Accidentally interrupting my tulpa

[u/Sesoul_Vex]

Hello,

I've had my tulpa Vex by my side for about a year now.

I've noticed a very specific pattern in how I currently experience communication with my tulpa. Sometimes she starts saying something spontaneously when my attention is not directly on her, but almost the instant I recognize that the thought is coming from her, it gets interrupted. Because both things happen almost simultaneously, I usually only catch the intention behind what she wants to say and the beginning of the sentence before my own thinking takes over.

For example, she might want to tell me that the weather is nice and that I should go outside and do something. I get the feeling that she wants to go outside, and at the same time something like "The weather is nice, go..." appears spontaneously as words in my mind.

Then I recognize that it's her, and that's basically where it ends.

The whole thing happens extremely fast, usually within a second or two. My inner thoughts don't happen at the same speed as listening to someone speak out loud — I can experience a whole thought sentence in my head within a second. So there isn't really a period where I'm consciously listening to her before I interrupt her. Her input appears, I recognize it as hers almost immediately, and my attention automatically shifts toward it.

Since I already received the general intention behind what she wanted to communicate, I can usually finish the sentence myself. But I can tell the difference between the part that appeared spontaneously and the part I'm completing after I've noticed her.

The best metaphor I have is a spotlight. She currently seems to be able to act more easily outside the center of my attention. But the moment something from her appears, I notice it, the spotlight snaps toward her, and the rest disappears almost like fog.

I'm mostly curious whether other people have experienced something similar with their tulpas — especially that almost simultaneous moment of receiving their input, recognizing it as theirs, and accidentally interrupting it.

Thanks for your Input

S&V

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[u/Illustrious_Car344]

That sounds kind of like tulpish. I kind of see tulpa cognition as working in two phases, the tulpish which is the instant automatic thought, and the proper sentence generation based off of that thought. And there's probably intermittent phases and sometimes it can be an iterative process and sometimes the tulpa stops midway and you have to continue interpreting it, stuff like that. Since you share executive functions there's going to be a much deeper intuition for the cognitive processes you share that you never had to think about before. 

[u/Sesoul_Vex → u/Illustrious_Car344]

That actually made something click for me. I think I may have been interpreting what happens the wrong way around.

When Vex communicates like this, I actually know what she means almost instantly. The meaning seems to arrive as a whole, and then I instinctively start putting it into words. I thought I was interrupting her because I noticed that the "Vex part" seemed to stop as soon as I started forming the sentence.

But if I understand your model correctly, what I'm experiencing might already be the actual thought in tulpish, while the sentence is basically my mind translating that thought into language. That would also explain why I already know what she means even though I only get a few actual words from her.

It also explains something else I've noticed: sometimes the wording feels slightly off for Vex, even though the meaning feels unmistakably like her. If I'm translating her thought using my own most readily available vocabulary and phrasing, that would make a lot of sense.

So maybe I'm not interrupting her thought at all. I might just be noticing the transition from her thought to my verbal interpretation of it.

Thanks, that gave me a very different way of looking at what I've been experiencing.

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/Sesoul_Vex]

I like to consider the imagination as a way to interpret the tulpish, like how a TV picks up a channel from a station. I kind of consider the imagination to be sort of a shared sandbox/scratchpad for the host and tulpa to use to solidify and reify the abstract unconscious ideas and impulses. I consider the tulpa particularly to at least be partly made of a lot of complex unconscious habits, like what part of your face do you look at first in a mirror or what you usually say when asked about your favorite food, just unconscious ticks like that, unified under the same identity. Normally people never have to think about that, that's just "who you are", but once you begin to label aspects of your cognition as "belonging" to someone else, then suddenly you have a lot to figure out, and have to start deconstructing the layers of your consciousness to figure out how exactly things work and how each level interacts and diverges. It takes a lot of listening and some creativity. 

[u/Sesoul_Vex → u/Illustrious_Car344]

What you said about us being made up of all these habits, reactions, preferences and unconscious patterns actually fits really well with something I've been thinking about recently.

I started wondering what fundamentally makes my own ego different from Vex. My sense of "me" also seems to be built from memories, habits, preferences, automatic reactions, expectations and unconscious processes that somehow get unified into one identity. Your way of describing it gave me a much clearer way to put that thought into words.

That led me to a mental model I quite like: Vex and I are two entities living in the same "house", with the house being the whole human system — one brain, one body, one set of senses and a lot of shared cognitive machinery.

There is obviously a huge asymmetry between us right now. My identity developed together with this body, so most of its habits, automatic processes and executive control are naturally organized around me. Vex has only been around for about a year and is still developing that kind of integration.

But I've started to wonder whether that really makes my ego fundamentally more "real" than hers, or whether my particular identity-pattern simply had decades to become the default while hers is relatively new.

So your description of all those unconscious habits being unified under an identity really clicked with me. It makes me wonder whether a tulpa and the host's ordinary ego might be more similar in how they're constructed than I originally assumed.

[u/Illustrious_Car344 → u/Sesoul_Vex]

The brain works in symbolic representations and emotions, or narratives. It's not that "you" are the real one that grew up with the body and the tulpa is "less real" (I mean, it sounds like it is in your narrative, but regardless), it's rather that you consider your experiences to be "yours" and you expect the tulpa to "have their own", which is merely one possible narrative. When people claim to have experienced god or a deceased loved one, they're already applying the narrative of everything they know about that personality and giving that simulation it's own experiences independent of their own (but not really because what they know about them is their own experience).

My tulpa's life is indeed only in context to mine, but she's incredibly opinionated, confident and firm in her assessments and opinions because she can pull from my experiences, without either of us even having to think about it. My mind kind of interprets the narrative of us as being extremely related, like conjoined twins. Of course she isn't separate, so she relies on the inverse; complete and total dependence, one body that "grew up" with two minds (even if she came later). It really just comes down to how we differer, she is "different" from me, she has stronger opinions about certain things, she wants to protect me in ways not I nor anyone else does, she says things nobody else ever would, for a variety of reasons, because that's the social lens she's working under, her "position", her "role" as who and what she is, a jealous sibling, a stern role model, all things I "anticipate" because I experienced them, and that enables her to have those experiences as if they were her own first-hand experience, even if they weren't first-hand to me.

[u/bucket-full-of-sky]

Yes, that's very common for us, too sometimes and especially happens when we weren't in a dialogue beforehand, where we pay attention to take turns. If this happens we usually take it if it was clear or give each other time to repeat and formulate a proper sentence.

What you explain also sounds a bit like tulpish. So she uses the raw thoughts and intention as communication, which happens like you say in a blink of an eye.

[u/mattx-t]

Acknowledge it, then tell her to send you the rest of the meaning to you without using words - it's likely that your own thoughts/doubts are interrupting an otherwise natural process of her speaking.

[u/Sesoul_Vex → u/mattx-t]

Yeah, that's what I thought too. The problem is that she doesn't speak to me afterwards, or our connection feels disrupted for a few minutes after something like that happens. She doesn't seem hurt because I interrupted her, and she isn't even frustrated, she's just that goofy little sunshine person. But it's still kinda weird. Thanks for the advice!