It’s strange and terrifying to think about return when you’ve been gone for so long. It’s strange because many of us ultimately don’t know where we should be returning to. Is it even a return? What are we leaving behind? If the dream world feels like home somewhere at the back of your mind, then is reality where you should really be?
It’s inherent for a dreamer to despise reality because it threatens the only place where you can exist and therefore your existence altogether. Saying reality can never measure up to the daydreams is understandable from your position, but it’s a very ambiguous statement, dangerously inaccurate too. You know that daydreams feel wonderful because you exist in them, you’ve seen it all, you’ve felt it, you’ve been there and you can attest to just how beautiful and emotionally fulfilling they can be, right? But when you say reality is terrible, are you actually there? No. Do you feel like you genuinely exist in it? No.
This is why you are wrong.
Reality can’t measure up to your daydreams only because you are not here. How can you say reality is ugly when your eyes are shut so you can’t even see it in full bloom? What gives you right to say it’s dull when you don’t even exist in it? Yes, reality can be just as exciting, just as thrilling and mind-blowing and emotionally fulfilling as your daydreams. Don’t use the excuse that it will never compare to the life inside your head. It’s your perception that’s flawed, not the world. Every time you stop daydreaming and try shifting your focus from fantasies to the outer world, you come to a conclusion that not only reality happens to be dull and disappointing for you but outright suffocating. This happens because your entire system is depressed. And thoughts of depressed people are always turned inwards, preventing them to be here, to live in the moment, regardless of how intensely hard they attempt to shift their focus. If you aren’t turning your attention inwards to daydream, you’re turning it inwards to ruminate about how fucked up and miserable everything is. As long as your thoughts are turned inwards, you’re not here. And as long as you’re not here, reality will continue to be terrible for you.
Do you know why you daydream? Because you desperately try to exist somewhere, anywhere, as long as you can exist. Because when you aren’t daydreaming, you are nowhere. And this nowhere you call cruel reality, which you’re catapulted into every time you abandon daydreams, isn’t reality. It’s nowhere. Don’t mistake things.
Returning to reality means returning to yourself.
It doesn’t mean giving up what’s in your daydreams and it doesn’t mean forcing yourself to focus on the outside world and pretend you are what you’re not. It means rebuilding your sense of self until it’s solid enough for you to exist inside your own body instead of existing in dream world and nowhere at once. It means rebuilding the sensors which let you experience positive emotions on your own skin in place of having to depend on and live off emotions of your characters. This new self that will be reborn and that you’ll ultimately be returning to as you return to reality is made up of the same self that expresses itself in your daydreams which means that by giving up daydreaming, you’re only giving up the habit that consumes countless hours, nothing else. As I wrote in the previous post, those feelings of life making sense, of purpose and love and passion and spontaneity of emotions experienced in daydreams, they’ll remain yours. This is the thought you have to remember during your entire recovery. You’re not giving anything up. Your most precious daydreams are you.
There is no such thing as finding a balance between fantasies and reality because if you do so, you will always be split, moving from one place to another and never dedicating yourself wholly to either side. And this is not fair. It’s not fair towards people in your real life and it’s not fair towards yourself. You have to go for all or nothing. When you do go for all or nothing, you can have both. When you genuinely let go of your attachments and daydreams in order to experience and process underlying pain that must be felt for you to stand up and rebuild yourself, they’ll come back to you.
Guide to Maladaptive Daydreaming 
Thank you for opening my eyes.
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This has helped me more than you can ever imagine. I had been suffering for years, but you knew the perfect words to say without being aggressive or making me feel oppressed . I was able to read EVERY SINGLE word you wrote without daydreaming. No one has ever been able to captivate me so much. Whoever you are or whatever led you to write this I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and more. I hope to meet someone like you someday. You have saved me and surely many others in our state. Thank you.
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Oh god, your comment almost made me cry. Thank you so much for such wonderful words! I’m really glad you could benefit from this. If you have any questions, you can always contact me on Wild Minds forums (same username as here). Thanks once again!
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Hello, thank you for publishing this. I suffer from MD since i was 7. Everytime i try to stop it i fail, the dreams are 24/7 in my head and i cant concentrate in anything, recentely i started to forget everthing i feel like its getting worse but i cant control these thoughts can you give my some advice?
