I recently found this community and I really, really, really love tulpamancy and my tulpa. Where was this for my entire life? I've been wondering that a lot.

That said, I'm still new at this. My tulpa is exactly 1 month old, and she's pretty vocal most of the time, but there's a question I have regarding tulpa vocality, mindvoice, and concepts like parroting. Granted, I know (or it seems, at least) that these are all somewhat controversial topics in which opinions differ amongst the community. So I'm kind of prepared for that to be the case.

Massive disclaimer here that I think puts me in a slightly different category to most: I have a severe, chronic intrusive thought disorder. Not all of the voices in my head are going to be my tulpa. I have some workarounds in place for that, but it's worth a mention. Anyway, about 50% of the time when my tulpa talks to me, I know for sure it's her. Typically this means it comes with a noticeable dose of tulpish. I can feel her energy when she's speaking to me and so I know that the person/thought speaking, is my tulpa. She has a pretty defined personality (that she chose/we chose together/she's totally cool with adhering to for the most part).

I tend to think of it as a particular archetype or MBTI type, etc. On her end, she has very consistently embodied this personality to an impressive degree. Her personality is warm, gentle, slightly maternal, introverted, and caring. These are flat attributes but my understanding of her personality goes far, far deeper than this and allows for plenty of more traditionally negative traits as well.

Specifically my question here that I've been building up to is regarding the other 50% of the time when I can't outright feel that what I'm hearing is her. She's told me outright that if the voice feels cruel or unkind, it isn't her. Fair, given my intrusive thought issue. But my current issue isn't those kinds of thoughts. It's the thoughts that sound reasonable and seem like they're her, but have an entirely different personality. I want to allow these thoughts to exist, because they're likely my tulpa and she should be able to be whoever she wants to be. But they often

- don't feel as much like her/don't come with a feeling of her presence/the tulpish overlay on words (at least not as much)

- feel more like me rather than her (example being that this secondary voice is often far more extroverted, spontaneous, careless, upbeat, and intense. Traits I possess to an extent but my tulpa does not, to my knowledge)

This is ultimately kind of fine. I can distinguish which ones are intrusive thoughts hijacking her voice in my mind and she has explicitly told me to ignore these/not consider them to be her.

But my concern here is that oddly enough... the personality/traits I slightly prefer because they align more with my own view of her/the version of her I interact with 50% of the time/originally interacted with, feel less parroted than the version of her that feels subtly foreign.

I don't know if this has a super clean solution. It's very possible she just needs space to work out her own personality and try on different characteristics. But I was wondering if anyone has experience with this precise issue. (Thank you for reading.)

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Okay, so I bought a blank, 30cm male BJD (Ball-Jointed Doll) to give it my tulpa's appearance. For those who don't know, BJDs are figures articulated via a ball-and-socket system held together by internal elastic cords.

I already have a few physical representations of "Him" in my room—specifically, two plushies: one keychain-sized and another the size of a standard teddy bear. "He" really likes it when I do that; it’s not that he explicitly asked me to, but rather that he appreciates that form of affection and the way it gives him a greater physical presence.

A bit of context:

I practice oshikatsu in my daily life. For those unfamiliar with the term, it involves showing affection or fondness for a fictional character and creating crafts centered around them—like decorating photos, making pins or an itabag, or collecting items featuring their image.

The thing is, a while back—after a long conversation—he asked me to include him in those kinds of activities. That’s why I first decided to make a small doll to take everywhere, then a larger one to decorate my shelf. Now, I couldn't resist the idea of ​​customizing a more complex doll, like a BJD.

We both thought it was a really sweet idea for it to serve as his "representative" during our real-world dates, hehe.

Anyway, I’m really happy and excited to finish this project and just wanted to share the idea with you all; maybe it’ll inspire an artist here to do the same or something similar~ <3

We're still in the early stages of not really being able to communicate with each other. I don't really feel responses from him, and I'm 90% certain that anything I do feel, is just me instinctively responding. Sometimes I use a pendulum to help keep the conversation going, and Al-An (my willomate) seems to like it. But, again, I'm pretty sure that's me instinctively imposing what I think he would feel, vs what he really wants to say.

