Hey y’all!
I’ve been sitting with something from a past experience that I don’t really have neat language for, because the more I try to reduce it, the less accurate it feels.
What I went through, I would describe as an extended interaction with what I can only call a trickster-type presence or influence. Not constant, not always obvious, but persistent in the way it seemed to affect perception, timing, and emotional escalation.
I’m not trying to convince anyone of a universal explanation. I’m only describing how it felt from inside it, and what patterns I noticed around it.
What stood out just as much as the experience itself was how people around me responded to it.
Specifically: disbelief.
And I don’t just mean disagreement. I mean being told, directly or indirectly, that what I was experiencing wasn’t real, or couldn’t be happening.
That kind of response doesn’t just feel dismissive. When someone is already overwhelmed, it can make everything worse. You start doubting your own perception in real time. You stop trusting your instincts. You start monitoring yourself instead of actually processing what you’re going through.
And that’s where things can get unstable.
Because once you lose trust in your own perception, everything becomes internalized and self-questioned. There’s no external anchor anymore, just you trying to figure out if you’re “allowed” to trust what you’re experiencing.
From my perspective, whatever someone believes about the source of an experience, attention and emotional focus do matter.
In spiritual language, people might describe this using ideas like egregores or thoughtforms—where repeated attention, fear, discussion, or belief can give something more structure, intensity, or persistence than it originally had on its own.
Whether someone takes that literally or symbolically, the pattern I noticed is the same:
Attention changes experience.
But it doesn’t only change it one way.
Different types of response can affect things differently:
• Dismissal can make a person feel isolated and mentally unstable, because they lose grounding in what they’re experiencing
• Over-validation or intense focus can sometimes make the experience feel bigger or more consuming than it already is
Neither extreme is helpful on its own.
What seems more helpful is something much simpler:
Acknowledgment without escalation.
Presence without obsession.
Basically: letting someone know you hear them, without turning it into either a debate or a deep spiral.
Something like:
“I hear you. That sounds intense. You’re not alone in what you’re going through.”
Because in my experience, once someone is isolated inside an overwhelming experience—whatever framework you use to understand it—everything becomes louder inside their own head.
And getting back to center becomes harder than it looks from the outside.
For me, the biggest takeaway isn’t proving what anything is or isn’t.
It’s that how we respond to each other matters more than we realize, because it shapes whether someone feels grounded… or more lost inside what they’re already carrying.
> Bottom line: it costs nothing to be kind, and sometimes it’s enough just to be believed.
As always,
Your witchy friend from the bayou’s,
Kristina
push into the blinds , moving them forward. He said he then jumped up, and looked out the window as fast as he could (because our neighborhood has thieves & he thought that’s what that was,) but when he stuck his head out the window, nobody was there. He didn’t see or hear anyone running. And trust me, it’s Louisiana , you’re going to hear someone running because it’s not easy running through body’s of water with rubber boats on.