Yes, you can cure Maladaptive Daydreaming

[Eretaia]

Two years ago when I joined this community, I think I was more dead than alive. I've been waging quite a brutal war with maladaptive dreaming and the array of issues that underlie it ever since then and I'm on my way out of this prison. I wanted to do something for you guys so here is a little essay with insights on MD and what you can do to understand better and finally tame this beast. Hopefully, someone will find it useful.

 The split and the life between two worlds

Do you think the vague feeling of being split in two and existing between two worlds but belonging to none is exclusive to maladaptive daydreamers?

“If you try to have a conversation with me, I can’t bring myself to listen to you. I pretend to listen and you really think I do but my mind is somewhere else, thinking about it. Every time I try to stop doing it, I genuinely feel as if a part of me has been torn off and a deep sense of personal loss ensues. I feel as if I’m not here but I’m not there either and I can’t shake off this feeling of being split in two.”

This is what a recovering heroin addict once told me. Heroin addict. But it’s also what a regular maladaptive daydreamer could have told you, isn’t it?

Maladaptive daydreaming is, among other things, a typical psychological addiction. Most of the negative issues associated with maladaptive daydreaming come from the fact that it is an addictive coping mechanism and not some unique disorder with specific symptoms just recently discovered. You have heard million times that addictions are encoded in the primitive part of the brain associated with survival – which means that if you don’t get your fix right now, you feel more dead than alive and you need your drug of choice to bring you back to life. Your brain is sending a false message to you – it is issuing an urge that is blown out of proportion, compelling you to constantly indulge in daydreams and making you think that if you don’t, the world will end and you will lose a part of yourself. Drugs usually invade your sense of self – they fuse with it and by giving up the drug, you feel as though you are giving up a dear part of yourself.

Addiction is addiction but different types of drugs and addictive behaviors tell you different things about their users. So what does fantasy reveal about you? MD is like a guardian angel that tries to protect you too much and eventually causes more harm than good. But it’s still your guardian angel that tried lifting a burden off your brittle shoulders. It’s destructive in its own way but it was originally born to protect you from something. To realize and accept what you are trying to run away from is your first step towards recovery. Maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s low self-esteem and loneliness or it’s anxiety or PTSD.

Fall of the self

Maladaptive daydreaming isn’t the act of random mind-wandering – it’s a highly immersive mental activity, where all attention is gathered and directed towards happenings of the fantasy. This would be parallel to a so-called flow state, which is characterized by immersing intensely in an activity to the point of losing the sense of self. Which means, whatever happens in fantasy, happens, but not to you. It is a selfless experience, never integrated into what you call yourself, into sense of identity, into what makes you you. It exists as a detached, ecstatic, fleeting moment that slips through the fingers the moment you try to make sense out of it and process it as your own experience. You witness traces of happiness but the happiness is never yours.

Fantasy is an egoless state of mind where we are not ourselves. And by temporarily cutting ties from your own ego, the conscious identity, you’re also cutting ties from all insecurities you have ever had, from all the problems that are currently bothering you and this is why daydreams feel so damn good. Everything bad is just cut off from your perception. The part of your brain that defines your sense of self, along with all the negative things and mental illnesses attached to it, is turned off.

As you venture into this egoless place that is MD, you make up imaginary people you sometimes end up loving dearly or even fall in love with or you conjure imaginary places you’re desperately drawn to, and then suddenly – you wake up from your dream and you’re violently pulled back to reality and to being yourself. And this is where the problem arises: all those things you’ve done in your dreamworld and all those made up people you’ve come to love have nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with real YOU. They are not attached to your conscious sense of self. All those dreams and false memories you made – you made them in an egoless state of mind. And it’s this that makes you feel split. It’s not the fact that you’re physically apart from the content of your fantasies. It is the fact that your subconscious feelings, fantasies and desires do not connect to your sense of self. Even if everything you’ve been daydreaming about came true, you’d still feel like garbage, empty and miserable. If your imaginary friend came to life to make you less lonely, you’d still be lonely – because MD isn’t about made up friends or lovers or getting a new life. It’s about you not wanting to be you. Everything else is irrelevant.

