“Am I going crazy?” Entity contact and mental illness

“I heard/saw/felt something odd. Now I feel like something is trying to contact me. Is this real or am I going crazy?”

After spending some time and visiting occult forums and groups, I’ve noticed this question is one of the most common asked by advice seekers, I want to share a few of my own thoughts on the question and hopefully hear more from others. Standard caveat applies here: I’m only speaking from my own experiences and paradigm, not discounting any other experiences or paradigms that may differ from my own etc etc. And I’ll keep my descriptive language deliberately vague and non-dogmatic since I know many paths and individuals use different terminologies to describe these “things.”

Short answer: yes, these experiences are real. Most of the time. And no, they don’t mean you’re going crazy. Most of the time. There are classes of astral entities who specifically approach humans to form energetic bonds that can be either symbiotic or parasitic, depending on one’s perspective. These bonds create an open exchange of energy; your “basic” entities tend to elicit straightforward sexual release, but the more intelligent ones can influence human behavior indirectly to produce other types of energy—fear, rage, love, exhaustion etc. The symptoms of attachment vary but commonly include hearing a voice, feeling a presence, a feeling of pressure or tingling in the head or neck (either pleasant or painful), sleep paralysis and OBEs, astral sexual encounters, visions of an entity or shadow person, and later on mood swings, altered behavior patterns, experiencing ‘unfamiliar’ thoughts or emotions etc. 

Of course, many of those symptoms are also associated with an encroaching mental illness, which makes these experiences even more unsettling. And people dealing with abuse, addiction, depression, anxiety or other mental/emotional disturbances do tend to attract these entities since a) they’re vulnerable, and b) they’re already producing energy that is easy to feed on. I believe these attachments can also exacerbate pre-existing imbalances as the host’s energetic body struggles to handle the stress of an unfamiliar influence—similar to how the physical body weakens as the immune system fights an infection. I’m not saying that every person dealing with mental health issues is also dealing with entity attachment issues or vice versa. I’m saying that they can often be observed together, and tend to have strong and potentially dangerous impacts on each other. (And on a side note they’re particularly dangerous to people with suicidal or homicidal tendencies, as the release of death energy is too enormous for many entities to resist pushing their host toward. They can feed for YEARS at the sites of such crimes, creating all sorts of weird hauntings). Traditional Western psychiatry is a crude science yet and hasn’t advanced to the point where these attachments can be sensed or measured, let alone treated. All it can do is measure and treat their results. But as someone who has both experienced them myself as a child and used Reiki and other methods to treat them in others as an adult, these attachments are real. And they don’t mean you’re “going crazy”, although for many sufferers they walk hand in hand with an unbalanced psyche.

In terms of treatment, the entity or entities forming the attachment first need to be identified, then removed or convinced to leave. There are different ways of doing this from different traditions. They can be very stubborn and take time and effort to get rid of, especially if they’ve been around for a long time. Also, the host has to want to get rid of them; many people subconsciously don’t, especially earlier on in the attachment when the entity is still feeding them pleasure and validation (two of our biggest human weaknesses). After that, the crack or schism in the energetic body that it came through (or created) needs to be sealed up and completely healed so the attachment can’t reform. And finally, the host needs to engage in a period of deep self-reflection to identify the inner weakness that made them vulnerable in the first place and make healthy lifestyle changes to strengthen their defenses holistically. Therapies and medical interventions (both traditional and alternative) can really help here. And if the attachment also triggered or exacerbated a mental illness, the energetic healing MUST take place alongside comprehensive medical treatment. If an entity came to you when you were depressed, you can remove the entity but if you don’t treat the underlying depression it may come back (or worse, more may show up to take its place).

These experiences often leave long-term scars on the energetic body that also require healing over time but hey, every scar is a story!