Thank you everyone for all this feedback! Although I don't have loads of time to refine this theory, I am thankful for all your voices! I thought nobody else saw my post other than Thorn until a few minutes ago when I checked my alerts. Feel free to edit my theory and create your own threads, I'd love for ideas to be shared and spread! Also, fun fact, this theory came to me the morning I wrote it, I was just waking up and I was like, what if... It partially came from a novel I was writing, so it makes sense that some of the technical parts are a bit of a mess.

I completely agree with this! There are so many different factors in our lives that make us who we are, and if therianthropy is a part of who we are, I would assume it would have different sources, too. I've heard so many different theories for why therianthropy exists, and while not all resonate with me personally, many of them do make perfect sense (in my opinion).

Since this appears to be a theory/explanation of therianthropy and is not related to spiritual therianthropy I've moved this thread to the Explanations of Therianthropy board.

I've come across holotheres before on the Internet, and I always thought that the concept was something along the lines of identifying as an animal in every way/seeing yourself as fully animal, but of course still not being perceived by others as an animal- Like seeing your human self in the mirror and thinking, 'this human appearance is just an illusion, but it's an animal underneath.
Looking at this now... I see that this is either just regular therianthropy, or actual delusions if the person actually thinks they have non-human animal DNA, etc.
I see myself as a non-human animal, but my physical body is obviously human. I look in the mirror and imagine myself looking like an animal, but I of course know that I am human and nothing can change that.
All that being said- after reading this and reflecting a little bit more, this term doesn't make any sense to me. I never identified as a holothere or physical therian but I'm always pretty accepting of terms like that as they're so vague and can be interpreted differently by so many different critters.... But ultimately, I can see how such terms can be an issue
Thank you so much for all this information! I will obviously always be respectful to different critters, but perhaps the sharing of information like this could be beneficial to any confused beings.

After much thinking about what makes someone a therian, I've come to believe this theory.

Feeling a connection or feeling like you share things in common with nonhuman things is a universal human experience. The only question is what things and how strong. This is both a nature and nurture thing, and it applies to many more things than just animals. It can be music, weather, geology, plants, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and many other things as well. For some people, these connections and/or feelings are extremely strong. We may fantasize about wanting to be more connected with the things we cherish. For someone who feels a connection like this with a species of animal, they may fantasize about being that species, and the fantasy can be so strong that their mind manifests mental and sensory shifts. But I don't believe therians/otherkin are any less human than anyone else. Mental shifts are a universal part of the human experience. Think of a gamer, musician, artist, athlete, or just anyone working at their job getting in 'the zone'.

As someone who once called myself a wolf therian, I struggled with accepting the part of me that made me feel those strange feelings I didn't understand. Yes, I know the feeling many therians describe as something just 'clicking'. I was afraid of it for some time, and then I embraced it, but I found the explanations that other therians gave me either inadequate or incompatible with my faith. It gave me a lot of anxiety, and I was influenced by people online to think of wolves and humans as enemies. This turned into intrusive misanthropic thoughts. After some time, I learned what wolves were really like and these thoughts went away. As a Christian, I know that the natural world is marred by sin in the same way that we are. There is beauty and their is ugliness and cruelty. The same is true for the human race. Out of all creatures on this planet, we are capable of both the greatest good and greatest evil. It's important to keep a grounded perspective and try to understand both of these extremes and everything in between.

I was able to think of humans in a more friendly way after understanding these concepts more thoroughly, but it wasn't enough to put an end to my confusion. I was happy, but I still felt like I needed answers to why my feelings were so strong and came out of nowhere. Here is my attempt to explain them.

I think when God creates a soul, they aren't just an empty slate. Think of Adam and Eve, for example, but in a more vague way. We may not created with knowledge of the world like they were, but I think that God 'wires' our souls to gravitate towards certain things. For me, it seems like one of these things canines, and especially wild canines. In my current situation, it is not feasible to have direct connections with wild canines, but I can and have with dogs and wolfdogs. But I also have insight into the eternal perspective through the Biblical prophecy. Human sin and the harshness of the natural world will no longer act as a barrier for connections one day. I think I will spend much time with wild canines in the vast scope of eternity.

But I don't think that this should be seen as a limiter on who I can be. I'm still human and can have an impact of human society, hopefully positively. These types of experiences where something clicks so strongly are not common events in the course of a mortal human life, but I am confident I will find more throughout eternity. Probably with things that aren't animals and probably with more animals than just canines.

