Talking to Someone Who Isn't There
On an old and ordinary practice, and how to tell an encounter from an echo
People tell me about this carefully. They lower their voice a little, they watch my face — because some part of them is braced for me to hear a symptom. They've been talking to someone who isn't there. A parent who died. A grandmother. Sometimes a version of a friend they haven't spoken to in years, or a future self, or God. And when they finally say it out loud, they call it talking to myself, and they say it the way you'd admit to something.
So let me say the clinical part first, plainly, because I think it's what's actually in the way.
What I'm describing here is not psychosis. The difference is real and it isn't subtle. This is something you do on purpose — you start it, you can stop it, you know the whole time that you're the one holding the conversation open. The other doesn't arrive uninvited. It doesn't command you, frighten you, or refuse to leave. If your experience is the other kind — voices that come unbidden, that won't quiet down, that frighten or instruct — that's worth talking to someone about, and it isn't what this page is about. But the ordinary, deliberate thing, the conversation you reach for and could put down — that isn't a disorder. It's a faculty. A very old one.
Why it isn't talking to yourself
It also isn't talking to yourself, and that's the part worth getting right, because the name people give it is wrong in a way that matters.
When it's only you, it loops. You know this register — the worried, worded, circular thing that runs at five in the morning and arrives nowhere, because it isn't trying to arrive anywhere. You can't be in relationship with a loop. But the moment there's an other in it — even an imagined one, even one who isn't there — something changes. The circling stops being circling. You're no longer alone in the field with the worry; there's a second presence in it, and the presence does what the loop can't. (More on that difference between moving toward an experience and moving away from it.)
This is why it works, and it's also why the embarrassment is misplaced. You weren't talking to yourself. You were doing something else, something humans have always done, and you just didn't have a name for it that wasn't a confession.
It used to be ordinary
Because it used to be ordinary. For most of human history, talking to the dead, to ancestors, to figures who weren't physically present was simply part of how people lived — not exotic, not a symptom, not a belief you had to defend. It's survived mostly inside religion now: prayer to Mary, to the saints, to the tzaddikim, the conversation with God that millions of people have every day and don't think twice about.
And everyone else? The faculty didn't disappear when the forms did. What disappeared was permission — and the company. Most of us were handed two options, pathology or make-believe, and told the thing itself was either sick or childish. It's neither. The nervous system, it turns out, doesn't distinguish between a vividly imagined presence and a literal one; the comfort an imagined figure offers is received by the body as real comfort. (That's not a metaphor — it's how the imagination actually works.)
For me, recently: my parents were visiting, and I woke early with the old family dread about goodbyes — the kind that, in a family shaped by the Holocaust, never quite stays the size of the actual occasion. The worry had a sentence: will I see them again? I talked to my great-uncle, who died at a hundred and five, the last of that generation, a survivor. He didn't tell me I'd see them again. He couldn't have, and I wouldn't have believed him. He just showed up as someone who had lived the unthinkable version of the separation I was circling and was, even so, a presence I could reach. He didn't answer the question. He changed what I was standing on.
How to tell when it's real
That's also the place where it can go wrong, and there's one failure to watch for above the others: what answers you isn't an other at all, but an echo of your own voice. Without meaning to, you write the figure's lines — once out of fear, putting the dreaded thing in its mouth, and once out of longing, having it say exactly what you wish were true.
The sharpest way to tell: real comfort almost never answers the worry's literal question. If the voice says yes, of course you'll see them again — the clean reassurance, the thing you came for — distrust it. That's you, talking to yourself after all. What the genuine thing does is something off to the side, something you didn't ask for and wouldn't have scripted. And your body knows the difference before your mind does: the real version settles something, even when what it says is hard; the manufactured version produces a thin relief that doesn't quite land below the neck.
Which is why it matters who you talk to. Go to someone real enough to surprise you — a specific person, with their own history and their own way of being, someone you can't easily make say what you want. A particular grandmother. A mentor whose voice you still know. The dead have an advantage here: they had actual lives, and that independent reality is what keeps them from becoming your puppet. A generic "wise being who comforts you" is the riskier choice, not because it's too mystical but because it's too pliable — nothing there to push back.
Where I come in
If you've never done this, or you've tried it and it frightened you, or you genuinely can't tell whether you're keeping company with someone or just running the loop with a costume on — that's the part I help with. Not because you can't do it on your own. Because most of us lost the form that used to make it safe and ordinary. The discernment I described above was once ambient; the liturgy, the elders, the tradition did the telling-apart for you. Stripped of all that, the difference between real company and wishful ventriloquism has to be relearned, and it's faster and steadier to relearn it alongside someone who can tell the difference until you can.
This is some of what happens in the depth-oriented EMDR work I do. We start tentatively — I check for whatever thread is already there, because most people have one: some figure or presence the imagination can already reach, even if they've never called it that. From there it's slow and careful. We build the relationship until the body trusts it, and we learn together how to tell genuine company from the loop in disguise — staying with what surprises you rather than steering toward what you'd hoped to hear. Early on, I'm partly holding that discernment for you, noticing when something real has arrived, when the figure has said the off, unscripted thing that you wouldn't have written. Until, after a while, you can feel the difference yourself. The pace stays workable; nothing gets forced. And what tends to come of it isn't a technique you've acquired. It's a kind of company you'd half-forgotten was available to you.
You were never only talking to yourself. You just never had anyone to tell.
A companion piece, written for clinicians — When the Resource Answers Back — takes up the same practice from inside the EMDR work.