Caveat Tulpamancer - Let the Prospective Plural Beware

Caveat Tulpamancer – Let the Prospective Plural Beware

May 29, 2018

A time back, a prospective tulpamancer asked us what we thought of the community. I wrote her a long answer explaining my personal cynicisms. More recently, some people within the community asked us to explain what specific toxic attitudes we've seen there. In answer to them and any future askers, I'm reposting a slightly modified copy of the answer I gave the prospective tulpamancer. This is far from complete in my view, but it should at least answer the basic question and then some.

And I feel the need to elaborate that these problems are not limited to the tulpamancy community. I've seen variations of them everywhere in the wider plural community. I've seen them in mixed communities, in DID communities, and in endogenic communities. I do think that the particular nature of the tulpamancy community “institutionalizes” these issues more, but honestly, considering that the bigger plural community is also a mess of cults, toxic codependencies, persecutory paranoia, and pointless bickering, I'd say we're even. I also don't think these issues are a symptom specific to plural community, but specialized ways that issues found in general society manifest. Humans are just inept at treating each other well in general and this is simply another way that it happens.

In any case, warnings for the following: abuse (especially in-system abuse), forced integration, dehumanization (including the context of having to do pointless “tests” to prove you're a person), and a brief mention of sex with dubious circumstances.

Oh, tulpamancy... where do we begin? That community was our gateway to discovering the wider plural world, and we still have a foot in it. We've been participating in it on and off for over three years now. And we've accumulated many opinions.

Several of us have things to say about this. So I'll respond with an overview of our general stance and my personal opinion, and let the others respond with their own specifics in time.

Anyway. We don't have any problem with the concept of tulpamancy itself. (In a sense—more on that another time.) We do believe that it is possible for singlets to induce plurality, albeit a type that ends up being different in various ways from other forms, especially DID. We do believe, very strongly, that system members created this way are as much persons as any other, and deserve to be treated with due respect.

We do not hold any issues with individual tulpamancy systems. Quite a few of the non-trauma systems who we are close friends with and who also helped us a lot are primarily tulpamancy in origin. Others, like us, started out thinking they were “accidental tulpas” before discovering their actual origins later. Still others are mixed in origin with tulpamancy in some way: DID systems who created tulpas as part of system stabilization, systems whose origins are unclear but hold tulpa undertones, etc. We have met many good people through there, as well as many more heavily flawed people who are nevertheless ever striving to learn, and who do deserve respect for their efforts.

Where my problem, and others' problems lie is with the culture of the community itself. The community pays an awful lot of lip service to the belief that tulpas are persons as much as tulpamancers, but many of their discussions and language hint otherwise. Or at least suggest that there's a terrible deficiency of awareness and regard for others.

For example, there are a number of so-called “sentience tests” in the community, to determine if a tulpa is “actually sentient” or not. These are things like putting objects on their head and seeing how they react. Many tulpamancers also employ informal versions of these tests—asking their tulpa out of the blue to come up with a novel idea on the spot, say something unexpected, do something startling, etc to “prove” that they exist. This is not something done once—the tulpamancer does this again and again and again, whenever they have doubts, even after the tulpa's long established. Not one of them stops to think about the effect this has on the tulpa and what it belies: how this essentially makes validation and respect as a person something that must be “earned” through arbitrary tests instead of an innate right. How it hinges one's existence upon the judgement of another—you don't exist unless someone else says you do. How personhood can be whisked away because someone had a bad day, how you might need to jump through the hoops once again at any time. How nothing you do is good enough, because the person testing you always comes up with more doubts, more reasons and ways to test. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

There are discussions about the morality of killing off tulpas. There's quite a few people who are against it. The people who think it's no big deal, however, often argue that it's not immoral at all because tulpas can't be “really” killed, just put into hibernation. Not one of them stops to actually think about what it would be like from the perspective of the tulpa themself—to be forcibly subdued by the person who created them, their independent awareness, agency, and sense of self removed, taken away from their friends and desires in this world, submerged into sleep for what the tulpamancer intends to be forever. Others suggested merging a tulpa into a tulpamancer as a “humane alternative,” or say that dissipation of a tulpa isn't bad because the tulpa lives on as part of the tulpamancer. But none of them, again, stopped to think about it from the tulpa's perspective—even if they don't vanish or sleep, they're being forced to abandon their personality, sense of self, autonomy, and independent existence. To fundamentally change who they are to suit another.