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You’ve changed my life.
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I agree word for word with what Maryline has said. Thank you, Eretaia.
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Thank you!
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Thank you thank you thank you thank you times one million.
I never even considered myself depressed. Then, while reading, I took a minute to step outside my fantasy, and for a couple seconds there I felt the nothingness of my reality, and immediately wanted to dive back into my daydream. Now that I’ve recognized it, I know where to start.
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Thank you for the comment, Sara! Lots of repressed issues are about to resurface, so take it slowly and don’t get discouraged. :))
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Hello Eretaia.
I’ve been with this problem since I was 6 or 7. It was because of familiar problems, and later some health problems. I wanted to scape from reality.
A year ago I decided to do something with this. I couldn’t bear with this anymore, so I decided to eliminate MD triggers. That helped me. But I’ve had some relapses. There’s no MD if I don’t listen to music with headphones, but when I walk listening to music, even If I’ve been right, I fall again to MD.
I’d like to eliminate this from my life. The ‘addiction’ it’s controlled (more or less), but I’m not able to feel anything. I’m not sad, but not happy. I can’t laugh. I don’t know where to start to begin to feel again.
Can you give me some advice of where do I start?
Thank you for all this help.
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Hey Alice. Have you read the 4th part of this series? I wrote about this specific problem there. I’ve dealt with the exact same numbness and maybe some approaches I mentioned there may be helpful for you. Starting to feel again is one hell of a slow process. If there’s any concrete advice I can give to you, then it’s to push yourself out of your comfort zone. MD is acting like a stimulant in a way, so you’ll need a replacement, something equally stimulating to allow you to come in touch with yourself and start to feel again. Anger did a thing for me and a few other daydreamers I talked to (I wrote about it in the 4th article). So, it comes down to seeking activities or situations that will jolt you out of the emptiness and allow you to feel again for a short period. Whether it’s positive feelings or negative ones, it doesn’t matter – all you need is something to stir you up. In the beginning, you need to awake your real feelings for just several moments and then use those moments as a point of reference, as something to hold onto to help you break through the emptiness. The important thing is to keep pushing yourself out of this ‘gray zone’ where nothing happens. If you have any questions, feel free to message me.
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I am no good at complimenting but your post is amazing. I see myself in every word. Like many, I have struggled with MD and generally an addictive personality for many years and have been trying, unsuccessfully, to deal with it for an equal number of years. When not daydreaming, I often feel like I don’t have a personality rather I am just an extension of others around me. Can you offer any advice on how you worked on being able to express your feelings? I am finding that this has been one of the hardest things for me to do throughout my life and has resulted in many failed relationships. I am very intrigued in your explanation of anger as I can only recall a few incidents in my life that I actually showed anger rather than repressing it through MD. What did you do to get angry and release that anger?
Thank you so much for your writings, being able to relate to what you say makes me feel less isolated.
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Thanks, Jason!
Hmm… anger, it’s a tricky one. It’s a spontaneous emotion and you can do little to trigger it yourself. For you to get angry, you have to get attacked or have something you care about get attacked, but since a regular maladaptive daydreamer is just an empty shell who cares about nothing but their daydreams, it’s pretty hard to get angry. At the end of the day, you don’t care so why would you get angry? When you feel attacked or invaded by certain situations or people’s inability to understand you, you feel like you want to break down but you’re always holding yourself back from falling apart or fighting back and this is where the problem occurs. This is when you have to do something. When a situation like this happens where you feel you’re being invaded by negativity, instead of being paralyzed and frozen, let yourself fall apart, cry, fight back, try to explain to people if they bother you or simply tell them to fuck off. Lash out. Any way is fine. Releasing anger almost always happen at the end of tunnel of your defenses.
As for your question on awakening and expressing feelings, if you are hardcore daydreamer, then all your feelings are encapsulated in your daydreams while in reality you have none. Managing to express these types of feelings would actually equal getting rid of MD because MD is nothing else but a mechanism which allows you to express things you otherwise can’t. I wrote a bit about what I specifically did in my reply to Harjot in comment section of 4th article so you can check it out there.