In other words, you’re not addicted to your fictional characters or your imaginary love or to a fantasy about being a famous singer or writer. You’re addicted to not being you. You’re addicted to this erratic state of consciousness that is MD – regardless of its content – that provides a temporal relief.

I’m not saying that you don’t genuinely care about the content of your daydreams (quite the opposite, more on that soon) – what I am saying is that it’s not your love towards whatever is the content of your fantasies that creates this ugly feeling of being split between two worlds. One thing I can assure you (and this comes from my own experience) is that the moment you feel comfortable being you, those two worlds will reconcile, they will merge into one, and you’ll finally feel at peace with yourself.

Will a part of you be taken away as you give up your daydreams?

Maybe the saddest question I have ever asked myself was ‘how much of myself will I lose when I give up the only thing that makes me happy?’ Here’s a glimmer of hope: you’re not supposed to give them up. To give up the feelings you experience in your daydreams is self-mutilation. As strange or silly as they are, they still represent a censored part of your subconscious; maybe they are an epitome of your loneliness or your sadness. They are a testament to how hard you’re struggling and how hard you’re trying not to be dead – and to give this up is a crime towards yourself. Maladaptive Daydreaming isn’t just about wishful thinking and getting your wounds licked. It is that one place where your life flame stillburns while you may be dead in all other planes of existence. That’s enough to know that this MD thing isn’t all that entirely wrong. Maybe your real life is all emptiness and void but what you do in your daydreams – you do it with passion. And that’s enough to know that you are still capable of loving and caring about something just like other people. So passion exists and don’t you dare ever doubt that. It exists in a wrong place but it exists nonetheless. What you have to do is find a way to redirect those emotions from daydreams to reality and, as stated before, this causally happens once you’re finally you. All the positive emotions from your daydreams will flow back into you and you’ll feel as though these two worlds between which you have lived for so long have at last coalesced into one.

So what you want to do is focus on healing the self. It’s a tough one but there’s no quick fix here. Now comes the irony which you’ve been waiting for: in order to heal yourself, you need to let go of your daydreams. But didn’t I just say that you aren’t supposed to give them up, you ask? Don’t give up the passion, don’t give up the love you have for the content of your daydreaming, don’t give up the feelings – because they are all, real or not, a reminder that you’re alive. What you do have to give up is the false sense of comfort your daydreams give you. Try giving up all those countless hours you spend stuck in your own head pacing back and forth because you’d rather be there than here. Try giving up the temporal fix when you feel miserable. If someone angers you, don’t impulsively lock yourself in your room and act out a revenge in your head; go kick a sofa or something, lash out at something external.

You have to wean yourself off of this strange dissociative painkiller that’s fantasy, then let yourself feel all the pain with every ounce of your being, let all the negative emotions resurface, let them swallow you alive, don’t resist, don’t run away, accept them, let them ravage you, and somewhere along this process, a part of the you will be reborn. Something will awake. Not all of you, maybe just a small part but that’s enough to gather what’s left of your strength and continue the struggle. If you feel the urge to daydream, this is okay – as long as it doesn’t censor the pain which you shouldn’t run away from anymore, it’s fine to give in and indulge for a while if you feel like you have to. Don’t ignore temptations, this sparks the fire of addiction even more. It’s a well known pattern: if you fight the urge to engage in an addictive behavior, it makes it stronger. If you acknowledge it, analyze it, this is what breaks the cycle of addiction. In other words, the imperative is not to block the pain and negative feelings. If a sudden sense of self-disgust or low self-esteem suddenly hits you, welcome it. Welcome it, analyze it, let it consume you, and you will realize it is just a false message your brain is sending to you because that’s what brains of depressed people do, after all. The more you let yourself feel and process the negative feelings without censorship, the more will the urge to daydream weaken and the less you will run away.

