The Dark Side Of Maladaptive Daydreaming

The Dark Side of Maladaptive Daydreaming

TW: I don’t talk about specific violent topics(just mainly say “i have violent daydreams”), but if you don’t want to read anything about the dark side of daydreams just go ahead and skip this one.

I’m feely kinda shitty and anxious, and to actually be a little more proactive this time I pushed myself to write this overdue post instead of daydreaming. I mean either way I’ll end up daydreaming before I go to bed…moving on.

A couple of weeks ago The Daydreamers was released. And it was a good dip-a-toe-in-the-water introduction about maladaptive daydreaming. Afterwards I read a few tumblr posts about it, and I remember there was one post where anon expressed their frustration with the doc presenting MaDDing as this escape to a happy wonderland. This is a criticism I’ve heard before, and one I’ve had myself. 

When I first got involved in the MaDD community online I was frustrated to see -what appeared to me - MaDDers not taking it seriously. They were sharing art of their paras, paracosms, writing about their wonder fantasies, and posting memes. To me this came across as almost “lacking a depth”, I knew that humor is a coping mechanism, but I was upset that there seemed to be so so few posts with in depth dives into the negatives of MaDD. To me it looked like everyone else was peachy with it, while I withering with it’s burden. That’s why I started this blog, to create the content I wanted to see(no shame to those who rather post light hearted stuff).

To start off, I always dislike that the word “daydreaming” is included in the name of this condition, because “daydreaming” has a very “cute” and “innocuous” connation in our language.  And to be frank, cute and innocuous are probably the last words I’d use to describe my daydreams.

My daydreams can contain incredibly dark, morbid, and violent things. There is a common theme of isolation, loneliness, being misunderstood, and martyr complexes. My parame suffering, all the while being criticized and hated by those around them.  That’s a very common theme, being hated because I’m misunderstood and I am going through some struggle unbeknownst to those around me. I would best title it as “Look at how everyone misjudges and hates me, but I am really a good person whose made sacrifices for others but has been wronged many times but I refuse to open up about it because I am afraid and because I don’t think I deserve to seek help and I am socially anxious”. 

And while there is this common underlying theme, it tends to manifest in disturbing and/or violent ways. 

*by manifest I mean what the content of the paracosm is.

And if I were to be honest, alot and I mean alot of my paracosms are straight up depressing, and their frequency tends to increase in quantity and disturbance level the more unhappy I am in real life.

But why do I/we do it? My best answer is that it’s a way to live out and externalize negative emotions I/we struggle to express and explore in our actual lives. The daydreaming gives a filter, a “safe place” to externalize, feel, and express these bad feelings. I wonder too if it acts as a disconnecting mechanism, you can experience your emotions through the paras you created, that way you don’t have to feel them as your own emotions that have occurred due to your life circumstances. Can I say it’s bit like a disassociating mechanism? Personally for me I’ve always tended to feel invalidated in my negative feelings. I felt (and still do) that I did not/have not earned sadness. That its stupid for me to be upset so much by something when there are so many other people with so much worse, so I create a fictional world where my parame experiences traumatic events that then make me feel justified to express my negative emotions through my parame. Because obviously those negative emotions make sense in the context of my parame’s life, but my actual life? Absolutely not.

TBH, I was gonna write a few examples of these dark paracosms but I backed out because honestly I’m still too nervous and scared to share the details. Sure I’m anonymous on this platform, but I know once somethings out on the internet it stays there forever. And I am afraid of the wrong people finding my post detailing my horrific daydreams and then somehow finding out who I am and they think i’m fucked up and so on….So this is all for now. These thoughts are from my personal experiences and I don’t speak for every MaDDer.