Sometimes I think that emotional expression itself is not what we ultimately struggle with. When you try to express things you feel in your daydreams, there’s a clash between your dream self and your real self. The feeling itself is not a problem, the clash is. This emotion you’re trying to express is supposed to flow naturally from your fantasies to your real self, but as soon as it reaches your real self (that is, as soon as you try to express it in reality), something backfires. Your sense of self is so broken and fragile that it cannot host this emotion, which is what prevents its expression. The emotion feels foreign to you because you feel foreign to yourself. So, it’s not feelings you’re uncomfortable with – it’s yourself. Expressing certain feeling means getting to love a part of yourself that blocks its expression.
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Thank you for writing this❤️ It has really helped
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Thank you so much, these writings have literally changed my life. I do feel reborn. I fantasized as a way to escape abuse as a child and still did up until today. I had no idea this addiction was subconciously hurting me until today. I feel like I just realized that Im a person and that reality is real. It was such a huge daily part of my thinking and life, I realized today that this is my issue that’s been fueling my depression and failures. I kind of feel like a newborn, as weird as it sounds. I had no idea others went through this. It’s hard though, I feel like a part of me is missing without transporting myself to the daydream world. I feel so grateful for this I could cry. Thank you so much!
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Thank you for your wonderful comment! A part of you really is missing without the daydream world. Daydreams are neither good nor bad – they are just a territory where you have temporal access to all the emotions that you should have but for some reason cannot experience in real life. While events in your daydreams may be silly or too far-fetched to be true, the emotions that come with them can and should be transferred and experienced in real life. When you manage to experience things you feel in your daydreams without actually having to engage in fantasy to experience them, that’s when you’ve really overcome MD. In other words, fantasy is just a mean that lets you experience certain emotions INDIRECTLY, via your characters or your idealized self. When you’ve truly beaten MD, that doesn’t mean you’ll lose those emotions or that part of yourself you feel is missing – it just means you’ll experience them directly this time, without having to use your daydream characters.
Well, good luck on your journey! It’s a pretty dark road ahead, and you’ll fall and fail many times until you get some sense of control but don’t get discouraged! There’s a way out, you just have to be really, really stubborn. :))
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Hello! Long post incoming. Just need to get some things off my chest.
I wrote the original comment when I was 16 or so. I am now 22. I still daydream. I still pace around while listening to music, less so but still do. And I still have trauma. You were right, the road was dark. But recently, I had a big realization that’s prompting me to write this. I did Psilocybin therapy not long ago (I am not recommending this as a treatment for anything as I am not a medical professional, just a patient. It’s NOT for everyone. It was a big choice and under a controlled environment with a professional). I’ve always been prone to revelation, ritual, and sometimes vague spiritual ideas. The drug brought me to a state of only existing in the moment. I never daydream on the drug – everything feels like it’s One, eliminating what I believe to be a root cause of my MD.
When I daydream, I split reality into 2 parts – the abstract fantasy world vs the real world, which contains the Past and Future. Both the past and future tend to weigh heavily on me. This then influences my actions and thoughts, such as daydreaming and pacing instead of studying and doing my college homework. I fear I’ll fail an assignment before I even try, so I don’t do it. For a long time, since childhood, therapists said I have low self esteem, but I feel like I had none at all. I was my daydreams. I wasn’t living, I was coping/surviving.
The first time I experienced derealization was when I was 12. It happened out of nowhere, it was like a switch in my brain was turned off (was not associated with MD-ing, which I’ve done since around 8) and continued after that. Thankfully, I don’t have it at all anymore. So after my treatment, where I realized the beauty of the present moment, I talked to my best friend of many years who doesn’t know about my MD because I’m ashamed of it. He had been reading and suggested to me the book The Power of Now by Eckart Tolle. It’s a book that combines some Eastern beliefs such as Buddhism and Taoism into a philosophy of living for a Western audience (such as me).
After learning about the ideas in that book, I have had a revelation about living. Buddhism says that the past and future are illusions that propel an endless cycle of suffering and fear. There is only Now, where all things are possible. The past and future are “heavy” ideas. When you feel heavy, weighed down by past and future images and words, it’s hard to move in the world. It’s hard to make the best choices for yourself. Your mind isn’t clear. When you choose to live in the Now, you become “light”. You reduce your own suffering which thus reduces the suffering of the outside world and others (I don’t believe in reincarnation but I believe in the kind of “karma” that I just described, on a realistic level). You dissolve the past and future.