Who are you really?

Depression usually enters people’s lives like a tempest – yesterday you were an optimistic person enjoying simple pleasures of life and today you feel like a suicidal or apathetic piece of shit, and this is how it is for most people. Depression that underlies MD, however, takes a different route. It enters your life stealthily, slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice it, then it gradually robs you of emotions, ambitions, memories, motivation, identity, empathy, and you end up thinking: “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’tmiserable,” or “these bad feelings must be a part of my personality, they have always been here“. Because of this, most of us fail to realize where depression (or anxiety or any other kind of chronic mental illness) ends and where we begin. So if this illness isn’t you, then who are you?

Let me make a digression here. MD is usually born when you can’t express yourself properly because you’re anxious, depressed or sometimes simply shy or lonely. Mental illnesses are like lenses which distort your perception. Everything you see appears more tragic, senseless or uglier than it really is. And your both eyes are infected with these lenses. But here your subconscious decides to play a trick on your mental illness and tells you: ‘well, if your both eyes are infected and make things appear worse than they really are, then why don’t you just close them?’ You do and this is the beginning of the addiction to fantasy. You stop paying attention to the outside world and you turn it inwards and use your mind’s eye to create things inside you: your daydreams. This mind’s eye, which is fantasy, cannot get infected with depression and this is why MD is a safe haven. Depression doesn’t reach there. What your subconscious forgets to tell you before it’s too late is that if you close those two eyes used for perceiving outer world, for things outside of yourself, you’ll be completely cut off from reality. But none of this is your fault – this is a war between mental illness, the attacker, and your subconscious, which is your protector, and you are their battlefield. You don’t have a single choice, they are the ones who decide – you only observe. So if you ever blamed yourself for being too weak to make a decision to cease this addiction, stop it. It’s wasn’t your fault.

Back to my question, who are you then?

The daydream version of you isn’t the true you but it’s not a fake one either. It’s a highly filtered product of your subconscious that tried to protect you. Then we have this other real-life you imbued with low self-esteem and negative thoughts that seem to go on a loop forever. Well, that’s certainly not your true self either. Heck, if it’s any comfort for you, the daydream you is far closer to the true you than this real-life depressed version of yourself will ever be.

Can you remember the time when you didn’t have MD? Can you remember your sense of identity when you were a child free of MD? Try conjuring up all those times when you knew how to live in the present. It doesn’t matter if you were 6 years old the last time you were here. Just try to pinpoint all those moments and try to remember the feeling of being in the now. Here’s one pretty handy trick you can use. I always joke that music is a drug that takes you on a trip down a memory lane. It’s like an emotional psychedelic. It transports you emotionally back in time, to another place, another reality, to wherever you wish. It helps people with Alzheimer’s remember who they are and regain a sense of identity for a short while. Maladaptive daydreamers often use music to help them imagine an alternate setting – but what if you used music to transport yourself to the past when you had neither depression nor anxiety or MD or whatever is bothering you? If you can remember a forgotten song which you used to listen as a child who at the time hadn’t had MD yet, listen to it again, try to remember who you were, and if the song is meaningful to you, the old you and your sense of self, which you used to have back then, will come back to you for those few minutes while the song plays. You’ll feel the warmth of finally being you. You won’t quite be in the present – you’ll be in the past, but it’s your real past, it’s your true self. Try to capture this feeling and then try to reenact it. It’ll strengthen your identity in the long run.

