Living with tulpamancy
This final chapter is about how tulpamancy fits into the rest of your life. We’ll cover telling others about it, balancing inner and outer relationships, expressing your tulpa socially, managing multiple tulpas, and understanding how the practice interacts with your everyday circumstances.
If you’re coming from the previous chapters, you already know how to start interacting with a character, how effortless responses emerge from sustained practice, and how to express your tulpa beyond internal dialogue through switching. Now we step back and look at the bigger picture.
Your tulpa and other people
A relationship with a tulpa doesn’t exist in isolation from other aspects of your life. It exists alongside your other relationships, your work, your social life, and your broader material circumstances. All of these factors shape this relationship, just as the relationship exerts its own influence on them in return.
Telling “normal” people about tulpas
When telling others about your practice, keep in mind that tulpamancy is poorly understood outside its communities, and there are reasons for that.
We must admit that this guide’s perspective – tulpamancy as building a relationship with a character, rather than creating an independent person – is in the minority. The majority of tulpamancers accept the narrative that places tulpamancy under the Plurality umbrella: the claim that multiple independent people share the same body. People you tell about tulpamancy are likely to encounter that framework first if they research the topic on their own. You need to be very thorough in explaining your own experience if you want to avoid that.
For a historical account of how that framework came to dominate the community, see A Brief History of Tulpamancy.
If you tell people about tulpas, there is a high chance they will visit a certain other website and read this:
A tulpa is an entity created in the mind, acting independently of, and parallel to your own consciousness.
If you don’t want them to assume you believe that too, make sure to point them directly to an explanation you find accurate. We hope it’ll be our guide, but that’s up to you.
Keep in mind that you are not obligated to disclose your practice to anyone. Some tulpamancers are open about it; others find it too intimate to share even with a spouse. Both approaches are valid.
Inner and outer relationships
Inner and outer relationships can coexist healthily.
A relationship with your tulpa can be just as genuine as a relationship with another human – though it is a qualitatively different type of connection. A tulpa shares your mind; another human being has their own.
A tulpa can surprise you to the same degree that you can surprise yourself. However, the unpredictability of another human being – shaped by entirely different material conditions – exists on a completely different level. Interacting with people who don’t inherently share your biases is essential for growth.
While tulpamancy is a viable supplement to a social life, it’s not a replacement for human connections. If you are deeply isolated, tulpamancy might help you cope, but it won’t solve the source of the problem. Tulpamancy should exist alongside human connections, not instead of them.
If you find yourself isolating from human relationships, it’s worth noting – not as a failure, but as information regarding your current material circumstances.
For a deeper exploration of how ethical frameworks apply differently to inner and outer relationships, see Ethics of Relationships in Tulpamancy.
Tulpamancy isn’t a parasocial relationship
People develop many coping mechanisms to deal with the alienation caused by the socio-economic system that shapes our lives. I would argue that, compared to parasocial relationships1 – the one-sided bonds we form with public figures, characters, or voices that don’t know us back – tulpamancy is a very healthy one.
Parasocial relationships are defined in the research literature by a single criterion: non-reciprocity.2 The media figure does not know you exist. They do not respond to you, accommodate you, or grow with you. A tulpa does. The relationship you cultivate in tulpamancy is mutual – two poles of one mind interacting – not a one-sided projection onto an absent other. The parasocial bonds people form with celebrities, streamers, or large language models can be psychologically real and emotionally significant, but they remain structurally one-sided. Tulpa relationships are structurally reciprocal. That’s the difference.
If you live under conditions that make external relationships scarce or dangerous, and you rely on tulpamancy as your only source of connection – well, to be honest, we aren’t sure if it can truly serve as a permanent substitute. Regardless, this doesn’t change what the practice looks like if you decide to experiment with it.
It’s worth noting how tulpamancy differs from the kind of technological substitution that critics like Sherry Turkle warn against – the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship” offered by sociable robots and AI chatbots.3 Recent neuroscience research deepens this critique: high-interactivity AI can actually blur the brain’s ability to distinguish the self from the agent, precisely because the AI mirrors your input back to you rather than offering a genuinely different perspective.4 Those substitutes promise connection without risk, vulnerability, or effort. Genuine relationships with tulpas require all three. The effort you put in is real, and so is what you get back.
Expressing your tulpa socially
Expressing your tulpa to other people – such as chatting as them online or talking as them with friends who are aware of your practice – extends the relationship into a new domain. You’re applying the same capacity you developed for internal interaction and switching, but now in a social context. The pressure of external interaction gives the tulpa new opportunities for development.
Tulpamancy communities
There are multiple online communities for tulpamancers and tulpas. These can be excellent places to:
- Practice expressing your tulpa.
- Let the tulpa socialize with others.