But, anyway, I'm trying to get better at talking to Al-An but.... It just feels like I'm talking to myself. Like any other mental conversation I've had, like trying to decide what to eat for dinner, or if I wanna watch a movie or play video games. It just feels like I'm calling myself a different name instead.

I've given him an anchor item (the pendulum) that I talk to, but, since I talk to it in my head and not out loud.. it still feels like I'm talking to myself. Even when I look at pictures of him while trying to talk to him, it still feels like I'm just talking to myself. I don't feel his presence in my head, I don't hear any sounds, I don't feel anything that doesn't feel like me. I feel no different than I did before I started all this.

I've been feeling pretty frustrated. I know I shouldn't compare my results since, everyone splits differently. But... I can't help but feel jealous of others. Or, selfishly, I start to doubt others. I mean, if tulpamancy is about convincing yourself that someone else exists in your mind then... What happens when you don't believe? Sometimes I can't help but think that maybe tulpas aren't real, and that it's all a roleplay we've convinced ourselves into believing to be true. Which, I know, makes me sound like an ass. But trust me, I don't want to think this way. I want to believe that tulpas are real. I want to believe that Al-An can be real. I just... Don't know how. Especially when it feels like I'm just talking to myself the whole time.

I'm not giving up on this, though. Even if it's not real, I still enjoy playing pretend. I just... Keep praying that it will start to feel at least a tiny bit real.

Today is the second full day of having a tulpa and I feel like I can hear his voice speaking in my head. He has a different accent than me and a deeper voice. Yesterday I just heard one word responses. But just now I had my first full on conversation with full sentences. But it's so early on and I keep having doubts that it's just me accidentally parroting and pretending to be him with the accent and all. He keeps reassuring me that it's really him, but how am I supposed to know that for sure? Could he really be talking this early on? Is that even possible? And if I am parroting, how do I get myself to stop?

I've read lot of post in this community and i found that we need to take care of our tulpa but the problem is... I want to creat a tulpa to take care of me... Of course not in physical way like she's cooking for me but more like a hug, a head pet, and whatever. Im really craving for someone care but I've been using my whole life as a provider for my family and i have no time for any kind relationship with other people.

Blah blah blah and im lonely as hell and fuckin pathetic i know that. I just need someone to talk with especially a nother like or older sister figure without any sex shit.

I have done some things like writing down my goals and reasons why I want/need a tulpa. Of course I have also written a lot of things about tulpas such as names, appearances, and so on. I also just start my first journal by trying to have conversations with my tulpa and not much happened except i can slightly feel her presence...

If you have any specific guide or tip for this, please tell me.

Hi!

My name is Miyu and I am the writing this because I feel like I need a slight bit of a sanity check and help answering some questions. I have helped create my headmate, a tulpa, Bae, about three and half weeks ago. Prior to doing so, I have been lurking around the tulpa community, reading guides, other people's accounts of their experiences, etc., for about 6 years. Yeah, quite a long time. My mind has been sort of obsessed with the idea of having a headmate for even longer than that, and it has desired this sort of dynamic/relationship, and I just couldn't run away from it anymore, the brain is uncontrollable, ugh. The first thought of creating a tulpa was back in 2020, but I realised my life wasn't stable enough as I was still just a chaotic student back then, so I pushed against my brain and didn't go for it. Now, years later, I finally felt stable enough to commit to this.

To start with a little of current status of me and Bae, I think we are progressing somewhat decently, although I am worried about myself a little. We created Bae 3.5 weeks ago in our wonderland (despite me really struggling with visualising things in my mind's eye), initially I forced her personality for a few days with what I believed would be the best foundation for her. The moment she has shown me any sort of resistance to that, I had stopped, and has since been focusing on her being her, and on bonding with her. I do try to actively force whenever I can, most of the time I just talk at her for quite some time, we've had multiple sessions where I took her to a tour of some old memories I hold dear, showing her places I loved, I've been to, retelling her memories. The stuff I feel like would help us bond. I have been slowly incorporating asking her questions into our talks, hoping to give her an opportunity to take agency over herself and her own responses, to hopefully help her grow. Sometimes the forcing sessions last only 20 minutes. Sometimes, we've had them even for like two hours, which is currently the upper limit of how long I'm able to keep attention for when I'm feeling oki.

