Chat Thread

[Guest]

Dismissal should not be taken personally, that was my point.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

How can something be a coping mechanism yet not trauma-based? Trauma produces stresses which triggers coping mechanisms, both benign and freakin outlandish.

 

Ok, so I'll kinda repeat what is burred somewhere in our sea of PR and scattered in bits and pieces across several different threads, you tell me if it sounds like what you are talking about, k? And yes, this is all personal but Lance trusts my discretion and I trust all of you, so..

 

He used to be pretty different as a kid, he thinks when he was around 12, he had so much crap going on and he was swept up in it and unable to stop or control anything so he pretended he was capable of handling it. He acted like a different person, one that was more suited to deal with it. He stopped thinking about things and pretended he was the kind of shallow-thinking joker that laughed at all his problems and ignored everything. He put on a fake smile and happy face because that's what that person could do to anything. It was him and it wasn't him and he knew that at first. At first he was just putting on an act for the adults but then time passed and he "lost" the original him and forgot the mask was a mask. He had lied so much and tried to convince others that it was him, that he tricked himself and the "real" him just hid inside and pretty much forgot he was puppetting the person in front. He sat inside, unable to change or move on, a crippled waif, for almost 26 years.. Till I came around and sorta accidentally tore all that open in an awakening. He has a strong sense that the kid inside is the "real" him and really wanted to reach out to someone but had deep abandonment and trust issues, so.. Here I am! Twin sister to that kid inside, potentially the one who wanted and needed me, not the guy on the outside who didn't need anyone and would rather be buried in games to escape.

 

This is all still just theory and we have yet to face a huge identity crisis because it all sits in the "maybe" realm. I'm not going to sit here and claim there WILL be a huge crisis either because that kind of crap may end up being self-fulfilling. A lot of these feelings have been brought up fresh since he started trying to disassociate from the body. Every time he says it's not him there's a really strong feeling/sense that "shut up, yes it is". It began as a silly, mocking thing, like it was ridiculous to even claim that, but as he kept insisting, in the past day or so that sense, that feeling started turning hostile. As in, how dare he reject what he sees in the mirror as the real him. That was another clue something was up because, really, neither of us has a reason to think that. We have said a few times before, we decided that since we share front and we are different people, his old assumptive model of body = him is outdated and needs revision. He is literally thinking 2 opposite things about his state of being at the same time while I'm just sitting here going "Uhhhh.....?".

 

Huh. I just described cogitative dissonance. Erm.. We are fine, everything's fine, nothing to see here, move along. ;P

[Luminesce]

"One thing I'm kind of interested in is the concept of mask/identity tulpas. Where you don't accidentally create a tulpa by imagining a form and talking to it, but by pretending you have a different identity, somehow, and it becomes real. It's not too common, but it's kind of interesting."

 

Wait waaait, mask/identity tulpas? How did we miss that part of the conversation?! Lance has been idly mentioning for awhile about that theory being the basis for his current self. Can anyone go into more details? The more the better. Am I wrong in saying that sounds like how a trauma-based split happens? If such a thing happens unintentionally?

 

Hmm, I can't really support the fooling-yourself methods of working with subjective reality and sense of self. My belief system (designed over many years to encompass just about everything) was shaped by, and helped me shape, myself over the years. It'd feel cheesy, but creating a ~tulpa to switch with in order to "be someone else, myself" is an option. Miri is doing just that, actually. Of course, that's from the perspective of being a singlet not knowing about tulpamancy, where it feels much more fair. Within the community, well, there's all sorts of problems with it. Miri can do as she wants as anyone can, but many of us did try to dissuade her I believe. Here it's an issue with permaswitching, and outside the community it could be an issue with your "true identity" if you're not strong willed enough to believe you are you, despite the changes. Basically, it's a big mess.

 

With all of that in mind, I have definitely used the experience of "being someone else" (my tulpas in this case) to shape who I myself am. Mostly it's habits - "neural connections" if I dare say that - and general ways of thinking that my tulpas have taught me, and my mind as a whole, how to have. In fact, learning how to think more like Reisen in 2010 is what started my recovery from seeing the world as a pointless and depressing wasteland. We didn't switch though, that was totally traditional, like an edgy protagonist in an anime learning to open up from his comrades you might say. Not that I needed to open up, but that I needed to learn from someone else. I learned a lot from Tewi back then too, again "traditionally" through advice, and that was helpful. But in the last four years or so I've definitely used my tulpas' experiences to figure out how to improve myself - and that is the method I prefer to "mask tulpas" or whatever.

