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]

[Eretaia]

Sorry for answering only now, Ruby. Didn't see the message before. I'm fairly convinced that a person develops MD because a certain part of themselves fails to manifest properly during normal conscious awareness and then in turn has to be conjured during fantasy where it can safely reappear. The question is always the same: what is it that you are trying to express, what are you trying to feel via fantasy? When you pinpoint what, then the question is: why can't it manifest in the conscious awareness? What prevents it? If you had a strong trauma, especially during childhood, something somewhere got blocked and if that blocked part happens to be the same one that is reappearing in fantasy, then the only way would be to tackle that trauma once again. As someone who has never had any trauma that would meddle with my perception of the self, I don't even feel like I have a proper right to say or advise something that would resonate with you, knowing how much of an emotional burden you have to carry. I do know, though, how powerful unconscious material can be and wreck one's life from where you can't even access it. As long as healthy aspects of yourself are blocked, I can only assume you will continue having MD. The moment you learn to express yourself fully and freely in real life, it should go away. 

What kind of therapies have you tried so far? The problem with trauma is that brain completely loses its own rationality when it comes to processing what happened. It doesn't always matter if you tell your story to a therapist thousand times, hoping you'd reprocess or re-experience it emotionally so the wound can finally heal. The brain is stuck. It's physiologically stuck, frozen and you need to be in a right state of consciousness for your brain to be even be able to reprocess trauma. Have you tried therapies like EMDR?

You say you don't want to remember that event - and I can fully understand why. But if you have this mindset while doing therapy, then therapy won't work because you can't be reached. I think therapy is the only answer here. It's a matter of finding the right one and committing to it. And committing to it means being willing to endure a lot of pain. If there's a simpler way, I don't know it. 

[Cemre]

Well I kinda got what you saying I guess. But I can't remember a time when I didn't have MDD. It's almost like I was born with an imaginary world in my head . It never left me, and that one is still one of my strongest daydreams. So I can't snap out of my daydreams. What else do you think I can do? :(

[Eretaia]

Why don't you try stopping daydreaming for a week? Yes, you'd have to go against your instincts. It's takes a bit of will power but it's possible. Ignoring cravings won't do anything in the long term. One eventually always relapses if all you do is consciously ignore the triggers. But I do think resisting cravings for something like a week or two can tell you a lot of things about yourself. Without MD to block bad stuff, things resurface. Then at least you'll have some material to work with. 

[kirti]

I am maladaptive daydreamer . can I cure it without going for treatment of any therapist or doctor?

[kirti]

My crush is the centerpoint of my each daydream. I am daydreaming whole the day. I am also trying points written in this blog but still don't know whether I can stop it or not. It badly interferes in my life.

[Annie]

That sentence mad me cry as well! So true!

Ivy White said:

I'm reading this at work and I have to fight back some tears when I read this:  

"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. "

This is true. This is so true.

[Annie]

Thank you so much Eretaia, for writing this beautiful piece where you stated our truth. I can not begin to express how much reading this has helped me already.

[Annie]

You are not alone. I am going through the exact same thing. Day and night. I am in the process of trying therapy to try and help it along to get better. I don't feel like I can get control without it anymore....

kirti said:

My crush is the centerpoint of my each daydream. I am daydreaming whole the day. I am also trying points written in this blog but still don't know whether I can stop it or not. It badly interferes in my life.

[Annie]

For many of us with extreme cases it's not that easy. I can not control my daydreaming and I can not simply stop it. It is my default mode. NOT to DD takes marathon running like willpower, and never lasts for more than 30 minutes without relapsing... But I do agree with you that we have to do it to face our bad stuff, let it resurface and deal with it as you say... If only I knew how.

Eretaia said:

Why don't you try stopping daydreaming for a week? Yes, you'd have to go against your instincts. It's takes a bit of will power but it's possible. Ignoring cravings won't do anything in the long term. One eventually always relapses if all you do is consciously ignore the triggers. But I do think resisting cravings for something like a week or two can tell you a lot of things about yourself. Without MD to block bad stuff, things resurface. Then at least you'll have some material to work with. 

[I was]

Willpower is the currency for making a change. I have experienced that even if you exert yourself in the opposite direction, sooner or later an insight is bound to occur. Keep your eyes open and keep going. That said, Eratia's post is excellent and helped me immensely.

Just a little tip: Try to experience the present moment, in all it's boring dread. Make friends with this utterly boring thing, and drop any expectations of feeling emotions invested in real life soon. You will begin to heal.

[Whitney]

Very true. I found myself going through my second anxiety "crisis" after my played out DD plots imploded, no longer felt "real", I started examining my life, and my anxiety got so bad I could not DD. I see it as a blessing in disguise most days as now I can try to reconnect with myself and figure out who I really am, what matters, what I need to be happy, and etc. I also realized that I used DD to  cover the anxiety and depression that sometimes plagues me.

As you said, I've discovered that it's important to experience the present and attempt to fully engulf in it as I would a day dream - investing all the time, effort, motivation I would in creating my DD plots. It will take willpower to deter myself from falling into the traps of DD (though at times I would trade anything to get completely lost in my imaginary world) and face the real world and this time around I understand more why I DD, how to control the anxiety and negative thoughts, and just be more realistic and optimistic with this life and all it can offer.
 
I was said:

Willpower is the currency for making a change. I have experienced that even if you exert yourself in the opposite direction, sooner or later an insight is bound to occur. Keep your eyes open and keep going. That said, Eratia's post is excellent and helped me immensely.

Just a little tip: Try to experience the present moment, in all it's boring dread. Make friends with this utterly boring thing, and drop any expectations of feeling emotions invested in real life soon. You will begin to heal.

[Eretaia]

There's no clear answer here. Some can, some can't. It depends on so many different factors. Your determination, your sense of inner direction, your underlying problems. If you can get a psychotherapist, get one. It makes things faster. 

kirti said:

I am maladaptive daydreamer . can I cure it without going for treatment of any therapist or doctor?