And as I've been writing this, I realize that I cannot possibly know the intricacies of souls. What I do believe is that they are neither matter, nor energy, but directly emergent from God's will. I believe our individuality is born from our limitations(finiteness) and our limitations allow for free will. Because we can never be infinite in the same way God is, we will retain this individuality for eternity.

I don't believe that I should consider my soul non-human, but I have been wondering something. Maybe it's not wrong to consider myself lupine on some level either, at least in part. This being true doesn't have to mean I'm somehow less human. After all, every human is different. But I suppose that some things are hard to accurately describe with words because there are too many unknown variables and the meaning of words can be too vague for things like this to have a yes or no answer. This is part of the beauty of life, though. Not everything is binary.

Either way, I think that a part of me that was meant to be awakened got awakened, and I don't need a yes or no answer to what I've been pondering in the last paragraph. All I need to know is that it is tied to both the unique way my soul was created and the experience I've had on earth. I don't need reincarnation or a non-human soul in a human body to explain it. I no longer define myself by the label of therian because as I said before, words can be too vague to describe spiritual and psychological phenomena.

And I know that God was with me the entire time. Even though I was confused about who I was, He still stayed the same. He tamed that part of me like I asked Him to, and I no longer feel anxiety about it. When I am upset about life, it's because I'm tired of the harshness of this world, both in the wild, and with man. Even then, God helps me to trust Him again when my mind strays too far from His love and promises.

Yes! I'd love to have a more nature-related name irl as it would help me feel more connected to my environment and my theriotype, but that name would be MINE, not my theriotype's as my theriotype is ME! :3
And of course I don't think I'd ever feel greatly connected to any name, as names are a thing of humans. They call me S0ngD0g, yet I, personally, am just me, and wouldn't refer to myself as anything specifically.

(2026-02-19 13:06)Artificial Fox Wrote:  Of course my therianthropy is more than shifting because of isolation. I would also be a completely different person without it. That's where the fear is coming from. I'm not suggesting that therianthropy needs to be cured either, but I think mine has been largely reliant on dissociation and isolation, so if those things can be healed, my therianthropy will have much less ground to stand on, so to speak.

One of my most integral expressions of therianthropy used to be daydreaming. All day every day I used to imagine that I was an animal. I wasn't able to do this so much anymore when school didn't allow me to zone out and ignore what was happening. This important piece of my therianthropy went away, but the whole did not. Even before this I would play pretend as an animal every chance that I got, but when I became a teenager I forced myself to stop because it seemed so childish. Every time my current manifestation of therianthropy goes away, I seem to find a new one. Maybe that means I just need to find a better way now too.

Exactly! The social isolation and daydreaming is not the only ground your therianthropy can stand on. In fact it's some of the most unhealthy ground it can stand on. You can adjust your living space, your actions, your environment, your style, your diet to fit your theriotype. There are many ways to be more like yourself, and you don't have to worry that your therianthropy will lose all its ground just because you stop socially isolating ^^

(2026-02-11 22:04)AriVB Wrote:  Still I feel like my therianthropy is not something that can just be "cured" by "escaping isolation" or anything. If you got rid of that part of me, I'd be a different person altogether. It has to do with so much more than starting to shift because of a lack of human connection.

Of course my therianthropy is more than shifting because of isolation. I would also be a completely different person without it. That's where the fear is coming from. I'm not suggesting that therianthropy needs to be cured either, but I think mine has been largely reliant on dissociation and isolation, so if those things can be healed, my therianthropy will have much less ground to stand on, so to speak.

One of my most integral expressions of therianthropy used to be daydreaming. All day every day I used to imagine that I was an animal. I wasn't able to do this so much anymore when school didn't allow me to zone out and ignore what was happening. This important piece of my therianthropy went away, but the whole did not. Even before this I would play pretend as an animal every chance that I got, but when I became a teenager I forced myself to stop because it seemed so childish. Every time my current manifestation of therianthropy goes away, I seem to find a new one. Maybe that means I just need to find a better way now too.

I also wanna add, just in case, that when I made my comment about “if you were actually X, you’d just be X,” I wasn’t referring to delusion, but literal fact. As was said earlier, a lot of these people are being metaphorical when they say “physical,” but for those who are being literal, I’m here to say “you are undeniably, verifiably wrong,” because if you were, say, physically a wolf, you wouldn’t be online justifying your existence, you’d be out in the wild doing your thing. But you inhabit a human body which is why you were able to get online in the first place.