Assumptions about the past and future make you heavy, cause suffering. Assumptions about other people cause suffering for yourself and others too. I now believe in a fundamental “innocence” of the world and other people and myself too. The world isn’t filled with hatred or any intention at all, it simply is. This innocence implies a deep potential for ecstasy, change, and happiness that leads to productivity and confidence, despite the suffering in yourself and the rest of the world, and unending chances to change, a lack of determinism. The novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being also talks about this idea. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being#Philosophical_underpinnings) I find it such a beautiful book. It says that when you internalize the idea of the Past and Future as infinitely regressing, inevitably recurring events throughout all of Time, in a way, you’re resigning yourself to carrying the weight of the world. These events and the implication of “fate” are dissolved when you live in the present moment. Stoicism also says that there are things out of your control, such as the past, and acknowledge it as illusory and from a distance if necessary. And as the novel mentions, it’s not easy and it can be painful to confront an existence of lightness, and the reality that you can make any choice you want in this moment and it will effect others. Meditation has really assisted me in facing my new responsibility that comes with making good choices in the moment. It clears your head, and feels like a workout for living in the moment. I understand why the Buddha is always portrayed smiling (he’s free).
Now I am focusing on changing my behavior. My behavior that I choose in the moment makes me. I saw an answer on the q&a website Quora from a Buddhist the other day, about how Buddhists deal with the reality of making mistakes and harming themselves or others. He wrote it in the form of a dialogue between the Seeker (a student of Buddhism) and Buddhism as a philosophy (https://www.quora.com/What-does-Buddhism-say-about-if-you-have-done-something-bad-in-the-past). The part about dissolving the self has touched me. I believe in having a Self, I don’t want to become a female monk (whatever they’re called…not sure) and not exist in Western society. But I believe that the Self can change. I believe thought patterns change. And I have changed and do all the time these days.
A while ago, before my treatment, a tarot reader and hypnotist at the cafe I go to did a reading for me. I don’t believe in magic but I believe in witnessing and utilizing symbol – tarot cards are symbols shown to you, ideas that can perhaps lead you by coincidence and convenience. I find acknowledging Jungian archetypes helpful in my life. I need to sit down with myself and analyze the characters in my daydreams – like almost all characters, they correspond to Jungian archetypes too, (ie The Trickster, The Mother, The Sage etc.). They are symbols of something greater, of implications. Jung says these symbols are natural and can be traced throughout all cultures. I find that comforting. For example, I often daydream of romance as a third person POV. What’s sad is that, I think I crave the kind of connection I imagine in my dreams (and I feel like they’re VERY real), but the daydreams are so “satisfying” that I feel like I don’t want or need real romance! It’s just a circle I need to break.
She told me that she sees a conflict with two parts of me that need to be reconciled. Of course, she could’ve said that to anybody, but it was an idea I needed. I must reconcile the roots of my desires that cause my MD with my present actions. I must combine the intentions and pleasure behind my MD with the reality of the world. I can still love the ideas and the fictional franchises that inspire my daydreams, but I must combine it with more actions that will ultimately help me, reduce suffering.
I also asked her, “why do I have one consciousness? Why am I stuck in my brain? Why am I separate from others, it seems so tragic? What if we were all one collective being?” And she told me that the world can be consolidated. You can acknowledge present suffering in many other humans and yourself, and still exist without burden by accepting the body and the reality of this moment.
We also discussed the idea that human consciousness is the universe (the material world) experiencing itself, as we are made of chemicals, molecules etc that are all found in nature too. Consciousness sounds to me like a spark in space. It will burn out someday, but while it exists, it’s a work of optimized and bright potential, meant to exist. It might sound corny, but I think that’s comforting when I feel trapped in my mind and this one body.
