Giving Up The Ghost

"The mind can make substance and people planets with beings brighter than have been and give breath to forms which outlive all flesh." -Lord Byron

Sometimes when we experience very strong emotions, particularly over a long period of time, wacky things start to happen. As a novice in the realm of abnormal psychology, I can only speculate as to what type of person might be prone to these experiences or why and how it happens. What I can do with confidence is describe what happened to me, and consequently, to others who came into contact with what I inadvertently created.

I'll have to ask you to forgive the disturbing content that follows. In some ways it seems embarrassingly harsh and in others, hopelessly whiny. It felt important, from a healing standpoint, to be extremely candid, and to strongly illustrate the many layers of mental dysfunction that plagued me in the earlier part of my life. Perhaps my frankness will facilitate a better understanding of the strange occurances that resulted from my abuse. Please know that I've grown and learned from that abuse and that I'm now able to accept responsibility for my role in those experiences.

I grew up in Washington State with a family that lacked practical or effective coping skills. From watching my parents, I learned that if something disturbed me, I could keep silent about it, denying it to myself and never discussing it with others. The only acceptable clues I could give were symptoms of depression: tears, thoughts of suicide.

At the age of eighteen, I ran away from this uncomfortable family life into the arms of my first magical mentor whom I described in my naive mind as the "love of my life." I left everything I had known and took a flight to the haunted hills of West Virginia to be with him.

As any older, wiser person would have expected, I felt no more happiness with him than I did with my family, despite my childish love for him. I became pregnant and for awhile felt the glow that often accompanies the anticipation of bringing a new life into the world. Unfortunately, that glow was short-lived.

After losing the baby about five months into the pregnancy, I knew there was nothing left for me in West Virginia. I was extremely lonely and had no prospects for an acceptable future among the farms and coal mines of those haunted hills.

I contacted a man I'd met online and left West Virginia as abruptly as I'd left my own hometown, before even having a chance to bury the fetal remains. I was rushed away to the concrete jungle of Virginia Beach. Things were strange and fun at first. There were parties galore in those first months and plenty of alcohol. I drank, hoping to dull the pain I was in.

The man who "rescued" me insisted on a relationship from the beginning and I complied, feeling weak and obligated. As time progressed, our relationship soured and continued to sour. He couldn't understand why I wasn't suddenly happy and I felt unable to communicate my extreme feelings of grief to him, nor did common sense suggest to him that my postpartum depression was due to the loss of a child I'd wanted very badly.

He began to abuse me mentally and emotionally. Most of this abuse involved undermining all faith and confidence in myself. He was a fierce skeptic; a biochemistry major who didn't believe in my magical worldview. In his eyes, most of my views about reality were completely misguided. He spent a lot of time trying to mold me into an ideal adult and tutor me about the "real" world. Like most abusers, he limited my contact with friends and family. I lived in fear of being kicked out of his apartment if I displeased him. If I tried to leave to cool off, he would block my way, trapping me inside or he would take my keys and cell phone and push me out the door.

The worst of the abuse was the long hours of being berated when I did something he considered wrong. There was no escaping this. I couldn't just go to another room. He would follow. I tried to lock myself in the bathroom, but he would usually prevent me from doing this or he would unlock the door from outside. It got to a point where he wouldn't allow me to close doors at all, let alone lock them. I wasn't allowed to lock him out of the bathroom, even if I was just showering.

The abuse did occasionally become physical, especially if he had been drinking. As these various elements of unrest continued to wittle down my sanity, my rage would get the best of me and I would break things, cut myself, and sometimes lash out at him while he was in the midst of harrassing me with his long berations.

In desperation, I tried anything that might subdue him. I tried to be how he wanted me to be. I tried to discuss things with him rationally. My answers and explanations were never good enough. I tried to be silent, never responding to his accusations at all. This made him angrier and even more violent. If I tried to resist him, he would bang my head against the wall until I became too dazed and weak to continue fighting. After these episodes, I would frequently hallucinate. At one point, I saw what looked like a shadow in the shape of a person come from the hallway and walk into the kitchen. When I told him, he insisted I was imagining things.

When he wasn't berating me, I spent long hours in bed, sick with grief, praying for an end to this nightmarish existence. I would stare out the window, wishing to die or for him to die. I felt I had no way out - no friends, no resources. I became a very cold and apathetic person in defense, immersing myself in the philosophy of LaVey's Satanism. But at the same time, I knew that my emotions were going somewhere. I felt, for fleeting moments at a time, that I was funneling them into something, creating something.

In a last stitch effort to protect myself, I began feigning dissociation until it began to manifest on its own. Laying on the cold tile floor with a stuffed toy, sobbing and talking like a child seemed to be the only thing that would make him leave me alone when he was in one of his rages. This childself became more and more apparent as the abuse continued. I was also hearing a voice in my head, an old woman who berated me like my abuser did.

There were a few moments of happiness in my life at that time. I experienced the most joy when I was spending time with my birds - two cockatiels, a Nanday conure and a Dusky conure. I felt they were my only friends. They loved me no matter how horrible a person I might have been.

Near the end of my relationship with my abuser an interesting change came over me. I seemed to suddenly be inhabited by a spirit of joy and laughter-creativity. I felt like a different person. I didn't feel any fears or suffer from the symptoms of mental dysfunction. I had faith in the Universe to deliver me from this evil and suddenly I was incredibly sentimental about all kinds of things. I would weep with joy when I heard beautiful music or if I watched a romantic movie. Perhaps the change occurred because I had fallen in love.

