Maladaptive Daydreaming: where wild minds come to rest
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No, I was raised by two loving parents in a nice neighborhood, and it was smooth sailing all the way till college. I think my MD might have had to do with three things, (1) being a loner, (2) feeling insecure/anxiety, and (3) just being more imaginative/creative. So since I'm usually by myself, I create my own imaginary characters for fun and comfort, weaving all these little stories around them in my head. My daydreaming becomes more intense when I feel pressure in the real world, like taking an exam or getting a job... I just want to retreat into my fantasy world to feel safer. After a while, this just became a habit, as there is no turning it off.
I used to think my MD was caused by a traumatic childhood, but as I'm reading articles and other people's experiences combined with looking back at how creative I was even very early on... I no longer think that's true. The trauma may have made daydreaming more appealing than being in the real world, but not the direct cause. Actually, I played "pretend" a lot from a very early age.
Before things got really horrible at home I was fairly out going, if I had another kid to play with I would often involve some sort of "pretend". That's how it was with my "boyfriend" (we were 4 or 5 years old, I didn't know what it really meant!) who loved Star Wars. When we played outside together, we had to "pretend" everything because our Moms sent us out to play with just ourselves and our creative little minds. Well one day, I wanted to play He-Man and he wanted to play Star Wars. I came up with the idea to play both. He got to be Luke Skywalker and I got to be He-Man. (Never mind me being a girl!) I pretended my porch was Castle Greyskull and when I raised my sword to become He-Man, Cringer would become Battle Cat. Skeletor and Darth Vader would attack at the same time, so Luke, He-Man, and Battle Cat would fight and save the day!
Ah, he was a cool kid. I wonder if he grew up with MD? He was very creative and quite happy to play "pretend". Fighting invisible bad guys with invisible light sabers. If anyone reading this remembers playing Star Wars/He-Man with a funny little girl named Angel in the early 1980's... :D
Mh, I thought a lot of what may be the cause, but i DD sinse I have memory!
I remember when I was 6 at school, children in groups were playing in various games, I didn't found a group for me(I think i didn't even tried to join to some group). So I started playing alone pretending to have a cap with super powers. That day I think i understood it wasn't normal to play alone, so i continued to DD in public but without moving. But the situation never changed from that day.Everytime i have a problem I cannot solve or feel a deep emotion, I solve it in a unrealistic fantasy, and then I forget the reality
Probably because I was bullied in Year 2 (I think that's first grade in America and other countries that use that system :p) when I was 7 and I decided to play alone.
But then, it might have been because I used to like playing by myself since my brother was (and still is XD) younger than me. Plus I used to copy TV shows that my friends wouldn't have watched and they wouldn't have known what I wanted to play.
I can remember when I was playing with a girl and we were pretending to be puppies and then some people came along and I said 'pretend they adopt me but not you' and she said 'no pretend they adopt both of us' and I wanted to play differently to that girl.
I also used to feel like no one actually wanted me to play with them because I felt like I wasn't being included and I started saying 'pretend I do this/that/the other' and one girl actually told me 'it's not all about you' but that was after I had started DDing a bit, so I was used to everything being about me because that's how it was.
Actually I was reading my Year 3 (2nd grade?) report and my teacher said "I believe [name] will always be a child who is comfortable in her own company, but I hope that this year she has learnt that she is also popular with the other children." But, unfortunatly, I didn't.
The same teacher also put about me "who thinks a great deal about topics and issies which other children might not consider." She's never known how right she was (joke).
I censored my name because, even though I suppose it's not THAT unusual (although the spelling of it probably is XD) I don't want people to know it, and I don't want anyone I know to realise it's me on here. Because if they actually read through my posts or went through my book where I draw/write poems/short stories/whatever they would probably eventually read my 'Truthful Alibi' poem and then look at my username and realise it's me. Well, to be fair, I did write that poem on a seperate piece of paper (which I've lost XD typical, but what can I expect, that I won't lose it? In my dreams [haha lol MD joke about me]) but still...
So, somewhere in that vast, vast sea of what I call a reply, you might one day be so bored that you read the whole of my reply and manage to make sense of the reason why I think I DD...
I have MD since i was 4 or 5 years, i remember my brother got the same problem.
We had a normal childhood, but i was more lonely and my mother never let me got out of my house, so i had less friends,
I think my brother stopped daydreaming ( at least pacing ) when he was 14,
So i think that maybe is something related to genetics,
Me and my brother never talked about this.
I'm going to honest - for me this is directly related to trauma. I don't know if that is the case for everyone. I have some dissociation issues as well. Well, I think this is a form of dissociation. Because of the trauma as a very young child, I used daydreaming and dissociation as a coping mech. Thank God I'm not so dissociated that I have different alters or anything like that but I am on the dissociation spectrum. I have trouble, especially in times of stress, "snapping out of it" - it has been more of an deficit (the MD) then a positive thing lately...
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