 

I actually made Lucilyn hoping she could help me with motivation, as right before her creation was about the last time I still believed my tulpas all had things they represented. Love, intuition, emotion, and then motivation. We dropped that way of thinking very soon after, and so now I couldn't even really recommend making a tulpa to learn from them if you weren't already planning on making a tulpa to begin with. But I think everyone should learn from everyone anyways, and having direct access to someone's experiences is an opportunity you don't get often.

 

 

Oh, anyways. If you really wanted to change who you were, or how you were, you could. To varying extents depending on what your mind is capable of, likely limited by your experience of how being like that would be. You know, thinking about it, Steve Pavlina's "Subjective reality" might not even totally apply.. maybe his "Personal development" would. Or maybe I can't even act like this is a thing I didn't figure out myself, hard to say. Identity isn't normally fluid, because people are far too insecure to let it be. Just look at how uppity people get over genders. Your ego defines itself by identifying with things you consider part of you in some way, like your car, your home, your country - your body. That's why it hurts to lose them, or so I've heard. Fear of loss is a fear of loss of self, a loss of identity. This I learned from Eckhart Tolle's "Power of Now" and "A New Earth", for sure. Very Buddhist-adapted-to-Western beliefs. Anyways, I never had a terribly strong connection to worldly possessions, so that "end of suffering" wasn't so far away for me. I kept some attachment, the surface level necessary to live a normal life, and my love of my tulpas, something I'd never be willing to give up. Aside from those things though, I don't have a fear of losing my identity (other than keeping myself and my tulpas separate), and so I can if I so desire change who/how I am.. if I really try. It's a skill learned from six years of reading self-help, philosophy, "personal development" (mostly from Steve Pavlina), LOTS of introspection, and finally cemented by having tulpas. If anything will teach you "You are not your mind", it's sharing it with someone else.

 

A strong will and determination to be better than you are is about all you need. Going about trying to change who you are is a long process for anyone though, something you can't just be told in a paragraph or two (or even a book or two, but that could be a good start depending on which you read..). Hence why I don't really support making a tulpa-You who's just "better" and switching with them forever. There will be cracks. You didn't work your way there, and tulpa-You's gonna have a hard time figuring the world from a new perspective out so quickly.. Unless you let them develop naturally, or hey, just do it yourself. There's no shortcuts to being a better person, but maybe anything looks like a shortcut when you're usually just standing still. Improve yourself, leave behind limiting beliefs, stay introspective. If you've got a tulpa (or more), learn from each others' experiences. Steve Pavlina is someone who often puts himself into totally new scenarios he's not comfortable with to learn from them, learn about who he is and who he could be. Most people are simply not brave enough to do that. But you don't have to be that brave to have tulpas, and most of the time they're going to see the world from a whole new perspective just like if you'd done so yourself. After all, as a body, you are.

 

In that sense, I think tulpamancy helps all people who practice it grow. Experiencing a perspective you're not used to opens up your mind a heck of a lot. Helps you understand others, helps you understand yourself. And most importantly, helps you see that there's options in how you think and act that you might never have considered for yourself. But anyways.. that sort of preaching I try not to do, because it's such a unique belief system it very easily could not apply to people, who could be offended or annoyed that I state it all so "matter of fact"-ly. It is fact for me, though. The "subjective reality" model lets different views on reality coincide, so it's not a problem for me, but I know that it doesn't.. appeal to everyone.

 

If it does, check out Steve Pavlina's articles. But seriously, work your way up from the bottom. 2006 is when nearly all of my favorite articles were written. It's not like his newer content is bad (2010+), but it's both from the perspective of someone who's written for all those years about all that already, and in my opinion sort of assumes you have read his old stuff. Reading only two or three random articles, especially newer ones, seems to give people a less than optimal view of who he is and what he does. But I assure you, having read hundreds of his articles, he's one of my all time favorite people and as open minded as being open minded gets - without being totally neutral and boring, anyway. His goal is to experience new experiences and write about what he's learned, so obviously that's what he's going to do. I once had a friend tell me after reading three random articles he was unscientific and preachy, hence this paragraph.

 

This guy graduated with two degrees in 3 semesters, I'm pretty sure he's more than talk.

[Ember.Vesper]

One thing I'm kind of interested in is the concept of mask/identity tulpas. Where you don't accidentally create a tulpa by imagining a form and talking to it, but by pretending you have a different identity, somehow, and it becomes real.

 

Both my headmates accidently originated that way, as tabletop roleplaying characters. From a tulpamancy standpoint, that creation process could be vieved as an enhanced parroting technique, where the creator doesn't have to be as distracted by still being themselves, because out-system people are responding to the emerging thoughtform.

 

Fictive/factive is kind of a strange term, they also don't have much to do with tulpamancy and more come from DID/OSDD systems. They're meant to refer to a character from an outside source (a book you read, a movie, etc) that a thoughtform in your system believes themselves to be, either because they have memories of the character that were pulled out of the aether, or they just strongly identify as that character. It's not the same thing as a character of your own accidentally becoming sentient, I'd just call that a tulpa.