There's a fixation on shaping tulpas into the tulpamancer's idea of what constitutes “sentient” and “a different person”—tulpamancers posting to say that their tulpa “doesn't feel different enough” or doesn't have a “different enough personality to be sentient”, how can they fix that? There's an undercurrent of concern about keeping a tulpa “compatible” with the tulpamancer's desires—tulpamancers worrying that their tulpa will change into someone they don't like, and tulpamancers reassuring them by saying that their subconscious will keep their tulpas in line. There's not at all enough emphasis on a tulpa's individual agency, on the importance of simply supporting people as they explore life, learn, and develop on their own.

I completely understand that morality is complicated as hell. No pun intended. And that moral and ethical questions become far more muddled in the plural realm, where so much is unknown and unproven, where many things operate differently and give rise to unique questions—the right of someone to their own mental space, or the right of a spontaneous system member to exist? Is it immoral to withhold control of the body, and thus the ability to participate in outer life, from a system member, or is it immoral to force one to restructure their outer life? None of these are easy questions to answer at all, and I suspect that more likely than not, there are no “true” answers—there are only many individualized, imperfect answers that hinge heavily upon personal context. And as always, one can argue that none of us know what any of us “actually” are—no one can prove personhood.

But I don't think that's a wholly relevant counterargument. Keep in mind that many of them believe tulpas to be sentient entities, if not full persons, and make these arguments and discussions and practices under the belief that tulpas are thinking, feeling beings. And as such, see nothing wrong with making these arguments about and doing these things with regards to thinking, feeling beings, provided those beings did not come first in their brain. It overall creates an environment where tulpas (and by extension, other non-originals) are constantly hinted to be less-than, and where people overall are reduced to philosophical abstractions, projects to be poked and prodded in some mockery of science, cures for loneliness or illness. Much of it is uncannily reminiscent of toxic parenting attitudes.

There are many other subtle hypocrises and dehumanizations as well—a large portion of the community refers to tulpas as “it” rather than “they,” even as they refer to tulpamancers as “they.” They contrast relationships with and among tulpas with, in their words, “real relationships”—even as a number of them proceed to brag about the amazing sex they have with them. Newcomers express paranoia over their tulpas “going rogue”, indicating that they already see tulpas as inhuman, propelled by unknowable forces rather than reason. Multiple times, non-newcomers have succumbed to this, too—they go silent, and then return to the community to announce that they've dissipated their tulpa for “going rogue”. They explain that they tried everything, that they tried to negotiate, that their tulpa wouldn't listen to reason. Upon closer examination, it's discovered that their “negotiation” with their tulpa was simply “fall in line, or I'll erase you.”

They then announce they're making a new tulpa.

The community also has a significant “dudebro streak”—it's mostly prevalent on the Discord side of the community, but there's traces of it elsewhere as well. Mockery of non-binary genders and non-tulpamancy forms of plurality, tasteless memes, some downright sigh-inducing remarks about suicide and mental illness. And respectability politics—people shouting “we aren't crazy like THOSE people!” without thinking about what they mean by “crazy,” and whether it's truly so important to distance themselves from “those people.”

The community has, for its credit, changed for the better in more recent times. It's no longer as widely accepted to make tasteless jokes about trans people or other plurals. There's more understanding of what DID does and doesn't entail, what schizophrenia does and doesn't entail. There's more people—far more people—recognizing the hypocrises, big and little, and speaking out against them. There's more tulpas speaking for themselves. There's more diversity in backgrounds, in lifestyles, in system types, in understandings. There's people turning their backs on the old strongholds of the community and setting out to found smaller but broader-minded spaces. But it still has a long way to go, and I still would not recommend engaging with it beyond finding resources. Our own group—and many other groups we've met through the tulpamancy community—is still working on dispelling many of the toxic mindsets that the community instilled in us. When you “grow up” with things like this as your normal, they have a way of chipping away at your sense of self.

Honestly, the best advice I can give any prospective tulpamancer is to save themself and their hypothetical tulpa the headache. If they felt the desire to socialize as openly plural, I'd tell them to do so in a decent plural community (emphasis on “decent”—the wider plural community has many issues as well) or in a decent non-plural community that's accepting of plurality. I'd recommend they either don't participate in the tulpamancy community, or that they don't make it their main social sphere.

At the very least—and I'm addressing this both to the new tulpamancer and tulpa—find yourself first. There's a lot of world to do that in. Don't limit yourself to this tiny pool.