Living only thru fiction and âmagical thinkingâ are common childhood ways to survive the cruel reality of abuse. If you donât find any safety, understanding, support or nurturing in your immediate environment, the only other place you can look as a child is books, series, movies, anime. Child fiction specifically deals with a lot of trauma, lots of independent and abandoned children who you can relate to, with adults being absent, uninvolved, or dead in the story. Protagonists deal with a hell of trouble on their own and succeed, and itâs hopeful that you could too. They also have loyal friend groups often risking lives for each other, which is a common desire to have for an isolated, trapped and friendless child. Having someone passionately ready to risk everything for you would do so much for your feeling of self value.
Magical thinking is another common way for children to survive abuse, and it can be interlaced with fiction. Since the forces of evil in your young life are so strong and prevalent, you have to imagine the forces of good are as strong and prevalent too. So that if you suffer pain and struggle past your endurance, then this means miracles could happen too. Waiting to be taken away, to be transported to another dimension which is your real home, to be materialized in a book or a movie, to be given your fictional friends in real life, to be given magical powers, believing you are special and chosen, believing you will become strong and powerful if you only wish it enough, and this feeling like an inevitable reality, that is magical thinking. It can get dangerous, because as a child youâve learned that for a little bit of good, you need to suffer a lot, so by that logic, to get your miracle, it can feel like you need to sacrifice something big, pray endlessly, provide extraordinary circumstances and relentless faith, believe it into becoming the truth, or even give up on the rest of your life only to make it happen. It can go as far as a child founding their own personal religion or set of beliefs that are very removed from reality.Â
Magical thinking is designed to help you survive as a child, but it can grow into an obsession, or something that takes over your life and becomes impossible to let go of, because you feel your life now depends on it. Itâs a life of waiting and inability to let go of the thing youâre waiting for, because you lived just for that, it was the only thing that made sense.
Not being able to bear your reality, you can get stuck only feeling alive in fiction, or thru maladaptive daydreaming, and these strategies to protect yourself are very hard to let go of. If youâve experienced these, itâs likely youâve been dealing with trauma that couldnât be faced, couldnât be processed by a kid, and wasnât survivable without a fictional escape. There is no shame or embarrassment in getting lost in fiction, magical thinking, or daydreaming; in fact, youâre still alive because of it. You wouldnât have gotten lost in them if there was any other alternative. You gave yourself a reason to go on where there was none. You found a way to keep being alive thru unsurvivable. Your mind saved you in the best way it could.
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