As I said in the original post, after my realization of the present moment, I felt reborn. And I feel reborn everyday. At first, I was scared. I thought, well aren’t newborns scared? And then I realized no, they’re not. A baby simply is. A baby doesn’t deny what’s in front of them, they just exist and experience. And then over time, they evolve further, and they ideally feel like they have a “full say” in their own choices all the time. Right now I’m just experiencing with my new perspective. I MUST experience. Despite reading about it a long time ago, I couldn’t truly put the ideas of Buddhism to use until i experienced becoming one with myself and the moment. It’s not something that can be fully understood on an intellectual level.
I am still solving the mystery of consolidating my daydreams with the present moment and reality. One thing, weirdly enough, that has helped me is involving myself in the fanbase communities of the franchises that feature in my MD. It’s an outlet and I get to communicate with actual other people about the ideas in the stories that I love, and I’ve also made cool new friends, and we don’t talk about the franchise all the time even. It sounds senseless, but I actually daydream less and feel less obsessive over the content while actually contributing fan content such as making art or “fanfiction” of the tv shows, which I don’t do much because I have a lot of homework, but I still chat with others in the fanbase without even thinking of the specific daydreams. I’m actually engaging with the ideas that I love when I’m creative with the franchise and not just *feeling* via the POV of the characters in my head. And doing creative things is still scary for me. I don’t consider my daydreams to be a form of true artistic creation, more like a ritual of comfort. Creativity means you sacrifice a part of yourself, your comfort. you show yourself to the world. I had a natural propensity for writing and drawing in school (so said adults), yet I only ever created when I was forced to. When I would fail the class without turning in a project. And I always turned them in last minute because I wanted to daydream. Creating can be scary. But I need to practice at it. I find it comforting to dissolve the fear of the results of creation – I must eliminate the illusion I have in my head that people will judge me upon seeing my work.
I think I will set goals for myself, for example, to do one act of creativity this week.
I have considered going cold turkey on the daydreaming, and to be honest, I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t newly involved in the fanbase as a buffer of sorts between my personal daydreams and the show itself. I’m considering doing it, and meditating in the meantime. I am most productive after I meditate. I feel armed with a lot more knowledge and experience. A “plus side” (lol) to my specific style of MD is that I NEED to either a. pace around a room or b. lie in bed before sleeping in order to daydream at all. When I meditate and get positive thoughts and chemicals going, I find it easier to control my actual actions. It will take lots of practice. When I lack either of those 2 actions, I do not daydream. Also, music with lyrics is a big trigger for me. I’ve been listening to a lot of classical and orchestral to avoid this for now and sometimes I feel anxiety because I’m not used to listening to music for non-daydream reasons, but it’s gradually getting more enjoyable.
I’m sorry this is so long and personal, but I can’t even describe how your website helped me realize who I am when I discovered it years ago, it was the first site I ever read about MD and I’m so grateful. Sorry if I sound insane, but I had to get it out of my system. I don’t discuss the progress of my MD with anyone, only a therapist but there’s only so much they can do (and I do appreciate mine), much less someone else who has experienced MD. And there is much I haven’t told them out of shame. Also, I know these kinds of ideas aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and I know not every MD experiencer will find it useful and that’s ok, just talking about what’s worked for me. I don’t claim to have some secret or ultimate truth. And I think I have so much to say because my recent spiritual developments have occurred over several years since I read your original posts. I’ve thought a lot and realized a lot in the time in between. Also, I’m going to start talking to my best friend about these things.
Overall, I’m still a newborn right now. Thanks for reading this if you do!
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I can’t stop crying or re-reading this! Amazing.
What can I do if the reality I’m living is just to awful to accept? How do I get to my real self without destroying the relationships I have because they are so unsatisfactory I just want to run away ( dealing with disabled kids)
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Thank you, Eretaia for an amazing article, which is the best I’ve ever read on this topic. MD extremely affects the quality of my life, I spend about four hours a day on it. I do MD when I need to calm down. For example, I am angry and I imagine myself in a different situation with different people one hundred times or so and feel angry over and over again until I feel calm. Or when I am scared/ happy/ suprised /in love I start to daydream of some situation, which never happened in reality and feel that emotion over and over again for hours until I am calm. I always come late everywhere because for me to leave the house and meet with people is a stress. I always daydream intensely before leaving the house. I also have a wrong feeling that there is a lot of time ahead and constantly finish my work late. This wrong feeling of time calms me down. So I use MD to calm down and feel out of stress. And for me any emotion is a stress, the stronger the emotion the bigger stress. I cannot handle emotions or new impressions. MD will start immidiately. I also have a tendency to fall into emotions and cannot forget for a long time afterwards. I’ll be really gratefull if you give some advice for my situation.
