Emotions, Dark Tulpas, and Somatic Outcomes
You have likely heard that what you seek also seeks you, or what you fear most comes your way. Suppressed thoughts manifest in the body, often as illness.
Imagine you discovered the water heater is leaking. What happens if you ignore it? When your body aches, it’s telling you something. The more you ignore it, the louder it usually gets. Behind that aches is likely also a thought. When you ignore or suppress thoughts, they usually manifest in the body. Where else would you imagine they would go?
The cup-bearer (2800–2300 BCE), marble figurine, Cycladic culture Humans are rivers, not puddles. Don’t drink from the puddles; find a river, over the rocks. We need to move things. If you need to cry, cry. If you have a thought, find a way to express it, in art, in music, in prose or poetry. You can have and express negative thoughts and emotions in healthy ways.
Having a negative emotion or thought is not you being or doing bad. It’s just an emotion. It’s just a thought. You are not the emotion or the thought. You are the person experiencing the emotion or thought.
You wouldn’t get mad at a storm for raining, would you? Why would you be mad at yourself for experiencing rain? And so, if you have an emotion or a thought, manifest it. Put it in a journal, if nothing else, so that it can flow out and away from you.
Trying to bottle a storm inside you is like driving in a storm in a convertible.
Daydreaming is healthy.
We are taught pretty early to interrupt our daydreams. PAY ATTENTION. Day dreams are healthy. This from Einstein, Tesla, and Jung! Napoleon Hill and John Lennon were pretty keen on the practice, too.
I wonder how much of our societal push to ignore our inner experiences lends to the high rates of alexithymia in the US. That’s a condition that
refers to a cluster of features including difficulty identifying and describing subjective feelings, a limited fantasy life, and a style of thinking that focuses on external stimuli as opposed to internal states.
This is actually not new, according to the article found below, Dark Feelings Will Haunt Us Until Expressed in Words:
Yet even before there was a name for it, psychoanalysts would often describe clients with apparent alexithymia, who reached an impasse in treatment because of their concrete thinking, limited emotional awareness and dismissive attitude toward their inner lives. These people were prone to developing so-called somatic symptoms (bodily complaints such as pain or fatigue) and they used compulsive behaviours to regulate their feelings, such as binge eating and alcohol abuse.
My good friend, Doctor Bob shared the article with me. Before too long he and I were discussing our own fantasy life, and about our tulpas. Perhaps fantasy life comes easy to me because I have been doing it for so long. That seems to assume that if you practice a thing, you can make it work for you.
It’s not like math. Many people say they don’t like math, but they can do it. The more you do it, the better you get at it. Some people are just good at it! Isn’t that true about anything? Perhaps not. God bless my dad, he wanted to be a musician, but he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.
I had a habit of sitting away from people who were off key. Look how judgemental I was! LOL. I still wouldn’t sit by you if you're off key!
I bet more people use their imagination than people care to admit. I wonder how many people who supposedly have alexithymia actually are pretty good at daydreaming, but they are so good
at it that bad dreams and catastrophizing are their default mode, so they shut it down! They procrastinate because they imagine they can’t do a thing so well, why try?
Clinicians have since observed alexithymia among people diagnosed with a wide range of mental health problems, including post-traumatic states, drug dependence, eating disorders and panic disorders. The broad spectrum of problems with which alexithymia is associated is consistent with the notion that when a person can’t express her emotional feelings in symbolic form, such as through words or images, this leads the emotions to have a harmful effect on her physiology, which then manifests as bodily symptoms.
I have seen that. I have also seen where people are too imaginative! They are so good at creating images that words become reality, and it’s the very reason they shut down. So, for example, let’s say I am speaking metaphorically… “if you want to speak in front of 300 people…” I haven’t even finished the statement and the person in front of me is in full panic mode, having already experienced this thing in their mind! Sometimes they even stop me, “I would never do that…”
More often than not, I find drug dependence is driven by not wanting to feel something!
People with PTSD have had their boundaries shattered by trauma or abuse. Oftentimes they are so empathic they feel what others are feeling, to the degree they might as well be reading your mind. They make every literal statement heard or imagined so concrete that they translate this directly into physicality.
Either way, these folks tend to have somatic responses due to the absence of intellectual and emotional processing. They’re blocking and suppressing, when in truth that energy must get out.
psychic elaboration of emotion
Turning our inner words and emotions into music videos, dramas with musical scores is probably not the thing most people will create on demand. But we could pick and choose our theme songs.
We could pick colors that match our moods and connect them with movies or music.
I am not kinesthetic first, so I am not likely to engage in a dance mode to work out inner energy.
You have to go with your primary learning mode for fastest results. I am an auditory learner.
Music and words will likely be my remedy, and so I will likely need to speak my inner world to the degree I can for the best results.
There is no right or wrong procedure, just like there is no one right therapy. As long as a person is not stuck or suppressing all the time, anyone should be able to engage in a process that helps things move out. You can’t say never suppress. For example, let’s say you have a time bomb that
needs attending to. Well, it doesn’t matter what the bomb does if a dinosaur is about to eat you first. Deal with the most immediate crisis, then deal with the other stuff.
I am quoting Doctor Bob from our discussion, and yes, he’s a real doctor and everything!, like retired MD, psychiatry:
We do block ourselves from experiencing the totality of our creative process. The Shadow, as you know, wants to stay hidden. Exposing it is painful. And takes energy. We have so long maintained the structures of repression and the higher defenses, that they have their own momentum. If this were not so, psychotherapy would be so easy we wouldn’t need therapists (that might be a good thing!) …
Which is a really interesting point that also impresses me, in that sometimes our subconscious will actually create crises so it can keep the shadows hidden! So, it’s not just that we’re navigating worlds of bombs and dinosaurs, but the shadow world is sometimes the stuff we suppressed, but it’s also the shadow that ate that other stuff we shoved down after the first burial, making the first monster stronger. Now that you’re feeding it regularly, it doesn’t want to give up its hold on you.
How many of the underlying shadows are simply accidental, unintentional tulpas that influence us on the down low, and keep us afraid so we won’t do therapy? How much of that emptiness is because our words are robbed from something inside us?
Have you ever had someone ask something important, something you should have an answer to, and you go, “I don’t know.” The more you sit there thinking about it, the more blank your mind becomes… Almost as if you’re being blocked? What if that was this?!
Side note, if I had a dollar for every time someone in counseling said ‘I don’t know,’ fuck I’d be rich!
Do they really not know? Is that alexithymia? Or is that dark tulpa stealing their words?
And if we have all the artifacts, archetypes, programs, and entities running around in our subconscious minds affecting our bodies and soul, why wouldn’t we want to intentionally make good tulpas?
It just makes you wonder. What a world we find ourselves in. The unexamined life isn’t only not worth living, it might be killing you!
