#madd experience

[babz-madd-diary]

My parame is friend with all her exes because I just can't stand the idea of losing a para.

[babz-madd-diary]

Do you ever feel guilty if you don’t daydream for a while?

I don’t know if this happens to you too but sometimes if I’m really busy and I can’t find time to daydream for a couple days I feel guilty, like I left my paras alone and the story is waiting... I don’t know...

[babz-madd-diary]

Talking about MaDD for the first time without knowing what it was.

This is an old page from my diary I wrote 29 June 2011. At this point I had no idea what maladaptive daydreaming was but here I was talking about me and my imaginary world for the first time. Some years before this, I wrote a couple pages talking as my paras and describing my paracosm but this was the first time I was actually talking about ME and acknowledging I was living a parallel life in my own head.

“...everything seems to be okay because I’ve been substituting my life with an imaginary one since I was a child: actually, I changed many lives, I guess everyone has done it, but not until they are 16, not to they point they lose their identity: this is what I’ve done, I lost myself, or maybe I’ve never been myself. I always played the role of someone else, I’ve never existed. help. it’s crazy to think about it, to write about it. I feel like crying. I don’t understand. why? who’s fault is this?...”

[babz-madd-diary]

I live in a Middle Earth. I can’t feel anything in real world and I can’t feel anything in my world.

This is a page of my diary that was written 19 November 2018. Here I talk about struggling to live with or without my demons. Thank you for taking the time to read.

“Where is the light? This void is more sneaky than the one before, before I was crying, I was screaming, now apparently I’m okay. Or maybe this is just bullshit. I AM okay. I just miss my demons. No, my demons are here, I don’t live in the real world and I would never be able to separate myself from what my mind created, even if it’s not like it was before. I live in a Middle Earth. I can’t feel anything in the real world and I can’t feel anything in my world. Last week they matched for a moment, that happens sometimes, I’m good  at creating stories that match with everything, so I don’t have to leave them while I live.”

[babz-madd-diary]

How I stopped daydreaming

Let’s start by saying I'm not an expert and every MaDD is very different and very personal; I share my experience hoping it will help someone in their journey. As I said in a recent post some years ago I stopped daydreaming (I started again 2 years later) and this is how it worked for me:

It was a really busy period in my personal life, I was studying, I had just moved to a different city and I was meeting new friends: keeping up with everything was difficult and daydreaming was making me waste time. It was around that time that I found the term "maladaptive daydreaming" surfing in the internet and I realised two things: 1) I was not alone and 2) it was “something”. I mean, it was not just me, it was a “disorder”? “condition”? “addiction”? “coping mechanism”? it didn’t matter, it was something. It was something stopping me from doing all the things I needed to do, it was something stopping me from living my life. I got really angry at this something (not at my paras, I loved them more than myself) and I decided it had to leave.

So at first I tried just to stop but it was impossible, I loved my paras and I loved being my parame. So I decided to talk with my paras (not all of them, just the most important two, not my parame, at this point me and my parame were the same person): I explained them I had to recover, I told them it will be difficult and I will miss them but it was time for me to walk alone. It was very emotional, they knew that was the best thing for me in that moment, I remember clearly how my paras told me that they will always be there as my guardian angels and that if I really needed them they will come back. I think this made things easier, I was trying to live without them but I knew that in case of emergency they would be there for me. I did this at night in my bed: I fell asleep while daydreaming my paras saying goodbye and comforting me, and when I woke up the next day, I was ready to start my life without daydreaming.

As I said before, at that time my life was very busy and I was spending most of my time with other people, this made it quite “easy” to keep my mind away from the daydream. It became easier and easier with time, until I was not thinking about it anymore.

This is my experience, I’m not saying this is the right thing to do or the right way to do it. Living without MaDD had consequences and it was not as I expected (I will talk about this in a different post), I also relapsed 2 years later (same for this, I want to talk about why and how in another post) so as you can see this is not a great example of “recovery”. 

At the moment my aim is not to completely eliminate daydreaming but to control it, also I have some tips about being productive with MaDD that I will share soon. I just hope that this will help someone in their journey. Please feel free to ask anything! :)

[babz-madd-diary]

I stopped daydreaming for two years and then started again. Am I the only one?

So basically five years ago I got really angry at this whole MaDD thing, I felt like it was ruining my life and stopping me from living, so I decided to stop.

It was really hard at first but I have a lot of self discipline so I said goodbye to all my paras and after a lot of crying I did it: I stopped.

Two years later I decided to start daydreaming again, it was not easy at first, I had to find excuses why my parame was away for that long and I had to meet again al the paras. In a few days I was daydreaming all the time again.

I guess I can say I recovered and then relapsed... does anyone else have a similar experience?

If you have any questions about this please feel free to ask, it would be great if my experience could help someone.