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Thank you for writing this. I use to think nobody could ever understand what I’m going through and I’m too nervous to talk to anyone about it because I don’t want to be judged for it. Every time I think about letting go, I get pulled back in, I feel like I can’t live without it. Life won’t be the same. It’s the only thing I actually love but it’s hurting me and the close connection I have with the characters I made up, I don’t want to walk away from them. MD makes me feel safe, secure and in control of my own story. Can you ever really let go?
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There is nothing to give up in the first place. Your characters are manifestations of feelings detached from real you and these feelings are an inseparable part of who you are and no one is taking them away from you. What you have to do is make them bleed from fantasy into real you. Your attachment to characters and scenarios is just a disguised attachment to feelings you crave to experience. Some of them, like those of false security and sense of control really do need to be let go of in order for you to work through underlying dark and insecurities that are fueling MD but positive feelings of belonging and self-acceptance, the very same emotions you experience in daydreams, will wait for you at the end of the tunnel once you’ve dealt with MD. Since your attraction to characters is attraction to detached feelings, making yourself experience those feelings for what they really are will put you at piece with both yourself and your characters.
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Also, I’ll probably soon publish another article dealing with letting go. Maybe in a week or so. 🙂
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Thank you for all the advice!!!!! I really need it. It feels like a constant battle with myself. Sometimes I feel like I can win and sometimes I feel like I can’t. Maybe meds might help but I don’t really want to go that far.
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You are saving my life… This is brilliant! A thousand “thank you”!
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Eretaia, thank you so much for your work. This is just grand !!!!! I wasn’t very sure of willing to quick my MD for I thought they were helping me to cope with real life, I even thought they were helping to reach reality and cure me but now I realize that as long as they exist, the split will always be there and they will only take me away from reality.
I do not know who you are or what you in real life 🙂 but everyone should read your papers in Wild Minds Nertwork, I think they could help them to reflex on their situation and on what MDD really is. It has woken me up. Now I have to deal with the worse part, the withdrawal and the real me. I hope I will succeed, for I have to !
Thanx a million, like Loulourose says 😉
Kim
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Thank you and good luck! :))
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Wow. It is amazing. It really helped me. I was suffering from MD from my begining of life. I know the very first memory is I used to daydream. Even today when I watch movie, feel stress, happy I start to day dream. I cant controll over it. and most disgusting thing to me is I engage in daydream with action on reality like smiling, making angry /unhappy face. I fell unsafe, suspecting every one, angry with real person etc are my problem. please help me to get rid of my problem. Iam 27 years old. I think when Iam 7 years from that age I have MD. Please help me.
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Reblogged this on Eccentric Shoujo.
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Dear, I found this very hopeful as I am coping with this issue since childhood. My main problem is that I can hardly ever be in reality, even when these few breakdowns of pain happened to me, I was crying and trembling but my brain would immediately find a proper fantasy to interact with me suffering, and situation in my brain develops and I am in a matter of seconds in fantasy, for example, fantasy where some men see me in this situation as capable of deep emotions (which is quality I admire and wish to have) and that it goes to narcissistic- love fantasy, he is in love with me because I have such qualities, he is consoling me, etc. And this is just one example..I am trying to say even when I am feeling something real, , my brain finds a path to turn it into material for fantasy…it doesn’t have to be even such an extreme situation as real suffering, it can be a moment of spontaneity, when I realize, how amazing I was just spontaneous, than again it goes to fantasy..I am completely fed up with living like this, and I feel almost physical nausea to it…In last few months, I started really getting sick when I “overfed” with fantasies and I would really catch some virus and vomit for few days and I couldn’t possibly daydream during that time, but I would feel finally alive…terribly sick and most alive…I feel I completely sucked up energy of my body with life like this
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This has happened to me as well. I’ve struggled with nausea and vomiting when I daydreamed too hard about fictional characters. It was as if my body were telling me: “Pay attention to me! I’m here! I’m real, they’re not!” And such a strong feeling (even though terrible), like when we throw up, brings us to reality, want it or not.