I’ll give another example on what set me free from my own MD for a short while. You all know what fight or flight mode is. What you also probably know is that most people with PTSD or chronic anxiety are stuck in a constant state of fight or flight. Spending too much time in this state eventually leads to a burnout and is a sure ticket to depression since you go from fight and flight into freeze mode where all your functions are off and you feel like an emotionless zombie. You don’t care, you don’t live, you don’t get angry or sad or happy, you only exist on autopilot. In order to feel normal and alive again, you usually need a fix so strong which will set your body back on fire. Someone or something has to attack you so fiercely in order for you to rethink your existence and regain your instincts and the will to fight back. This is what happened to me. When one of my daydreams violently crumbled some time ago, I got so ridiculously pissed off that for the first time after several years spent in freeze mode, I felt genuinely alive. I was me. The anger acted like a stimulant and the state lasted for 15 minutes until the anger wore off. But hell, during those 15 minutes, I was me. I was so mad but I was also indescribably happy. I could feel. I could let go. I was defeated but I also won. The thirst, the cravings, the split, this strange nostalgia for my daydreams all dissolved. But instead of just disappearing, every positive feeling that was limited to the daydream world only, such as sense of purpose, motivation and normal self-esteem, flew back into me. I didn’t lose a single part of me – quite the opposite – I regained back that detached part of my soul that existed only in daydreams. What took for me to awake was extreme anger, being defeated, my world crumbing to pieces. The moment I genuinely accepted that my dream world crushed, the moment I let go of all attachments holding me back for years, I was reborn. The anger, which is a natural stimulant, made something in me click. But note: this feeling of finally being alive and the desire to fight back woke up in me once my daydreams were in danger, not me. It’s because we’re so displaced, because fantasy is where we had hidden the core of our souls.

In the long run, you’re destroying neither the daydream you nor the positive feelings that come with it, you’re not giving anything up – you’re just transferring it to reality, to where it should be. But for this change to occur, before you can be reborn and whole again, you have to self-destruct, you have to let go.

-

If you made it until the end, thank you. I hope you found it at least a little bit useful. This is just a part, you can read the rest here: 

Part 2

[nature of fantasies]

Part 3

[return to reality]

Part 4

[emotional bluntness]

Part 5

[root of MD]

[Letting go]

[Sophie]

"There's nothing waiting for me "back where I came from", aside from whatever threw me (?) out in the first place"

What do you think it was? Just curious.

[Source]

I'll be at the last bit of the end of my rope before I pay someone to snoop around in my head. That said, I actually did try to 'open up', twice. The first time, I learned the hard way that if I release too much (how much isn't constant) of that sealed darkness in a can, it shoots forward like a battering ram, with effects that took more than a year to dissipate, and I'm still not sure they have completely disappeared. Because of this, the second time (ongoing as of writing) I'm being over-cautious about how much I let out.

I have no way of knowing precisely how much destructive power has piled up or when it started to accumulate, but given that:

- it's enough to completely erase all positive emotion, and negative as well, to an extent

- when I can't contain it and it leaks, I almost black out and turn into a roaring berserk whose only thought is indiscriminate destruction

- it has the battering ram effect ^ when I release it in a not intentionally destructive way ("opening up")

- the "battering ram" always hits a friendly target due to how it's triggered

I don't dare let the leash loose. There's been one friendly fire victim, and that's already too much.

Now I hope you get my point. If I keep it sealed and guarded, things are bad. If I don't, things get worse.
I've tried to use it as a fuel for determination in whatever I'm doing, but the results I got ranged between 'inappropriate determination for given purpose' and 'overpowering force', plus its natural instability.

If that (see point 2 above) is the spontaneity you mentioned, I'm more than glad to pass the offer.

About ever having felt emotionally present "here", I have no way of knowing. (With this, Sophie, I'm answering your comment as well) My most significant memories from 2014 (latest certain year, but it has very likely been going on beyond that) to 2010 and possibly all the way back to 2008 and before (born in 1997 by the way) are corrupted by the consequences of the "void" 's presence (namely, MDD), which means that if I try to identify a cause, I can't get reliable information.

[Eretaia]

Oh boy, you're too vague. Before I can actually get your point, could you clarify what exactly going berserk and indiscriminate destruction imply? And what consequences your friendly fire victim had? Give me some concrete examples. You get violent? Self-destructive? Psychotic?

Also, what's wrong with vising a psychotherapist? What's wrong with asking for help? Are you just going to crawl into a ball and let your passive aggressiveness consume you alive?

