Can you 'get rid' or a tulpa?

[Chara The Changeling]

If I decide I want to stop using/having/talking to a tulpa, how do i stop? I dont want to start without knowing how to stop. Are they just there forever?

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Also, adding onto this, I dont want to make a tulpa for the purpose of just entertainment until i get bored. I just want to make sure there at least is a way to stop. 

Edited October 30, 2021 by Ranger
Merged posts

[Glaurung26]

I'm not an expert at dissolution, but as I understand it, it's like a plant. Stop watering it. Kind of the opposite of forcing. You phase it out and it disappears. It's easier early on because young tulpas need constant attention and care to grow or they fade away. Sometimes they even come and go on their own. Others could tell you more but it is definitely possible. 

[ruleofthumb]

Stone: How easy they are to get rid of depends on your mindset and how old they are. You should look into dissipation guides if you are wondering how to dissipate older tulpae. Here is an example.

 

I have advice for “younger” thoughts/ideas. The first is to not treat them as tulpae. Do not call them tulpae and do not treat them as people. Do not be violent to them, do not argue with them, and do not try to reason with them. There is no point. They are ideas you’ve had and you can stop thinking about them.

 

When my tulpa Cloud made herself known, I argued with her and told her she wasn’t a tulpa and she wasn’t a real tulpa. This was a mistake, because arguing with her like a person made her seem like more of a person, giving her more power.

 

Since then, I’ve had walk-ins and I don’t treat them as people. Sometimes I give in for a little bit but then Cloud steps in a says, “No. This is another stupid time-wasting project. Do something more important.”

 

I have yet to try to dissipate any older thoughtforms, which may be more difficult to ignore or treat as ideas.

[Adagio]

I feel like at some point your tulpa is another fully real person, and getting rid of them is equivalent of murder. Making a tulpa is like adopting a child. You've made a commitment.

[Ranger]

The short answer is yes, a tulpa can be dissipated, and the younger the tulpa the more successful the dissipation will be. Once they reach a certain age and/or milestone in development, the tulpa's consent may be more or less required for successful dissipation. Beyond that, an older tulpa may struggle to dissipate and may need another strategy such as merging or integration to give up their identity. Even though I don't like the idea of hosts creating tulpas they ultimately don't want, I see it as an inevitability and hosts should have the option to walk away as fast as possible to create the least amount of stress and suffering for everyone involved.

 

Gavin's dissipation guide is a good guide because it focuses on damage control and a gentle approach to dissipation. Because of the taboo around dissipation, there are a lot of really bad, unnecessary, and stressful ways people come up with on their own. Given the circumstances, an approach like that can be additionally cruel or create even more anxiety and guilt for a distressed host and tulpa, such as violent symbolism or abuse. While there are not any guides for tulpas to dissipate themselves that I'm aware of, my headmate's approach to dissipating themselves was similar to the process Gavin covered.

 

Our headmates Spirit and Jasper dissipated in similar ways, the key differences were how they wished for the dissipation process to cary out. After Spirit realized he wanted to dissipate, he wanted to talk to everyone one more time before he left. Being in charge of and going through that process, he fell apart over time (possibly due to some unconscious processes already working) and by the time he was ready to dissipate, he was very weak. When he died in a unique corner of wonderland, we tried not to call for him and if we accidentally did, ignored whatever response we got back if there was one at all. Gray only struggled with a "ghost walk-in" for lack of better words once, acknowledging it wasn't Spirit helped. On the other hand, Jasper wanted to dissipate more or less immediately after realizing it was what he wanted. We took the same approach, and any "maybe Jasper" responces were rulled as intrusive thoughts and/or potential walk-ins to ignore. We strongly suspect dissipation is both a conscious and unconscious process, the brain possibly doing a lot of the actual dissipation work automatically on its own. Aside from not trying to wake up a tulpa trying to dissipate, the hard part is to cope with any grieving going on in-system. For Spirit we went through people one-by-one, but for Jasper we didn't lock people out of the front and instead helped when a headmate was ready to unpack it.

 

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Dissipation is complicated, and depending on your situation it could be absolutely necessary or almost impossible to achieve. We had headmates who chose to dissipate themselves and we thought about dissipation as a hypothetical for older tulpas.

 

Dissipation can be a delicate subject for some and the reasoning behind dissipation can vary a lot. Some tulpas are dissipated by their hosts, and those tulpas may be dissipated because the host feels they "failed" creating them in the first place or the tulpa has become a barrier or disadvantage to the host for whatever reason. I personally feel more sympathetic for the former than the latter and hosts who think they "failed" seem to grieve far more than hosts who don't want their tulpas. However, I realized there's no point in trying to keep an unwanted tulpa around and a tulpa is better off being let go in that situation. So much so in fact, there are lots of tulpas who have chosen to dissipate themselves, with the system supporting them or otherwise. Some tulpas may self-dissipate because they feel unwanted, but some dissipate because they have an unstable sense of self, they find development painful, or they feel there's not much point to existing. If the system doesn't support their dissipation, they may quietly die on their own or refuse to interact with their system after a fall out of drama.

 

Dissipation is sometimes necessary to stabilize a system or help it shrink to a more sustainable size. Several systems struggle with walk-ins and keeping their system population down once they establish separation, creating anxiety and distress for the system. Gray accepted too many walk-ins in the past, and in addition to the other 'characters' already present, we wound adding an additional 15 system members to our "binary" system. Given the difficulty of running a large system, we were thankful we already knew how to effectively manage walk-ins before our system grew any larger (we accepted our Sub. Rep. as an exception because we deemed he was an older tulpa and not a walk-in). We currently continue to ignore walk-ins, and I don't think we ever needed to go about a more thought out dissipation process since. Otherwise, only two of our headmates have chosen to dissipate and one chose to integrate. While I can't say for sure, I wouldn't be surprised if our system continues to shrink slowly over time. If we didn't help our headmates dissipate when requested, our headmates would have likely self-dissipated anyway and there would be a lot more unnecessary suffering around it.

 

Unfortunately, I have considered my own dissipation when struggling with depression, but I ultimately decided I don't want to. Entertaining the thought as a hypothetical, I'm a deveoped enough tulpa it would be much harder than dissipating Spirit or Jasper. In addition to having a sensitive trigger and wake up extremely wasiy, I have unconscious thoughts that the brain automatically simulates that can wake me up too. I have heard in a couple places rumors that a developed enough tulpa may reduce into a collection of habits and triggers, "haunting" their host for awhile, if not forever. Some worry that there's too much tulpa there the only good way to clean up the tulpa completely is to integrate or merge so the habits and brain data can be overwritten instead of left there to cause trouble. However, I have heard some systems claim their host has completely dissipated when they committed egocide. If this is true, I can't see why a developed tulpa can't do the same thing. Despite all of this however, I decided that I ultimately want to live, regardless of the challenges I face or how separate from Gray I ultimately become.