I suppose it’s possible, but with the scenario you described, I wouldn’t say that’s likely to be what happened. Your brain is very, very good at pattern recognition, and does it subconsciously. There’s a reason you’re told to trust your gut feeling about strangers, and err on the side of caution. I’d say something about that guy set off that pattern recognition. Maybe falsely, maybe not. The guy could’ve been a normal guy entirely and you could’ve just had a false alarm, or maybe he was dangerous in some way, and that pattern recognition held up the closest equivalent, which is the person you remember.

The only time I’d say that it’s likely that you sensed their soul is if you had a friend, and you had a feeling that their kintype was X, didn’t mention it, and they later turned out to be X without you telling them (and thus, without being influenced by what you thought). It’s possible. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s possible. It happened to me with my qpp – I saw them when we first met, and every instinct was going off and saying “hey. hey you see that person? they’re Important. they are Important With A Capital I. that is a Main Character right there.” Well, we’ve been in a happy relationship for almost a year (as well as being canonmates!), so I did pick up on that.

But it’s not a common occurrence, and is not the most likely explanation for what you saw. Now, if you saw the guy again, and got to know him, and turned out to be right, then it’s a lot more likely you sensed that connection. But it’s more likely to be simple pattern recognition / gut feeling that something was wrong, and that’s fine. Humans are good at that, and you picked up on your gut feeling and recognized that this was a Problem Situation. That’s a handy and well-developed survival trait, and yes, if you’re in another Problem Situation, that may just save your life.

I’d suggest being aware of it when it happens in the future anyhow, because you never really know. Either way, whether it’s spiritual or plain ol’ danger sense, it’s good to recognize that and be aware of it when it’s telling you that you need to get out of there. So looks like you’re fine to me.

~Mod Lu

Go read Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series (the first book is Every Heart a Doorway).

It’ll tell you more than I can. But know I understand, happened to me two years ago.  Good luck.

You mean all kintypes that everyone has being at least partially psychological? It’s possible, but I for one am never going to even consider it as an option unless it’s been proven. It’s kind of super invalidating to a lot of folks.

You only need the url and post number, the words are actually optional. 😮 I know the person who made it is somewhere on tumblr, it was invented after I joined the community. 

I’ll give it a read and reblog, would be good to have it archived somewhere. Thanks!

Well, I haven’t gotten any other asks, so I’d assume so. 😮

I’m delighted to hear it! 😀 Having a stable identity and being able to contextualize things can really help, and you know yourself a lot better now that you understand why you are the way you are. Such things can almost never do you wrong. Best of luck with everything else you do.

This is super flattering, actually. I love this. ❤

Well, you should probably see if you can’t tell your friends/family about it. Tell them about being fictionkind, or moreso, tell them about what fictionkind is and test the waters to see if they’ll accept you being fictionkind. Go gradually and see if they’re not willing to help.

Other than that, look up the ‘symptoms’ you have (do you have triggers that cause panic attacks, do you have flashbacks, etc) and see how traumatized folks from this life+body deal with it. Then steal all their tactics because chances are it’ll work.

Therapy will help you on this. And before someone goes “you’re taking away resources how dare you”, you’re not. The person in therapy for their midlife crisis who just talks about their office job drama and otherwise shoots the shit and pays 250$ an hour for that is paying for that same therapist to give the near-homeless kid in a seriously abusive situation therapy for 10-15$ an hour; and also gives that therapist a break from dealing with all the horrific things their patients can go through, and gives them a chance to work with easy and low-stress patients.

So see if you can’t get therapy anyway, because it’ll help and having that sort of support can never do you wrong, unless you have the wrong therapist, then it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

But otherwise, how it’s happening doesn’t matter so much as what’s going on and how to fix it. Tactics are generally universal. So see what you can’t manage with those.

Hope that helps.

Exo- = a prefix meaning ‘outside’ or ‘external’
Trauma = you know what that is.

It’s the term we use for someone whose trauma exists but does not come from this lifetime and body. (We can’t currently prove people can swap bodies, and I’m not sure if I believe it to be possible with what we’ve got, but I’ll give those folks the benefit of the doubt.)

It’s for the trauma you have from past lives, alternate dimensions, probably the astral, and effectively all that does not happen within this linear reality on this planet.

I haven’t seen a psychological definition for it, personally. And we don’t have the studies to say what it is and what causes it. But someone decided they needed the term (as far as I know, it originated within the multiple community and was dropped because some people didn’t like the concept of exotrauma), and a lot of people I know, including myself, realized it applied to them, so clearly something’s going on there.

So as far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re not being disrespectful, if the term fits some of your experiences then you’re welcome to use it.