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fubarobfusco comments on Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I have a small problem. My girlfriend (that I've been with for almost a year, and hope to be with for more years to come) has something of a New Age/unscientific worldview, which I find slightly disturbing, but I don't know how to attempt to "convert" her to something, well, less wrong, without upsetting her or making her feel stupid or something like that, or even how to react to her talking about her more "unusual" experiences.
A trivial example: She once mentioned that a certain kind of stone (it may have been hematite) had "healing powers". I expressed vague skepticism but didn't press the issue any further.
More seriously, my girlfriend has told me stories about seeing and interacting with "spirits", although she's asked me not to repeat any of them, and I've had to reassure her that no, I don't think she's crazy. For example, she said that whenever she goes to a particular railroad crossing, she always sees a woman riding a bicycle along the tracks that nobody else sees, and that one side of the woman's head looks horribly injured. There's another spirit, which she says reminds her of me, that usually hangs out on the roof outside her second-story window on nights when I'm not there, and sort of stands guard. He's asked to come in, but she says that spirits can't come in if you don't let them and she's always said no, except once when she was in a hotel and he spent the night on the side of the double bed she wasn't sleeping on.
I'm not sure how to react or deal with this. She feels kind of fragile emotionally to me, so I have to tread lightly; her father died when she was seven and her mother died when she was thirteen, and she says she's always afraid people are going to leave her. She also has something of an inferiority complex and is hypersensitive to perceived slights. She worries that, because didn't do well in school, people (including me) will treat her like she's stupid. She's also fat and she thinks it makes her ugly. I, of course, think she's beautiful and sexy, but she doesn't quite believe me when I tell her that.
Any advice? ("Break up with her" will be ignored.)
When I was in college in small-town New England in the late '90s, one year a group of freshmen became convinced that the woods near campus were haunted by a malicious evil spirit — a wraith. This upset them greatly; they reported feeling the wraith as an oppressive and disturbing presence. Practical advice such as "there's no such thing as wraiths; you are all just working each other up into a tizzy over nothing" was ineffective to relieve their upset.
Eventually, a friend of the group got a friend of his, who was an initiated practitioner of ritual magick, to send them a spell to banish the wraith. The spell was cast, and the people who had felt the wraith's presence reported that it was no longer bothering them.
Now, one self-consistent description of these events is that wraiths literally exist, and banishing-spells literally work. Another is that when people become caught up in playing out an upsetting story, bringing that story to a close within its own rules can work to end their upset.
Other possibly relevant tales: