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Spiritual attachment symptoms: 11 signs to look for
What people actually describe, in the order they usually describe it, and just as importantly, what these signs far more often turn out to be instead.
Almost nobody arrives here knowing the words for what is happening to them. They arrive having typed something like “why am I so tired when nothing is wrong with me” at two in the morning, for the fourth night running.
What follows is the list I have built over twenty years of sessions, not from a book, but from what people actually say in the first few minutes. Very few people have all twelve. Most people who turn out to be carrying something have three or four, and one of them has been going on far longer than the others. If you would rather see what people arrive with as whole clusters than as single signs, that is on why people come to us.
1. Exhaustion that sleep does not repair
This is the single most common opening line I get. Eight or nine hours in bed and you wake as though you had two. It is not ordinary tiredness. It has a heaviness to it, as though you are dragging something.
Where an attachment is involved, the tiredness tends to be worse in the morning and to lift slightly in the evening, which is the opposite of how ordinary fatigue behaves.
2. Thoughts that do not sound like yours
Not voices. That is a separate and more serious matter, covered below. These are thoughts, in your own head, in something close to your own voice, but with a tone that is not yours. Cruel where you are not cruel. Defeatist where you are stubborn. Contemptuous about people you love.
The tell is usually the vocabulary. People will say “I would never use that word about my own daughter”, and they are right, and it bothers them a great deal.
3. Waking at the same hour, night after night
Very often somewhere between two and four in the morning. Not gradually. Wide awake, all at once, frequently with the sense that something in the room woke you. Then unable to get back down for an hour or more.
Sleep apnoea and cortisol problems do this too, and they do it far more often. Please have them looked at.
4. Absorbing other people’s states
You walk into a room and take on whatever is in it. You spend an hour with a particular person and leave feeling wrung out, hollow, sometimes physically unwell, and it is always the same person or the same handful of people.
Many people who describe this are simply highly empathic and have never been taught to shield. That is not an attachment, it is a skill gap, and it is fixable for free. See the psychic protection techniques.
5. A part of the house that feels wrong
One room, one corner, one landing. Nobody chooses to sit there. The dog will not go in. Children invent reasons not to go upstairs alone. Guests comment on it without being prompted, which is the part that tends to convince people.
This one is about the building rather than the person, and it is dealt with by a land and property clearing rather than a personal session.
6. Patterns that repeat past the point of coincidence
The same kind of relationship, the same betrayal, the same financial setback, the same self-sabotage arriving punctually every time things start going well. Everyone has patterns. What I am describing is a pattern that seems to have its own timing, and that reasserts itself hardest at the exact moment you might escape it.
7. Appetites and cravings that arrived from nowhere
A sudden pull towards alcohol, drugs, gambling or compulsive behaviour in someone with no history of it, or a relapse that felt, to the person it happened to, less like a decision than a shove. Chen is blunt about the relationship between intoxication and attachment: it opens a door, and things come through open doors.
8. Personality changes other people notice first
This one usually reaches me second-hand, because the person it is happening to does not see it. A partner, a parent or a friend gets in touch and says a version of “he has not been himself since…” and can name the month it started.
The since is worth paying attention to. It is often a bereavement, an anaesthetic, a serious illness, a house move, or an evening messing about with something nobody took seriously at the time.
9. Physical sensations that come and go
Pressure on the chest at night. A cold patch that moves about the room. Pain that migrates in ways anatomy does not permit. Marks that appear overnight and fade by the afternoon.
10. Anxiety that landed on a specific date
Ordinary anxiety builds. What I am describing arrives. People can often tell me the week, sometimes the day, and there was nothing in their life at the time that accounts for it. Frequently it dates to a place they visited or an object they brought home.
11. Dread around a particular object
An inherited piece of furniture, a mirror, a piece of jewellery, something bought at an auction or a house clearance. People feel foolish raising it. They usually raise it last, and they are usually right that it matters.
How many of these do you need?
There is no scoring system, and I distrust anyone who offers you one. What I would say is this: if you recognised three or four of the above, and if they have persisted for months rather than days, then it is reasonable to ask the question.
If that sounds like you, book a spiritual health check and let’s see if we can work to clear your energy field.
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The mechanics, explained without the mystique, including how a session can possibly work at a distance.
Psychic protection
Seven techniques you can use tonight, for free, without booking anything. Start here if you are mostly just porous.
Dissociation or attachment?
How the two present differently, and what to do if what you are experiencing goes beyond the list above.