brief episode alarmed a lot of people hearing about it from our headmates. I want to talk about this because we may have an idea of what went wrong so other people don't have to stress about recreating what we did.

 

Before I continue any further, I don't want the take away message to be fear merging. This situation seems really unusual, and for all I know maybe we had a whole bunch of risk factors that are more or less exclusive to our system (I.e. our system dynamics, anxiety disorder). Even in this situation, one of the scariest parts was the unpredictability. By telling people this happened, what the context is, and by talking about it, I believe we can prevent this from happening to anyone else or at least pay more attention when it does happen and learn from it.

 


 

Last night, Cat and I were trying to merge and do something different. When we merge, we usually merge into a pseudo tulpa but we know there seems to be this alternate stable blend type of merging. We wanted to try and achieve this alternate state. After an erratic episode (our merge symbolism between me and Cat is normally over the top) with at least 3 premature splits (one of them being induced, the other two naturally occurring), we decided to take a break and try again later.

 

In normal merging situations, we have two headmates look after the merge. Our second merge, Train, created some in-system drama and the consensus was to keep the merge seperate and have two headmates there observing the experience. Red Gray and Blue were there to look over the attempt last night.

 

There was a little extra anxiety than normal. Our symbolism was more out there and Red Gray got spooked at one point, cutting our merge in half prematurely. Blue seemed to be fine, offering help to calm Red Gray down. Red Gray felt extra self-pressure because he was excited about us merging and brought up the idea a little while ago. In addition to the more violent and erratic merge symbolism, both Cat and I were on our toes but otherwise we were having a good time.

 

Once Cat and I split after the third time, I decided we should stop and take a break. Cat felt a little spacy after the episode, but I'm not sure if she took note of it in our written log. We will update the tell me about your merges thread on the symbolism of the episode later. In the middle of the merging experience, we asked Red Gray If he wanted us to stop and he wanted us to continue. We were able to communicate with him, but sometimes the merge symbolism / weirdness was really distracting. About a couple hours later, we were feeling a little tired but we were getting excited about another attempt.

 

We normally don't do another attempt after a merge failure. We figured at the time it wouldn't hurt to try. So we did, and so far things were weird but okay. The symbolism didn't seem as bad and we were trying to focus on just becoming one. After some time passed, Cat started to feel dissociated and that's where the problems started to begin.

 

Both Cat and I felt confused. We were in a really weird trance state, she wrote down in our log it felt like opening our eyes from a switch (even though we considered both of us being switched-in the previous attempt, we didn't aim for that this attempt). Both Cat and I struggled to think and when we did we had what seemed like forcing headaches. We tried to communicate with Red Gray and Blue, but it was really fuzzy and we couldn't quite connect with them. Cat and I talked to each other confused over whether we merged or not, wrote more details about the attempt, and then we broke the communication barrier and Red Gray / Blue became more clear.

 

Once Red Gray became the active thinker (we call this being dominat), the headaches eased and almost went away. Red Gray was talking to Blue and then both realized they couldn't talk to us for very long. I remember at one point Red Gray tried to talk to me and I couldn't process much of what was happening. I felt weaker than normal but I didn't recognize it at the time. Cat also appeared to space out briefly after spoken too. Both of us would stop communicating after a certain length of time, and both of us were triggering headaches just by being active or thinking. Pain was triggered by Cat's under-the-hood thought processing, the kind she has when she's switched-in and being possessed by someone else or trying to go inactive.

 

At first, Red Gray and Blue were confused, Blue joking that we broke something and thought it was funny. Red Gray was posting to see if anyone else had an idea of what was going on. Once Blue and Red Gray realized they couldn't easily communicate with us and we were dropping into inactivity after speaking, they started to get anxious. Red Gray and Blue continued to try and reach out for help, Blue's stress escalating towards a panic attack. We were not doing a lot of thinking at this point, and Blue was trying to keep Cat from waking up too much to reduce the pain.

 

Red Gray wasn't sure to get help within our system nervous a flood of triggers could make us more unstable. At this point, both of them were feeling embarrassed and stressed out. Our Sub. Rep. woke up from this and stepped in. He explained to other people we were okay even though we weren't sure what was going on. Our Sub Rep was considering the idea sleeping would reset whatever was going on. Our Sub Rep tried again to communicate with us with little sucsses.

 

After the Sub Rep possessed the body for some time, I and Cat leaked through for a moment. There was less pain than before and things were a little bit more clear. He tried to reach out to Cat explaining he wants her to try to go to sleep. After some time, Cat broke through and our Sub Rep spoke to her. He encouraged her to get ready for bed and both talked to each other in the process. Once Cat went to bed I naturally triggered awake.

 

At this point, I felt okay and I went to tell people that I was okay, apologized, and we went to bed. Cat and I processed some of it last night, but both of us felt weak and tired. Gerodious and Spirit woke up and comforted Red Gray and Blue. Cat and I felt embarrassed and guilty going to bed.

 

When we woke up this morning, everything seemed back to normal. Red Gray and Blue are okay, and Cat and I are fine. Our Sub Rep was calm from the start.

 


 

I replied to a nervous response on Discord this morning and a light bulb went off for what the main cause could have been.

 

We already suspected the second attempt was probably to blame, but then we remembered our second merge Train actually happened a few hours after Aziraphale, our first merge (we were merging for/with friends at the time). Train himself seemed to have all kinds of problems- anxious, unstable, awkward, etc., and it didn't help Aziraphale was dissociating before that and we were tired. There may be a link between having merge attempts happening too closely together and the risk of having possible problems go up if there's not enough of a break between attempts.

 

Aside from that, being tired could also be a risk factor in of itself. However, Red Gray and Blue seemed a lot more stable than we were, I think being tired probably made the anxiety worse more than anything else.

 

We're not sure if the way we merge creates a greater risk. Maybe turning into a pseudo tulpa is taxing on our personalities? Maybe trying to go against the grain created a lot of exhaustion?

 

Since we have never heard of this happening before, it could also be a weird quirk in our system. Keep in mind when we did switching attempts before we could switch, I would get really tired and want to nap. Maybe we're more sensitive to merging and doing weird stuff in the front.

 

The episode in total lasted for about 50 minutes and the pain seemed to get worse 20 minutes in and then after a few minutes ease up until it didn't hurt 15 minutes later. The pain itself was comparable to a forcing headache, it was more intense than a head pressure but less intense than a throbbing headache. We considered the thought of taking ibuprofen especially because our right arm was also sore from typing and also was acting up (We were laying down on our back with our phone perpendicular to our chest) but we felt the pain wasn't significant enough to treat it.

 

Long story short: don't panic, take a nap or sleep if something weird happens, take tylenol or ibuprofen if you think you need it, and worst case scenario it will probably go away on its own. All of this assuming it could even happen to other people; maybe we won the lottery and we need to be more careful with merging than other systems.

 

We're not afraid of merging again, but we're going to take a much longer break.

Edited by Ranger

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.

 

If I missed seeing your art, please PM/DM me!

Blog | Not So Temporary Log | Switching Log | Yay! | Bre Translator | Art Thread

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...