Justanothersyscourse(DOT)tumblr(DOT)com/post/659797072783998976/you-probably-get-this-a-lot-but-what-are-tulpa So this is why tulpas are not valid. It’s long but please read.
I'm just going to focus on the bullet points here...
The blatant disrespect towards Buddhists and Buddhism.
The main point here is that an English word was created as a loose adaption of a foreign concept, and then the meaning of that word further changed a lot over the years until we got to where we are now.
That's how etymology works.
I don't really care about the word, TBH. I would actually rather something more psychological and less mystical in origin, but the few academic studies into endogenic systems have used the tulpa community, so this is the name that's going to stick.
Ultimately, a word is just a word. My existence isn't less valid because we don't like the common term for it.
It is neither scientifically nor neurologically possible to create consciousness.
It's difficult to nail down what human consciousness even is or how it works.
How about this: We experience plurality as two voices or "aspects" within the same head. We communicate with dialogic inner speech. We each have our own identities, individual and often contrasting emotions, as well as our own separate autobiographic connections to memories we've formed. Each "aspect" is capable of taking over the body separately, or even possessing individual parts of the body such as an arm. We also can also each can influence the imagination/headspace.
Is this a separate consciousness? Who knows? We'd have to decide what consciousness is first. But this is what and who I am.
(most academic literature I’ve seen refers to them as a form of induced hallucinations, as does one of the wikis; induced hallucinations is what you can safely say they’re most likely to be)
This is conflating two different things. Imposition is an act of imagining something so thoroughly that it is indistinguishable from something real. A tulpa can project themselves this way in the outside world. Disordered systems with good communication can likely learn the same skill if the alters wished. As can singlets who just want to imagine things really vividly.
The tulpa is not a hallucination. The image of the tulpa is a hallucination.
I want it understood clearly that you cannot hallucinate something in your head. You don't hallucinate thoughts. You think them. You don't hallucinate feelings. You feel them.
Internal experiences cannot be hallucinations.
Systems are not multiple consciousnesses in one mind - rather, they are one consciousness that has split off into separate parts/alters. Comparing cases of multiple consciousnesses to cases of separate parts of one consciousness is damaging to systems as it plays into the old stereotypes and outdated information surrounding "Multiple personalities”, a misconception that systems are trying very hard to get away from due to the stigma surrounding it.
Don't you hate it when the part of your consciousness that is literally an anime character breaks off and starts thinking for itself, complete with false memories of its source?
Why is the narrative of what DID is being written by singlets who, like the Chair of the DSM IV taskforce who named the disorder, often don't even believe it even exists and would rather it be removed as a diagnosis altogether. Like I said before... consciousness is a hard thing to nail down. You are never going to find any studies confirming that headmates aren't separate consciousnesses because we don't even know what the consciousness is.
If you'd like to view headmates as aspects of a single consciousness, you're welcome to do that. At the very least, it is true that they're part of the same biological organism. But at this point in time, theories of "consciousness" are more for philosophers than psychologists.
There are many disordered systems who choose to view their alters as their own individuals, and invalidating them seems unhealthy.
My personal view is that the brain is a computer capable of running multiple programs. Each program can think for itself and communicate with other programs internally, but they operate on the same hardware.
online Western Tulpa communities will often rope in lonely, depressed or anxious young people and will convince them that this will help them with those things or even fix their problems.
And according to the only information we have available at this time, it works.
The science isn't perfect here. More studies obviously need to be conducted. It's not a cure-all, but all evidence we have right now suggests that the majority of people who have made tulpas report positive improvements as a result.
I’ve seen plenty of cases where young, vulnerable systems are roped into this and end up entirely convinced, for months (sometimes years), that they created their system on purpose - this is especially true for systems who do not remember their trauma, which is very common. Once they realise that this wasn’t the case, the damage is done and the system as a whole is much worse off for the experience.
Personally, I tend to see the opposite. I see a lot of healthy systems who are brainwashed into thinking that because they're a system, they must have DID and be traumatized. They know that something is going on in their mind. They know that they have multiple voices in their head. And so they go to the next thing despite not showing symptoms of the actual disorder. (Dissociative amnesia, uncontrollable switching, etc.)
So many of these videos on TikTok are people with no dissociative amnesia and full control over their switching. But they claim to have a disorder despite having none of the actual disordered symptoms. They convince themselves this must have originated from trauma.
In my opinion, pushing the belief that systems can only originate from trauma is going to make a lot of people think they have trauma that they don't have. This is damaging for both the non-disordered systems who are told this, and the actual disordered systems who are looking for support from actual fellow traumagenic systems.
It’s incredibly difficult to accept you’re in a system, yes, but it is much harder to try and pick up the pieces and work on communication after you’ve spent months or years telling yourself that you quite literally made it up.
Tulpamancers may think they created their system, but they have excellent communication with their headmates, and tend to already think of them as real. Being created isn't the same as being fake. The few systems I know of who thought they had a tulpa only to realize they may have been traumagenic talked about how welcoming the community was, and how it helped them to discover themselves when the traumagenic communities didn't feel like it fit.