(2026-02-17 9:42)Hemlock Wrote:  

(2026-02-17 8:00)FernFox Wrote:  I also agree with Neon Rosette's reply a bit above. If someone is experiencing true delusions, I don't think they would be seeking out a word that puts them into a little bubble like this. They would just 'be' the animal.

It falls into this weird grey area of "I delusionally believe I am a physical animal, but am self-aware enough to know that it is a delusion". This by definition, means that it is not a true delusion-- as true psychotic delusions typically involve a lack of insight. Having that degree of self-awareness, yet choosing to still feed into delusions / self-identify as being a physical animal -- and encourage it by taking on an 'identity' that specifically marks you as delusional -- is unhealthy and shouldn't be encouraged. (Especially among easily-influenced young people just trying to find words to explore their identity).


- Fern

I'll comment on this one as someone concerned.

It is not entirely impossible for someone to hold a delusional belief while knowing other people register it as a delusional belief. It's usually referred to as double-bookkeeping in psychiatric literature. You are correct that it is kind of on the grey line between what a medical professional would qualify as true psychosis or not, but it is not entirely uncommon in people with certain schizospec disorders (such as schizotypal), or in people who have been through the medical system for their delusions.

As a language shortcut, people usually refer to the belief held as a delusion when they know they are experiencing double-bookkeeping. Knowing other refer to one's belief as a delusion also doesn't necessarily means people do not act on the held belief : a lot of people will still to some degree follow rules imposed by the held belief, or continue obsessing over the subject. For a simple example : I am currently medicated and stable. I used to have a held belief that God talked to me to punish me. I currently am able to recognize this is a symptom of my disorder. Yet, even knowing this, it is very uncomfortable for me to enter churches or possess objects tied to a monotheist god, and to verbally denounce my delusion as fake. I wouldn't even consider my current state double-bookkeeping, I have experienced that too and it's a lot more severe, because in that case I did simultaneously hold the belief as true and try to react to people as if I did not believe it!

Psychosis is more complex than an off and on switch, and while what some people are saying online does register to me as exaggerated or incorrect, there is in fact a few people who do strike me as experiencing that sort of things.

Finally, for whether it is unhealthy to have a label that acknowledge delusional status : I don't think so personally. This is a complex subject, but psychotic experiences are often very shameful. Being able to take them back and talk about them can be powerful. I preferred how the endel movement (an identity caused, rooted in, or otherwise tied to a delusion per the coined definition) went about it personally, as it was a lot more safe both for other psychotic people (the holothere movement often posts things that can trigger other's psychosis by asserting them as true empirically), and for oneself (a lot of what I saw of it surrounded how to cope with experiences that are impossible, a lot of posts that made psychosis easier to understand and help with for non-psychotic).

I do also agree that these subjects are prone to being sensationalized by young people who are trying to cope with their own problem and tend to select the most severe sounding label they can. It is an understandable impulse in the face of pain you do not yet understand, and many young alterhumans are isolated, dysphoric, and experiencing things that for a lack of a better word, makes them feel insane. I don't entirely blame them. But where the endel movement's advice would probably not hurt someone who may be in the first stages of a delusional disorder nor would it hurt someone who was not, the holothere movement has a bad habit of... relying on pain as a measurement of how animal you are. The most animal are the ones in most pain, and i see a lot of holothere having blogs full of extreme distress that they do not wish to fix as they consider "being in a human world" the source of all their pain in a way they cannot fix instead of hoping for healing.

Hope this was easy enough to understand, I am not psychiatry professional, but I thought a bit of nuance on the subject was interesting to throw in.

This 100%. I also have a psychotic disorder and it is not as shallow as a lot of others seem to think. You cannot control how it will play out, or when it will stop and start. I mentioned this in spoon's group, but one small thing can explode into a lot of big things, fast. One could think that having the delusion of being physically an animal is harmless, but in reality is not-- It could quickly either proceed to enter the territory of "well i'm an animal, so therefore I should act like one" and the person could bite others or trash things just because it feels right to them, or it could then stem off into other harmful behaviours. Example, the desire to rid of ones physical body because it no longer aligns with how they see themselves.

If you or someone else recognizes you're having a delusion, You should be getting help. You shouldn't celebrate it and dance around labels to approperiate it or make it seem like some tame thing.

I also wanted to briefly mention, the creator of the holothere label is also a horrible person, they support some horrible creators and like a lot of horrible things. And it's purely made to the publics eye, too. I worry about pups seeing this and thinking what he supports is okay, when it isn't. I won't speak of it here, as i do not intend to slander this individual (and I want to mention... do NOT go to harass them if you do your research, I do not support witchhunting or slandering).