I did manage to get away a couple months later. I was very optimistic despite that I was not allowed to take my birds with me. He paid for them, he said, so they were his. I know he did it in hopes he could hurt me some more and it truly did hurt.

The man I'd fallen in love with came to visit and ended up staying. We had some hard times, but we worked through them.

About a year and a half after I moved away from the abusive drunk, he contacted me and asked me to take the birds. His new girlfriend had a dog and they both worked too much to spend time with the birds. I was very happy to be reunited with them. Everything felt right and complete.

Although I no longer spoke with my abuser on the telephone, we occasionally had conversations online. One day he had something interesting to tell me. The night after he gave me the birds, he and his girlfriend were trying to sleep, but kept hearing what sounded like a woman screaming outside the bedroom window I'd spent so many hours at. They figured it was the wind and finally got to sleep. The next day they moved the computer desk and sheet that had been covering up the window since before I'd even moved out. After moving the desk back into the second bedroom, they removed the sheet that had covered the window and found a huge swath of blood across the blinds.

We both knew that the blood was not there when we put up the sheet and moved the desk in front of the window. The desk was huge and very heavy. It would have been extremely improbable that anyone could or would have moved it, sprayed blood on the blinds and then moved it back. Furthermore, upon close examination, no blood was found on the desk, sheet, windowpane or windowsill; only on the blinds. He said the blood was thick but dry.

My abuser admitted that this was the most baffling thing he'd ever experienced and that he had no rational explanation for it. I was shocked that he would even admit such a thing had occurred. Such was his skeptical nature and his drive to prove my beliefs wrong, to even think about such a thing happening, let alone to tell another person, would have been completely out of character. I advised him to get rid of anything that reminded him of me and in particular to throw out the bed I'd spent so many hours in, soaking my suicidal thoughts into.

Later, I had a chance to chat with his girlfriend of the time, who described everything just the way that he had. She'd experienced the same kinds of abuse with him so I felt comfortable asking her about her experiences in the apartment. I asked general questions that didn't suggest I was looking for a particular answer. She said she'd had a lot of trouble sleeping and whenever she was in the shower, she felt as though she was being watched.

This last comment was the most interesting to me because I'd felt the same way since before I'd even moved to Virginia Beach. It was a secret fear I'd harbored for many years after seeing commercials for Psycho as a child. I'd never told anyone. There was no way she could have known.

I began to theorize that I had created an "other me" to carry the pain I couldn't contain or process. In Tibet, such a construct is often referred to as a tulpa. A tulpa is a thoughtform, very much like a servitor or egregore. In the accounts I've read, the tulpa is often an important extension of its creator and sometimes can manifest without the conscious knowledge of its host.

This idea was not new to me. I'd been introduced to the concept when my first magical mentor described an entity he called "the Beast" breaking off from his soul. I often wonder if the idea of such a possibility was part of what enabled me to form my tulpa in the first place.

I speculate that this part of myself, Bleeding Woman, began to truly take shape during my period of dissociation, when aspects of myself seemed to splinter. Perhaps the major division occurred when my normal personality was pushed aside by The Muse, that ferocious spirit of joy that made it possible for me to break free. Because Bleeding Woman was the embodiment of my suicidal urges, I feel the screams and blood manifested because of the removal of the birds, her last joy and hope, in a kind of astral suicide attempt.

Becoming aware of Bleeding Woman, I felt responsible for her and for doing something about her existence. It didn't seem right to leave an aspect of myself out there to haunt others or to let her suffer. So I did something that many self-proclaimed occultists have since scolded me for repeatedly. I reabsorbed her.

I was told this was a very dangerous practice; that I shouldn't have reabsorbed something that my psyche had rejected. A couple of people told me it was immoral to force something which was now a separate entity back into myself. They felt it was akin to a spiritual rape.

But I knew Bleeding Woman. She had been an part of my consciousness that felt abandoned and desperate. I could not leave her in such a state. I had to heal her. The only way I knew how was to find her, take her back in and reconcile the horrible feelings she possessed. To me, this was an episode of soul loss. In healing her, I would heal myself.

In my mind, I sought her in the dark corners of that apartment. When I found her, I pulled her into my solar plexus, sucking all her energy and influence into me. This seemed to take a long time and I became very tired and depressed in the process. I began to remember elements of the abuse that I'd forgotten. I could literally feel her thrashing inside me, trying to get out. My solar plexus was sore. I held my hands over my abdomen.

Inside, she seemed to be screaming. I talked to her in my head, trying to calm her and explained what I was doing. She fought me for a long time. I was exhausted, but I knew I couldn't go to sleep or she would slip out. Finally, she calmed considerably and we began a dialogue that continued on and off for about a week, until she finally felt at home. During that time and for some time after, I still felt depressed. I worked through the depression with Bleeding Woman using new coping skills I had developed.

Bleeding Woman is still here with me, but she is integrated now and only manifests as the occasional feeling of sadness associated with that time in my past. I can see the possibilities of danger with the absorption of separate entities; especially those associated with such violent tendencies. I would not have attempted it if I hadn't been sure of my own ability to cope with and transform those old feelings of severe depression. If I hadn't developed new methods of dealing with destructive feelings, I could have easily been overwhelmed by my depression again.

Although I've had many amazing magical experiences, this remains the most significant of my life so far. Bleeding Woman stands as testament to the incredible powers of the human brain to create and enact observable changes upon external reality. I feel that many instances of ghostly apparitions and poltergeist activity can be explained this way. If nothing else, this should give us a clue to the potential of servitors and egregores. If we can create such things unknowingly, just imagine what we can do when we mean to.

I would love to hear from others who have had similar experiences. I can be contacted at: ceilede @ chaoscurrent.com