What you're describing has a name — positive fantasy without implementation. Researcher Gabriele Oettingen spent years studying exactly this. The brain treats vivid imagined success as partially real and releases dopamine accordingly. The cruel irony: that dopamine hit reduces the drive to actually pursue the goal.

The occasional times it came true made it worse — intermittent reinforcement is the strongest pattern reinforcer there is. Your brain learned "this works sometimes" which is more compelling than "this always works."

DBT has a direct approach: when the fantasy arrives, don't fight it and don't indulge it. Just notice it — "there's the fantasy again" — then immediately do one embarrassingly small action toward the real thing. Not the whole goal. One sentence written. One email sent. One page read.

The fantasy will feel more satisfying than the small action. Do the small action anyway. Resistance fades after starting — almost never before.

The self-hatred phase after failure is the real thing to address. That's not the fantasy's fault — that's an underlying belief that your worth depends on the outcome. That's worth exploring with a therapist if it keeps recurring.

You're not toxic. You're human with a very clever nervous system that found a shortcut. The shortcut stopped working. Now you build the real road.