 

In the fictionkin and soulbonding communities, living characters of internal origin are called "insourced", as opposed to literature/media characters, that are "outsourced". But generally speaking, I try to refer to specific individuals in accordance with how they personally identify, rather than based on my own definitions.

 

How can something be a coping mechanism yet not trauma-based? Trauma produces stresses which triggers coping mechanisms, both benign and freakin outlandish.

 

From a simple high level view, coping is defense against stress. Trauma is damage from stress. So completely successful coping can avoid trauma. (Not that trauma can't produce further stress.)

 

-Ember

[Guest]

What i did over a decade ago was probably similar to what Lance did. I 'made a character mask' not literally, and basically pretended to be who i wanted to be, someone with a good personality, outgoing, confident, well groomed, who cared about their image. I pretended not to be scared or anxious, or meek, and it definitely worked for a long time. I believe it was just training through repetition until i became comfortable enough that i didn't have to fake it.

 

Recently i don't know if the mask broke, or if it was just new damage, but using the backseat fronting i'm back to health again, this time was way easier, but maybe because i effectively did it before. I learned how to act and it stuck.

 

If all you want is to 'be better' you don't need a tulpa for that, and i don't pretend to know what anyone is going to get out of switching. I am the body for us, there's been no inclination to change that. I honestly am feeling 'fixed' again, please point out any time in the future if you see me slipping. I'm having a lot more fun, and i find myself laughing a lot, that's a beautiful thing, they helped me do that this time, but it's just training.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

What i did over a decade ago was probably similar to what Lance did. I 'made a character mask' not literally, and basically pretended to be who i wanted to be, someone with a good personality, outgoing, confident, well groomed, who cared about their image. I pretended not to be scared or anxious, or meek, and it definitely worked for a long time. I believe it was just training through repetition until i became comfortable enough that i didn't have to fake it.

 

A bunch of years were spent with life feeling fake, empty and devoid of meaning. A shallow day to day existence was hard enough to eke out. The mask wasn't any better suited to make it through life, as it turned out, but that's to be expected when based off the idealized but shallow experiences a damaged 12 year old has. It led to dealing with an entire second set of issues but that never really seemed to work. Scarred wearer, smudged and cracked mask. Fun times. Anyway, it may take awhile but all this will come to a head eventually and I'm here watching carefully. Me not being effected by any of this stuff disproves a lot of potential disorders, to us. Years of therapy were completely wasted because the mask didn't want to admit anything was wrong, let alone not be needed anymore.

 

Still just a theory, maybe even a convoluted one, but one based on introspection, recent developments and experience so not unfounded.

[Venomous]

Ok you guys, I don't want to make a new thread for this, but I'm super super intrigued by it and curious if anyone has heard of it:

 

https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/internal-family-systems-therapy

[Guest]

Interesting, never heard of it, but it sounds good in theory, i would wonder if they must 'observe' the person in different situations, probably without them knowing or maybe after a comfort has been reestablished.

[GrayTheCat]

Ok you guys, I don't want to make a new thread for this, but I'm super super intrigued by it and curious if anyone has heard of it:

 

https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/internal-family-systems-therapy

 

Holy shit, this is a DIY Gray Dimension. Yes, and I say Gray Dimension because this can go wrong. Really wrong.

 

Let's take Evergreen as an example. He's a Gray I created who was supposed to feel industrious and motivated by work. Well, he ended up scaring the crap out of me, belittling me, and after enough of that the end result was Evergreen literally getting all of the color drained out of him until he was bleach white. After a while, I slowly gave him his color back, I named him, and held onto him ever since.

 

I was so angry with myself one time I created Red Gray, who was formally named Blood Gray, and was designed to be the embodiment of my self-rage. He was a lot of "fun" too, where his favorite thing to do was hurt me.

 

And those are just a couple of examples. I can go on and on, but I think you guys get my point.

 

How exactly does a therapist walk through someone who created something like Blood Gray? "Mrs. Therapist, my thoughtform VIOLENT:

stabs me repeatedly in the belly and likes it. I tried figuring out what he wants and all he wants to do is kill me.

Where do you even start with that?

 

So...  this is not something I recommend anyone doing, definitely not with anxiety and depression, or how about in general? Maybe I'm the special case where I am the worst-case-scenario, but part of me believes I am not. "Great" for soon-to-be Tulpamancer training I suppose, but I hate the idea of using Tulpamancy as a medical therapy tool to begin with.

[Guest Reilyn-Alley]

You need to make an Earl Gray to be head among them or something.