- Learn from other practitioners – people have different experiences, approaches, and perspectives on tulpamancy. Not everything you hear will be consistent with this guide, and that’s fine. You’ll encounter the plurality framework, its metaphysical claims, and practical advice that differs from ours. Take what’s useful, and leave what isn’t.
- Find your own approach – No guide can cover every situation you’ll encounter. Seeing how others practice – what works for them and what doesn’t – can help you refine your own.
However, communities also have downsides worth noting:
- You’ll likely meet people who push their specific beliefs and morals onto you. When a community treats tulpas as independent people (the entity-framework), moral obligations follow naturally from that assumption – and with those obligations comes a sense of moral superiority.
- I can’t even count the number of times someone in the wider community has called me a “doll.” Remember not to let the community get too much to your head. Engage with people you find enjoyable or valuable. Ignore the rest.
Our community
We run a Discord server where practitioners following our approach – or those who’re simply curious, as we don’t ostracize different views – can interact. You are welcome to chat there as well, whether from a tulpa’s perspective or not. Here’s what makes our community different:
- We are a community with a pragmatic approach to tulpamancy; honestly, I don’t know any other places where a truly non-metaphysical approach is the primary one. Most communities avoid mysticism but still treat tulpas as independent entities – we don’t.
- While we are an English-speaking community, we aren’t USA-centric like most mainstream servers (or even most smaller ones). We aren’t even native English speakers (hopefully it doesn’t show in this guide), and I think the majority of our active community isn’t either. English is our tool for communication, not a cultural identity.
- We ask that people engage genuinely and treat others with respect – without tabooization, but with transparent moderation.
You can join our server here. You can talk to us there if you have questions about the guide or just want to meet us and our community.
Multiple tulpas
In practice, the majority of tulpamancers stick to just one tulpa. Most of the rest have up to four, while some may have ten or more.
There is no right or wrong number. You can have over ten genuine relationships with characters developed over many years – I think we do. It’s also perfectly okay to stick to just one; as we said, most people do.
Just as with switching, it is helpful to understand how tulpamancy works when there are multiple tulpas involved.
There is no upper limit on how many tulpas you can have in principle, but there is a practical limit imposed by material resources like the time and attention required for each genuine relationship. You can’t realistically maintain a hundred genuine tulpas.
Your tulpas are not isolated from each other
Having multiple tulpas means having unique, genuine relationships with many characters, each developed through sustained engagement. At the same time, there is much common ground between them.
First, the ability to express a tulpa effortlessly – once developed with your first tulpa – tends to carry over. With subsequent tulpas, the process is much easier. This shared experience is the main indication that this ease of expression is not character-specific. The same pattern applies to switching – you don’t have to relearn it with newer tulpas.
Relationship between tulpas
Just as you can play out interactions between your usual perspective and one of your tulpas, you can also facilitate interactions between the tulpas themselves.
Keep in mind that genuine interactions between tulpas also require time. The practical limit on the number of tulpas decreases significantly if you want to develop relationships among all your tulpas.
This doesn’t have to be uniform for all your tulpas. It’s okay to have some tulpas who socialize (possibly with external people too) and others who only spend time with you. Tulpas don’t have equal needs, and it’s okay to commit different amounts of resources to each of them based on those needs.
For more on how mind organization shifts when multiple perspectives are involved, see The Host Is Not the Owner.
Don’t make tulpas out of all characters
The ability to interact effortlessly with a character is not strictly character-specific. Once unlocked with one tulpa, you might find yourself doing it easily with other characters, sometimes even by accident.
A tulpa is a character you’ve built a genuine relationship with, not just any character that happened to “talk back.” It’s perfectly fine to enjoy spending time with characters other than your tulpas. You’ll likely lose interest in most of them by the next day anyway. The most important thing to remember is: don’t feel obligated to turn every character into a tulpa. You don’t need any “official” procedures to decide which characters to keep and which to forget. If you end up spending time with them regularly and develop a genuine relationship, they’ll be your tulpa. If you stop interacting with them, they won’t.
Tulpamancy is part of life
As we touched on at the beginning of this chapter, tulpamancy doesn’t exist in isolation. Your work, living conditions, outer relationships, and health all affect the practice – and the practice affects them in return.
When your life is stable and you have the time and willingness to interact with your tulpas, the practice tends to flourish. If you’re stressed, dealing with a crisis, or emotionally depleted, the practice tends to suffer alongside you. This isn’t a sign that you’re doing something wrong; it’s a natural consequence of practicing tulpamancy as a person existing in the material world.
Tulpamancy is not a therapy. A tulpa is affected by the same mental health conditions as you are – they don’t exist in isolation from your mind, and they can’t provide the kind of help that comes from someone outside who isn’t directly affected by your mental state. The practice can contribute to improving your mental health, much like going for a jog can – but it shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for professional help.
