My girlfriend yesterday mentioned she had maladaptive daydreaming, but I can't fully understand and grasp what it's like to experience? Can you help me feel or see how she does?
I can’t tell you about your girlfriend specifically but I will do my best to give you and overview of the most common experiences MDers relate.
She probably feels like a ghost. Some of the most common reasons for fantasy distress are the amount of time it eats away at and the impact it has on social relationships. It pushes the daydreamer into a cycle inwhich they seek comfort from their anxieties, only to experience further distressabout their time wasting and loneliness, which they ease with more daydreaming. The daydreamer is left feeling like they have glided across the surface of life, never really living. This can be true even for those with significant others and loved ones.
MD itself is immersive and affect-laden. I cannot stress enough how important these traits are to the maladaptive daydreamer. You may have done something like it yourself; most people will, when watching a movie they “are really into” experience a sense of losing themselves, the suspensions of disbelief and the immersion make the people and theater around you dissolve until you forget for a moment that you are a separate ego.
This is what MD is like, there is a dissociative aspect of the daydreaming that makes the self disappear. For the MDer, though, this is not fleeting, the daydreams stimulate the senses and are pregnant with feeling. Many daydreamers express the disturbing fear that they have more love and affection for their characters than they do for their real families and friends. This deep affection can cause conflicted feelings when it comes to the maladaptation.
MD has it’s roots in childhood, most MDers have lived alongside their worlds since they were small, it becomes a deep part of ones personal identity and the thought of ‘curing it’ can be frightening and downright offensive to some. Daydreamers tend to be split on how they felt about the daydreaming growing up, some always knew there was something ‘different’ or ‘wrong’ about them, others assumed it normal and were dumbfounded later in life to discover it was considered odd.
She probably feels like an addict. And, in fact, she might be, MD is often seen as a behavioral addiction. Most MDers describe their fantasizing as an addiction or compulsion, some liken it to an OCD-like obsessive thoughts.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, most MDers think of themselves as creative people and many are able to reign in their MD enough to create art. She may think of herself as a ‘patient’ person, the kind of friend you can call if you need someone to sit with you in an ER for five hours or drive halfway across the country with you. The majority, too, never tell anyone about their daydreams. Yes, there are active online communities with vocal MDers, but this does not reflect the lived IRL experience of the typical daydreamer. Most MDers experience shame and embarrassment about their fantasies and go to great lengths to keep the activity hidden, which I think says a lot about her feelings towards you.
