My client, E.E, simply could not focus on her studies
She was in med school, there were expectations placed upon her, including the high fees her parents paid for the school, yet she could not, to save her life, attend classes, not to mention to get past page 5 in her textbooks. She was in her first year.
Within the first 2 meetings, E.E confessed she didn’t see any life past med school, and if she didn’t manage to pull herself together, life might not even be worth living.
Her problem was lack of focus, and lack of focus alone, as my client would put it. And I was tasked to help with that.
Exploring the problem
E.E needed help with her ability to focus, which according to her, was under the sea level, so I probed further. How bad was her focus? Can she give me an example? Can she focus on other tasks, or does she struggle only with studying? How did she handle studying in the past?
When I asked E.E how a study session looked, she was already fretting, looking uncomfortable.
It made me feel I was somehow already getting around an uncomfortable issue.
So I took a roundabout approach.
How is your sleep?
How is your diet?
What do you do in your free time?
What do you do instead of studying when you decide against it?
E.E looked distressed again and told me, she has a hard time focusing on anything, other than listening to music and dancing around her flat with her headphones on.
She almost never cooked, she had no friends, she would barely attend classes, had no hobbies, she wouldn’t even play video games, but what she would do, was to dance and dance almost all day, until she would go to sleep, out of exhaustion.
Now we are getting onto something.
Running towards the happy place
What did she do when she was dancing around the house until she was mentally and physically exhausted?
E.E mentioned her happy place. The happy place was compulsively calling her, with a tinge of sweetness to its call. What else would she do? What was there for her to do outside listening to the call of the happy place?
She was dissociating, and doing so in a unique way. E.E was creating an alternate reality, in which she wasn’t a painfully lonely student who couldn’t focus on her textbooks. She had it all. In her reverie, vivid, intricate and addicting she was living another life. A life within a life.
E.E with her current knowledge and resources, could not be a loved friend or a passionate lover, or so she thought, even though love and friendship were what she desired the most. At best, she could aim for a high-status job, which was deeply unfulfilling but at least would have paid the bills.
Yet, E.E didn’t mapped out the road properly, she couldn’t in two places at the same time. She couldn’t be both a studious student and someone trapped in a fantasy.
She was suffering from an ailment as old as time, when resources are scarce and there is no way to fight, flee or negotiate with the threat, the body becomes still, and the mind escapes through fantasy in a freeze response.
She was daydreaming excessively to escape reality, a condition that doesn’t have yet a place in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and was only identified by professor Eliezer Somer in 2002.
Like many maladaptive daydreamers, which fit the diagnosis, E.E had her fantasies prevent her from meeting deadlines, engaging in everyday activities, and simply allow her to be a fully-functional being. But what’s worse, she was full of shame because of it.
She felt ashamed she had to flee from reality and not being “good enough” for it and she was ashamed of the flight.
The chosen one
Maladaptive daydreaming often starts in childhood. Many daydreamers use reverie in many of its forms since they know themselves. They’ve survived by standing still and have their mind cut off from their bodies.
With E.E it all started in her attempt to avoid the emotional abuse coming from her mother. Her mother was deeply unhappy in her marriage, yet couldn’t quite take out her frustration on her husband, who was often cheating, out of fear he might leave her. Instead, she took it on her daughter.
From the moment she arrived from kindergarten to the moment she went to sleep, there was not a time where E.E wouldn’t be criticized, admonished or even slapped around the house. And there were always, always reasons to be found, for all of it.
On a particular day, on the weekends, E.E was in her room, when she heard her mother’s yells climbing up, all the way from the kitchen. It was the weekend, two days of hell and it was only morning. This time, E.E decided to hide. If there’s nobody there, nobody’s getting yelled at.
She climbed her way up to the attic and opened the closet and sat there, silent as a statue.
The yells were growing in intensity, but E.E made it a challenge for herself, not to be there. She would not sneeze, not even when she could feel the dust rising up in the air, she would not cough, she would not make any noise, and she would stay there all day long.
After a while, she heard the outside door being slammed. Her mom went outside to look for her. But she couldn’t get out just yet, her mom could come back inside at any moment. So she closed her eyes and found ways to entertain herself.
She closed her eyes and much like in the movie she watched last week, the closet , with her inside her, started shaking and within moments it flew bursting through the attic window.
E.E was out in the air, flying at high speed, going up, and up, up until it found its way on an island, resting upon the clouds, where fairies and all kinds of creatures were waiting for her.
She was the one, the chosen one who would save her, the girl in the closet, and she was here.
The dangers of treating maladaptive daydreaming
Many well-intentioned therapists and coaches prematurely recommend techniques that anchor the person in reality.
At best, they don’t work. At worst, they do.
Meditation and mindfulness techniques are useful only when you have someone who is already feeling safer in the real world, yet feels the tug of fantasy and needs an anchor.
Removing the defense mechanism while the threat is still present is much like sending a soldier to war without a shield or a sword. Defense mechanisms need to stay intact until the threat is removed, otherwise collapse may happen.
This is the reason why some people who experienced intense trauma when trying out mindfulness meditation and are told to focus on their breathing, they start panicking. And why wouldn’t they panic?
You are telling someone who feels unsafe in their body, to fully remember that they are in an unsafe vessel.
E.E needed to find a real solution to the lack of safety she felt in her life. She didn’t pick the college degree herself, her parents did the choosing and now she was dependent on her parents financially and was in a place where she felt she didn’t belong.
My client faced a number of challenges, that no amount of mindfulness meditation could help, perhaps only make her remember how helpless she is.
In other words, E.E needed support and guidance in learning some real-life skills, and those years spent in a daydreaming prevented her from acquiring the aptitudes necessary to become a high-functioning adult.
In cases like this, not only the client has to develop a sense of feeling worthy to be in the race for happiness but also develop the competency to become a fast runner.
E.E didn’t attend any of the exams, but that didn’t matter. Because in the meantime she spent a lot of time exploring what she can and what she can’t do. What she likes and what she dislikes.
She started socializing, first, online, she was too shy for in-person meetings.
Next, she started volunteering at a shelter. She loved animals and loved the idea of not being pressured or pushed around as one would be in a high-stress job. She had the luck to love the volunteering work, and the people working there were kind to her.
By the time exams rolled around, and she had to make the dreaded phone call to her parents, telling them she quit college, she was already hired as a barista, at the local Starbucks.
Her parents threatened to disown her for bringing shame to her family. She agreed to the idea of being disowned and never receiving any financial help from them, starting from that day. She has money from her parents for one more month. E.E used that month to find a smaller place for herself that she could afford with her barista salary.
One year and a half later, she was enrolled in coding school and was planning to apply for a paid internship at a big company in her city.
If E.E had been advised to focus solely on anchoring techniques without gradually making changes in her life to enhance its quality, in reality, she would have been only left with a feeling of shame, for not being able to anchored in reality, or worse, with a feeling of despair, fully knowing, at that point in time, her hands were tied.
Instead, the slowness of the process increased her window of tolerance allowing for true healing.
If, like E.E, you are someone who is battling with any form of dissociation,, whether is playing video games, being hooked on tv shows or just good’ ol daydreaming and are looking for ways to better manage it, contact me to find out how you can book a coaching session with me.
All sessions are done online, and in the format that suits you best, ranging from instant messaging, to audio calls and video calls.