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I feel like there are two different sides of me, one that’s holds the insight (like from this blog) and logically understands the process and why I should resist cravings and let everything resurface, the other that is always desperately scrounging for excuses and permission to daydream even in your writing, that’s all too happy for another go with my characters and alternative selves and to dissolve my hours. It’s the other side that keeps winning.
I wish someone could just take away my ability to MD whether I like it or not so I can finally process what’s going on. So many failed attempts to not only logically understand what I’m doing to myself, my life, and to my family and my friends, but to finally FEEL it empirically, the anxiety, the numbness, the dullness, the loneliness, somehow I know it’s there but I can’t feel it. I always allow myself to be blinded even though I know it’s wrong. It’s feels odd to say that I’m taking whatever discomfort I can.
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Wow. This is exactly how I feel. I know I should let go but I still want the feeling that comes with MD. I don’t know how to live without it. I actually fear who I would become without it. I always had it as a coping and defensive mechanism. And I don’t want to trade it a addiction with another one.
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I am just reading and got to know so much about myself like I literally related word to word and I want to tell that I have been daydreaming since idk when I was a kid but it never really affected me I was still doing stuffs getting marks and was happy . My teenage years were awful like not having friend people treating you like shit, academically so low and everything started falling apart diagnosed with chronic anxiety and in depression for I guess 4 years now I am 17 🥺. But now I want to work hard for my career and needed such things to help me out alone in order to understand myself to find myself again till now I won’t say that I have completely stopped it but there is improvement. I am reading this 3rd one and I will improve eventually. Thank you so much you have changed my life:)))
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I wish you good luck! My honest advice to you: if you can, get a good psychotherapist! You should not go through this struggle alone. Dangers of MD come down to isolation, to thinking we are all alone but also to thinking we can handle it all by ourselves. Noone should go through this alone. You need connection to someone outside yourself.
The first step in overcoming this split between interior world of emotion and exterior world of reality is breaking this isolation. I’d definitely find a good psychotherapist. It makes things meaningful. Good luck 🙂
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I was bullied when I was younger. It was emotional and verbal mainly but also physical sometimes. The bullying took place not only in school but also in home by my aunt who lived with us and by my cousins who I stayed with during weekends. I couldn’t tell my parents because I was ashamed of myself for being bullied and I knew they would just tell me to man up and stand up for myself. So instead I just endured in silence for a long time. My only escape was the world inside my head. Whenever something painful was said or I felt hurt, i would lock myself in my bathroom and daydream the pain away. I did this quite often. It even became like a family joke that if you are looking for me I am probably in the bathroom. Anyways, when my parents moved to a different country, the bullying stopped because I was far away from all my bullies. However, the damage had been done. My self esteem and self confidence were in shreds and I developed a fear of people. Worse than that, I became addicted to my inside world (which is what I called it) and I preferred to spend time alone in my room then go play with others. Years later, I discovered that this condition has a name and it made so much sense. Through your writings I am taking the steps needed to go back to myself and rediscover who I am without these daydreams and without the pain of memories. Hopefully, one day I will meet this wonderful person that I have been neglecting. I want to thank you for writing these posts because they have given me courage to share my story that I haven’t shared with anyone before.
PS. also as a side note if anyone is reading this I just want to add that if you are ever a parent with a child who is being bullied then take my advice and become the most ANNOYING parent on earth and notify your child’s school, the schoolboard whatever it takes. And if it comes to it, transfer your child to another school because bullying is no joke it can cause real damage to a person’s mental health even if its just verbal. Stay safe and happy.
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I thank you a thousand times for these beautiful words which made me hope to overcome this disorder which practically ruined my life I intend to put your advice into execution and I would just like you to explain to me what you mean by building a meaning strong self? I didn’t quite understand this self-confidence? self-esteem? I want to understand and I want to know if you really got rid of this addiction and become normal or you only learned to have better control and thank you once again
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thank you
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Thank you very kindly Eretaia. You have opened my eyes and made me understand, your blog made me truly understand what you meant and make it to my own truth, my own conviction that avails me against MD. Your words have hit my mind and heart. Thank you very much.
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