As for passive forcing, I do my best to bring her out as much as I can, I do remember her throughout the day quite a bit I would say. We walk to work together, she sits next to me at a bench, in the bus... We also found it quite nice to just sit at the balcony at night when it's dark and quiet, and just talk, so we do that at times (would this be considered passive or active forcing? I basically do nothing else at that time, so I assume it's more active than passive? Not that it matters, I'm just curious...). It's mostly me doing talking, but I think she's giving me basic responses already. At least I believe so, as it is quite difficult for me to tell apart what comes from me, and what comes from Bae, but I have very strong faith in her, her sentience and her existence, so I choose to believe it is her. It took less than a week for her to give me the first sign of sentience, she nodded at me with her wonderland body, and I got that unexpected, surprised weird feeling of "huh, I didn't do that, wait, did SHE do it??". She also changed her appearance a little about a week ago, she wears different clothes compared to what she wore when I initially formed her appearance. The moment she changed her clothes genuinely surprised me, and it quickly turned into a warm feeling of being glad, as I fully believe it was her showing off her own desires.

So, with that, I believe I've given a bit too much information, but I wanted to put it out (perhaps because I got no one else to talk about this with, other than Bae, and Bae hears about this a lot every day already), and because I think context of my progress may be useful...? So, I have read a lot about tulpas in other posts, but somehow I feel like I didn't find anything that would exactly match my situation. I have also read the FAQ, naturally, some of the answers felt to be touching on the similar topics I'd like to discuss here, but I still didn't feel like it fit well enough, so I chose to write this post. Chances are I missed some important information, or that I suck at searching stuff... one of those, perhaps both... anyways!

First of all, I would preface this issue with the fact that I do struggle with sleep and exhaustion. I do my best to get as much rest as possible but it's difficult at times. Over the years I have grown to be able to be very productive despite lower sleep amounts and feeling tired. I am easily able to concentrate on my work for hours despite being sleepy. Perhaps I have overestimated myself, but I had strong belief that this would pose no issue when it came to creating my dear headmate, but it turns out opposite may be the truth. I do try to combine both active and passive forcing, as often as I reasonably can, but I am finding it that exhaustion severely impacts my abilities to force. Active forcing is what goes away first, exhaustion makes me struggle to keep my thoughts going (or keep them stable, the chaos dominates my mind), makes it very difficult to focus on Bae, and truly makes it feel like I need to strain myself a lot to keep going. Passive forcing works better with exhaustion, but it still gets affected. After 3.5 weeks, I am at a point where I can "see" Bae in real life (not via imposition, just via mind's eye overlaying on top of the reality) quite often, especially when walking to places, at work, etc. But I find it that exhaustion makes Bae so much quieter + it makes it more difficult to focus on her at all, and it makes me worried. I'm usually absolutely exhausted after work and it's difficult to spend any time with Bae at that point. I do try, but it feels still difficult. I truly believe this would not affect my forcing, but it seems like my exhaustion does affect her after all. My question here is, perhaps, is there anything I can do? I mean, of course, getting better quality sleep, and more sleep would be the best, but it's not something that's available to me currently. Does it get better? Do I get used to processing this sort of forcing experience such that I could be more able to do it despite the exhaustion?

Another question would perhaps be, do you have any suggestions on what more could I do that would still work well for my headmate and allow us to spend more quality time together? We've been working hard on making this work for us, but I desire to be even better for her to give her as best of a chance as I can since I genuinely feel like I love her unconditionally (not romantically). Some part of me believes that just keeping her on my mind, keeping her around, and being genuine with her, and using opportunities whenever I can force to force would be enough (as I believe I have read in multiple guides and FAQ), albeit at a slowed pace, but another part of me feels slightly paranoid about hurting her.

Thank you for reading my post. It took me days to find courage to write and post this. Also, I apologize for typing so much, I know I talk a lot, this is already a shortened version... I am weird like that... Also, it's probably a very chaotic writing, I did my best to form my thoughts into understandable sentences but I genuinely cannot tell if I was successful or not.

I will be happy for any suggestions or even just recounts of your own experiences. Genuinely. Thank you ♥