[Source]

Going berserk means that I lose all control, indiscriminate destruction means that there's no longer any distinction between friend and enemy, or between my own things and others' things. The only concepts that exist in this state are 'target' and 'obstacle'. If something is between me and the target, I try to circumvent it, if it actively stands in my way (in the case of a person), it becomes a target itself.

About "asking for help", I was put in therapy due to being bullied by around 20 people at once (whole class, I'm not even joking) back in 2009. Nothing came of it. I didn't understand the purpose of it and I didn't see or feel any improvement. I remember it as my parents paying a stranger to tell me how to think, with no results. Wasted money.

The "friendly fire victim" was hit by the shockwave of negativity that resulted from me letting go. Without wanting it, I had turned a sensitive friend I intended to protect from that negativity into an emotionless machine worse than myself. I opened up, and instead of helping myself I wrecked another who didn't deserve it.

[Sophie]

Hey source, I couldn't possibly know what you are going through, but I just want to tell you that - from what I gained from your description - I have been through exactly the same, and it still happens, at times. I relate to everything you wrote.

I always thought that I reacted with rage/emotional numbness(oxymoron, I know) because I suffer from PTSD and because I have been numbing my feelings for far too long. It honestly feels like my entire emotional system is shutting down when this happens. The first time it happened I was 15 and the worst part of it lasted for about 10 months. This led to the most cringe-worthy year of my entire existence, as I became convinced that I was a psychopath/monster, and would try to act that way as well. After all, I had seemingly lost all that was left of my humanity and was doomed to be 'bad'. It was a dark time, but also kind of an adrenaline rush and power trip.

Whether or not it is related to MDD I don't know.

[Source]

That 'thing' stuck its claws into what used to be my emotions and feelings, feeding on the positive ones and leaving behind a trail of negativity. Fear, pain, anger, false hope, you name it. When this happened, I can't tell, probably around 2008. In order to prevent the virus from spreading, I had to shut the whole system down. And I waited five years before doing that. There was a time where "I was still human", and an ever deeper depression was what came from my attempt to retain emotion, combined with the effect of whatever it is. I could wait for it to completely devour me or I could make a drastic decision to keep existing. My emotions are the price I had to pay to not succumb to it. That, Eretaia, is what waits beyond the locked door, and I won't fight it unless I'm sure I'm going to win. Besides, the lack of emotion does wonders in neutral judgement and logical thinking.

My inner condition isn't the best, but unlike before, it isn't getting any worse.

[Satchi R]

For Eretaia, thanks for responding it doesn't matter how long you take.I 'm sort of obsessed with your writing because it just hit so close to home.I know you have no obligation to help anyone or you may have trouble relating, but if you have a minute can you please help me out? I'm so frustrated with not being able to concentrate on my studies at university because I'm constantly MDD and its like I can't stop.I have an exam tomorrow and I can't get my mind on studies no matter how much I try.It's literally a drug.I'm going to have to defer my exam because I simply can't get it together.So you have any advice or helpful insights on how to study with MDD? Is it literally impossible without getting to the root of my problem? Thanks

[Eretaia]

@Source:

You're so dangerously full of disdain. So what if you've had one failure with psychotherapist? Why are you so fast to conclude that they are all collectively useless and that no one can help you? And why in the world should we care that the lack of emotions does wonders in neutral judgements? Who cares about that when you're are on the metaphorical brink of death? No amount of neutral judgement and logical thinking will compensate for a single second of you being emotionally fulfilled. Will logic make you suffer less? No. Will it make your existence more bearable? No. Without emotions, you do not exist. Without emotions, you cannot make memories. It's feelings your brain encodes into memories, not events and logic. It's emotions that give you the feeling of being alive and keep you alive, not system shutdowns and logical thinking. You can say you saved yourself by shutting down your system but you're reduced to nothing because that walking shell that is the only 'living' thing left of you is as good as dead anyways.

