Tulpa and relationships with other people
At the end of previous chapter we mentioned a possibility of switching identity in real life and obstacles it involves. When interacting with real life environment, we usually either:
- need to deal with people who know us under our default identity
- need to do stuff that doesn’t require identity
It’s hard to maintain thinking as a tulpa in such conditions.
But what if instead:
- we could form new relationships as the tulpa,
- have interactions that make us think under tulpa’s identity?
It’s quite easy in a tulpa-friendly communities in the internet.
Let’s join the chat.
The easiest option to enable the tulpa to interact with others is to join a tulpamancy chat. Nowadays, most popular medium for that is Discord. Most of active tulpamancy servers are listed under tag tulpa in Disboard.org
In particular, there is our official Discord server .
Tulpa community might not be the safest place for children.
Imaginary friends are mostly made naturally by children and there is no basis for purposely made imaginary friends requiring maturity to be safe.
I cannot say the same about the community though. Most tulpamancers are adults and people joining are implicitly assumed to be adults.
Most of decent servers are reluctant in accepting minors. Our official server accepts only adults and none of servers we can recommend accepts minors below 16 years old.
How tulpas chatting look like?
Before Discord got popular, we used mostly IRC. Back then it was common to prefix the tulpa’s sentence with their name or initial. It looked like this (well, there was no profile picture at all tbf):
In Discord, there are bots that enable us to automatically replace such messages with message with tulpa’s name and avatar, like here:
Some people make separate accounts for their tulpas, it’s a valid option too although less popular and arguably less convenient.
How to distinguish between a host and their tulpa in the chat?
In general, you can’t without knowing the person. Usually tulpas use bots/apps but there are also many people who type as the tulpa from their main account and use bots/apps to talk as the host.
From perspective of another human being, there is no way to tell if the person you are talking with is talking as a host or a tulpa. On the one hand, it’s the same person using a different identity, on the other hand, both those identities as independent of you. Regardless of you talking to a tulpa or their host, you are talking to another, independent person and you should respect them as such.
Proxying tulpa’s words
Even if you can’t consciously control switching identity yet, you can type words that you experience from IIA or just make up. Indirect message passing like that is called proxying.
At some point you might notice that responding to a message to your tulpa from the chat takes no conscious effort from the host’s perspective but all thoughts it involve are associated with the tulpa. Typing itself doesn’t require conscious effort after all. Experiencing it and catching yourself acting as a tulpa might be another step to grasp conscious identity switching for you.
Internal conversations in the chat
As I mentioned in here, writing down your conversation might be helpful. You can use the discord chat and bots to have quite immersive experience as tulpa’s messages are visible as independent from yours (as the host) if you use the bot.
Keep in mind that hogging a public chatroom for your internal conversation is considered rude. You can make your own private discord server and invite the bot there.
Check out server rules before talking with your tulpa in public. In our official server we don’t mind if you keep it interactive for other people rather than closing yourselves in your own world but other places might be more strict.
Consequences of tulpas having external relationships
The meaningful relationship with you was implicitly the only relationship tulpa had. Now that they are able to communicate with other people (including their tulpas), there might be more meaningful relationships associated with them. In the picture we see a tulpa having their own external relationships with two people.
Up to this point, all of your tulpa’s existence took place within your mind. If you wanted your tulpa to revert back to ordinary OC, no one would even notice. It’s no longer the case when other people have relationships with the tulpa.
External relationships are also sources of interaction for a tulpa independent from our usual fantasies. Even if the host and tulpa stop interacting with each other much while fantasizing, there is a possibility of tulpa still keeping in touch with their external friends.
What about relationships outside tulpa community?
There is nothing stopping you from making an account for the tulpa in social media or for them having their own blog. People might not even know they are interacting with someone else’s imaginary friend as in many parts of the internet we can be completely anonymous. Nothing there constrains the tulpa more than the host.
Offline relationships
Switching identity enables your tulpa to have relationships in real life too. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, obstacles in switching include interaction with people we know as our usual self, from perspective of the tulpa this time. It’s not something you can’t overcome with practice though.
In practice most of tulpas end up staying with just online relationships as it’s more convenient.
Some people are lucky enough to have other tulpamancers in their real life environment. Practicing it together with another person (outside of your head) certainly helps us in acting as tulpas naturally in real life.
Summary
Interacting with community enables us to build relationship with other people under our tulpa’s identity. Most of such interactions happen in Discord chats nowadays.
Having relationship with external people gives our tulpa a source of interactions independent from our internal fantasizing with them. Those interactions might sustain the tulpa even if we stop spending time on internal interactions.