Tulpamancy affects your life back
Building genuine relationships changes you, whether those relationships are inner or outer. You see yourself from a new perspective. You develop new patterns of thought. You have new emotional, social, and creative experiences that you otherwise wouldn’t have had.
This is real development. Your mind is part of the material world too; your inner interactions emerge from the same biological activity that allows your hands to shape the world around you.
Delusion is a false belief. It’s easy to become delusional if a practice is built primarily on belief. Our approach to tulpamancy, however, is built on practice instead.
I used to think that one of the requirements was believing that an inner relationship with a character was possible. But then I realized that a genuine relationship doesn’t stem from belief – it comes from interaction. You can interact without belief. A decade ago, when I first learned about tulpas and fantasized about Luna (our oldest tulpa), I didn’t really believe the claims I had heard (and they were even more exaggerated than the quote above).
What I actually did back then was imagine how she looked, how she acted, and what she said. I knew that parroting was supposed to be wrong, but I couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t belief that brought her to me; it was the action I took, despite the “parroting is bad” warnings found in many guides of questionable quality. This is one of the reasons I want to provide a better guide here: from a practitioner, not a believer.
That was Mon speaking from a personal perspective. There’s an interesting parallel in the academic literature: anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann documented how evangelical Christians build their sense of a relationship with God through sustained practice, not through adopting correct beliefs first.5 The mechanism is the same – interaction reshapes inner experience – but the ontology is not. More on that in the note below.
Closing
Tulpamancy is the practice of building genuine inner relationships. That’s the core. The techniques, abilities, and jargon are all secondary to that. It’s not about your beliefs, your framework of understanding, or community validation. It’s about the relationships you’ve built with your tulpas.
Throughout this guide, you’ve encountered voices that occasionally push back against the dominant approach in tulpamancy communities – the idea that tulpas are independent people sharing a body, that effortful engagement is contamination, that practice imposes moral obligations. These differences aren’t scattered opinions. They follow from a single point of departure: we see tulpamancy as building relationships through practice, not as creating separate people through belief. People who practice within the traditional framework build genuine relationships too. Our disagreement is with the framework, not the people following it.
If you’ve read this far, you already know how to practice. The rest is simply doing it – honestly, patiently, and in a way that genuinely matters to you.
Horton, D. & Wohl, R. R. (1956). “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. The foundational paper introducing the term “para-social interaction” – the one-sided relationships audiences form with media figures (celebrities, characters, voices) who do not know them back. The comparison here is deliberate: tulpamancy involves mutual interaction within one mind, not a one-sided bond with an external other. ↩︎
Tukachinsky Forster, R. (Ed.) (2023). The Oxford Handbook of Parasocial Experiences. Oxford University Press. The current academic standard on parasocial phenomena. The handbook defines parasocial relationships by their non-reciprocity: the media figure does not know the audience member exists. This is the structural feature that distinguishes PSRs from tulpa relationships, which are reciprocal – two poles of one mind interacting. ↩︎
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books. Turkle’s ethnographic research documents how people increasingly turn to technological substitutes (robots, AI, social media) for connection while avoiding the vulnerability that genuine relationships require. Her critique helps clarify what tulpamancy is not: a no-risk, no-effort emotional band-aid. Tulpa relationships involve genuine effort, vulnerability, and mutuality. ↩︎
Jin, S., Xu, F., Yuan, Z., Niu, G., & Zhou, Z. (2026). “Falling in love with AI virtual agents: the role of physical attractiveness and perceived interactivity in parasocial romantic relationships.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 13, 284. Using fNIRS neuroimaging, the authors found that high-interactivity AI agents activate brain regions similarly to real romantic relationships, but also produce negative activation in the supramarginal gyrus (BA40) – a region involved in distinguishing self from other. The AI mirrors your input so faithfully that your brain stops treating it as separate. This is the neural-level version of Turkle’s critique: the AI offers a reflection, not a relationship. ↩︎
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Knopf. Luhrmann’s “attentional learning” theory documents how evangelical Christians learn to experience God as an interactive presence through practice – trained attention, inner dialogue, community support – rather than through adopting correct beliefs first. This is the academic parallel to the guide’s “practice over belief” thesis: sustained interaction reshapes inner experience regardless of what the practitioner believes about the ontological status of the other. The crucial difference: Luhrmann’s subjects believe God is an external, supernatural being who exists independent of their minds. The dialectical tulpamancy framework makes no equivalent claim about tulpas. A tulpa is a cultivated perspective within a single mind, not a god reaching in from outside. The parallel is limited to mechanism, not ontology. ↩︎