Also, it's not true that your feelings are annihilated and that you have nothing left aside from logic. It's just not true. You have so ridiculously much contained deep inside you. Bad feelings, yes. But beneath that are buried good feelings as well. People who are engulfed by nothingness subconsciously stay in nothingness so that their inner fire doesn't burn them out. That's what system shutdown is all about. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing you in any way. I'm not blaming you because I've once been caught in the same toxic vortex as you. I know full well what a system shutdown does to a person and what being stripped off of your emotions is. I've lost a parent while in this state, and a few months later, another very close family member. I couldn't grieve, I couldn't connect to sadness, I couldn't feel anything, not even empathy, I've watched myself turn into what I thought was a monster - and that's when my first emotion came back: guilt. Where was I? Where was I emotionally when they needed me most? What would I give for just one opportunity to go back in time and be able to share their pain and cry when they cried? I blamed and hated myself so much for what emotional numbness did to me and when first volcano of painful emotions started to erupt, I let it because I wanted to experience all the pain to punish myself for the years of being emotionally absent. And I wasn't doing it with the intention to win. I just wanted to suffer, to make up that way. But somewhere on that road down to hell, first transformations started to happen; the more pain I felt, the more I started recovering emotions that were missing. Eventually, you reach a point where you rediscover that godforsaken self that was butchered by both numbness and pain and realize none of this is your fault. From there, things slowly start to untangle. Slowly but they untangle.

So, no, it's not over. You're not beyond return. Take your time but don't be so quick to think you've broken the threshold of return. At one point you'll run out of excuses and no system shutdown will stop toxic emotions when they break loose but when it happens, know that at the end of the world, your world, may be a new beginning. 

@Satchi R, I'll write you in inbox but first you'll have to accept the friend request before I can send you a message. :)

[Source]

Ah, now you've hit a delicate wire. I know full well that I'm closing in to the end. The end of what, I have no idea, but one thing I can tell you for sure is that I've been raising my negativity threshold for years, just to keep from blowing up at the worst times. Now, it seems I can't keep up properly, it's like the maximum raises linearly, but the amount goes up exponentially, you get me?

I know the time is coming where this state will no longer be sustainable, but what choice do I have? Quit resisting and let it burn me away and explode me to shards? Who the hell is going to pick them up and piece me back together? The only two people that have ever understood and could even remotely do that are one farther than the other, and both too far from here (real world location, just to clarify) to begin with. Do it anyway and let some sort of gravity pull the pieces back into one big chunk? Already tried that, you can see it didn't work well.

You can't create missing key elements out of nothing, no matter how you arrange the pieces you have, you're still messing with the same parts in different orders. You can get closer and closer and almost reach completion, but how do you open a door if the door isn't yet built and you don't have the materials to build it? Break the wall? Aside from implying you have enough strength, it's a quick hack that consists in destroying, not creating. Plus you get hurt in doing it, then you go through your poorly punched hole, look back and realize you didn't build anything, you failed yet again.

So, yeah, I'm stuck indeed. I've also experienced that kind of guilt many times, whenever I looked inwards and not sideways. "What the hell am I doing? What the hell is this?" immediately followed by "How do I fix this?". No answer to the last question, so I can do nothing.

[Satchi R]

I accepted you!

Eretaia said:

@Source:

You're so dangerously full of disdain. So what if you've had one failure with psychotherapist? Why are you so fast to conclude that they are all collectively useless and that no one can help you? And why in the world should we care that the lack of emotions does wonders in neutral judgements? Who cares about that when you're are on the metaphorical brink of death? No amount of neutral judgement and logical thinking will compensate for a single second of you being emotionally fulfilled. Will logic make you suffer less? No. Will it make your existence more bearable? No. Without emotions, you do not exist. Without emotions, you cannot make memories. It's feelings your brain encodes into memories, not events and logic. It's emotions that give you the feeling of being alive and keep you alive, not system shutdowns and logical thinking. You can say you saved yourself by shutting down your system but you're reduced to nothing because that walking shell that is the only 'living' thing left of you is as good as dead anyways.

Also, it's not true that your feelings are annihilated and that you have nothing left aside from logic. It's just not true. You have so ridiculously much contained deep inside you. Bad feelings, yes. But beneath that are buried good feelings as well. People who are engulfed by nothingness subconsciously stay in nothingness so that their inner fire doesn't burn them out. That's what system shutdown is all about. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing you in any way. I'm not blaming you because I've once been caught in the same toxic vortex as you. I know full well what a system shutdown does to a person and what being stripped off of your emotions is. I've lost a parent while in this state, and a few months later, another very close family member. I couldn't grieve, I couldn't connect to sadness, I couldn't feel anything, not even empathy, I've watched myself turn into what I thought was a monster - and that's when my first emotion came back: guilt. Where was I? Where was I emotionally when they needed me most? What would I give for just one opportunity to go back in time and be able to share their pain and cry when they cried? I blamed and hated myself so much for what emotional numbness did to me and when first volcano of painful emotions started to erupt, I let it because I wanted to experience all the pain to punish myself for the years of being emotionally absent. And I wasn't doing it with the intention to win. I just wanted to suffer, to make up that way. But somewhere on that road down to hell, first transformations started to happen; the more pain I felt, the more I started recovering emotions that were missing. Eventually, you reach a point where you rediscover that godforsaken self that was butchered by both numbness and pain and realize none of this is your fault. From there, things slowly start to untangle. Slowly but they untangle.

So, no, it's not over. You're not beyond return. Take your time but don't be so quick to think you've broken the threshold of return. At one point you'll run out of excuses and no system shutdown will stop toxic emotions when they break loose but when it happens, know that at the end of the world, your world, may be a new beginning. 

@Satchi R, I'll write you in inbox but first you'll have to accept the friend request before I can send you a message. :)

[Eretaia]

There comes the magic of true self-destruction, sir. When you let go of this broken version of what you think is yourself, you're not just being blown to pieces that need to be put back together. You die and pieces of you die. There is a moment of liberation where toxic fixations and obsessions fall apart and new patterns arise. You let go of what holds you back. You heal because parts that were blocking healing in the first place decompose. We aren't trying to fix you by rearranging the current parts of you in different orders. We're trying to resurrect the parts you forgot ever existed.

This is a very specific feeling but I can assure you it exists. I can write about it and it still probably won't make sense to you but when you hit your ultimate bottom rock, just remember that someone else stood there in the very same condition as you and got a second chance at life right when the darkness reached its apex.

[Sera Arnett]

This is a very nice post. I guess I'm somewhat of an optimist because even though I've been this way for as long as I can remember I still believe I can get out of it "if I want to". However, I've had to have a hard look at that phrase recently.

During one of my last sessions with one of my therapists he asked me "Are you sure you actually want to get better?" Of course my automatic answer was yes but I think the truth is somewhat of a different story. I don't think I can actually remember a time I was happy. I wasn't happy playing sports although I was good. I wasn't happy going to school although I was intelligent. I wasn't happy with friends although people liked me. I haven't had a difficult life. So what exactly am I fighting for? What am I returning to? I have no destination to head towards because I can't remember ever being there. To my mind it doesn't even exist. Or rather it exists in my fantasies and no where else. I'm just blindly flailing around. I'm 22 years old and I've spent the last 4 at home, doing nothing but going to psychologists, psychiatrists,  pretending to go to school but not actually going. Failing out of classes again and again because I wouldn't go until my parents finally pulled the plug. Isolating myself from everyone and not as a secret plea for attention but because I enjoy my being alone. I'm lucky (or unlucky depending on how you see it) because my parents still support me and are trying their best to help me in any way they can.

I can literally feel myself wasting away and I'm not doing a single thing to stop it. I don't want to. I don't want to put myself through struggles to go back to the way things were. I don't want to suffer for a destination that doesn't even exist.