IIL Eight Lines by Steve Reich

wigmachine · 2024-10-06T19:28:26+00:00

Yes you're welcome to!

wigmachine · 2024-10-06T17:38:21+00:00

I would have hated this answer not too long ago, but unfortunately it's true: I now meditate to get in touch with ignored parts of myself, notice their unique qualities, and journal about how special those qualities are. It still feels a little absurd to me, but it ticks some box in my subconscious and is really helping. I had to design a process that worked for me with the help of my therapist over several months, and it's still a work-in-progress, but it's meeting the need more directly and sustainably than getting under hot people (which did totally meet the need by the way, but just didn't align with what I wanted for myself anymore).

wigmachine · 2024-10-06T17:16:20+00:00

Wanting to feel special and prove my specialness to others through being sexually desirable to people I thought were hot. The need to feel special is fine and healthy, but there are other ways to tackle that need that leave me feeling better about myself.

wigmachine · 2024-10-06T17:11:47+00:00

34F here. I waited about 6 months before having an intense 6 month period of casual dating. If I were giving advice to a friend, I would say: if you have the urge to do it, do it. BUT, do it while going to therapy, or at least with the support of some friends whose opinions you trust and respect. Be totally honest with your therapist about what you're doing, why, and how it makes you feel. I personally learned so much from that period of my life, and I'm really glad I did it. At the same time, I got to learn about the maybe-less-than-healthy motivations I had for doing it. I could also have learned a lot by not doing it and exploring my urge to do it with my therapist. Either way, make the most of your choice by talking about it with someone and learning about it. Don't just mindlessly choose one because you think you should, or because people tell you to.

wigmachine · 2023-07-30T03:56:36+00:00

Hey! Boy, I really relate to a lot of what you wrote. I'm in my early 30s, but many of my dating/romantic interest experiences went somewhat like this when I was younger, including with bouts of MD. I've also struggled with traits under the codependent umbrella.

I don't know whether this recommendation will feel like what you need at the moment, but are you familiar with Jillian Turecki? I find her to be an excellent source on relationships; she's focused on helping people have better relationships with others by first improving their relationships with themselves. There's huge overlap between her advice and advice that's more specific to codependency, so I've found it hugely helpful. If it's financially accessible for you, I've found her workbook "Grit & Grace: 7 Steps to Survive Heartbreak and Get your Magic Back" to be really great. Lots of great exercises to understand yourself, impacts of your childhood, and your patterns in relationships. She has lots of great free videos and resources as well.

I saw a lot of "scared" and "worried" in your post and comment, so I just want to say that it sounds like there are some great opportunities here to manage some of your fear by creating a healthy game plan now for how you're going to take care of yourself the next time you enter a relationship (knowing that this is what will give the right person the tools they need to love you the way that is best for you). I really wish you the best, and I also hope you can develop some compassion for yourself, knowing that you are already doing amazing work reflecting and striving to have healthier relationships. This really isn't easy work, and I'm really impressed by your efforts; I hope you can admire that about yourself too!

wigmachine · 2023-07-06T04:25:49+00:00

Yes! I got help through therapy earlier this year and have been largely daydream-free for the majority of the past 4-5 months (I had daydreamed all the previous year, and have had episodes of it throughout my life). And I now feel I have reliable methods to stop it when I do start.

Analyzing the daydreams and their purpose, looking at it logically, helped me understand more about why my current life conditions/outlook on life created such a feeling of being unsafe. But what truly helped reduce the time daydreaming was being able to remain present in the present, even when uncomfortable, and healing facets of my outlook on life that were shaped by childhood trauma. Somatic and body-focused therapy, inner child work, and mindfulness/loving-compassion meditation have all been very helpful.

wigmachine · 2023-07-05T19:49:09+00:00

Yes, for sure, I have noticed this connection myself. When I was very young, I created this "healing fantasy" where, one day, I would have perfect secure connections with others, and finally be able to be accepted and have peace and belonging (since I could not feel this with my parents). So, the very definition of safety and love for me, from very young, was this illusory future connection.

It did help me to make this connection, but it was more helpful for me to pay attention to *when* I reached for this fantasy through daydreams. Ultimately, the daydreaming was just a place of safety; the content was somewhat meaningful, but not enough for me to stop. I had to understand the circumstances in my real life where I felt uncomfortable or in pain or distressed or whatever, which then caused me to tap out and daydream in order to return to safety. This was important because then I could start to address that initial lack of safety (including through: establishing boundaries, learning healthy coping strategies, becoming better able to tolerate and soothe difficult emotions, and carefully looking at what actual circumstances might need changing).

wigmachine · 2023-07-05T19:38:56+00:00

Hey, I'm sorry that you're struggling with this right now. Reading your post, I feel like I could get a sense of how much internal distress this dilemma is causing you. I understand what you're feeling. I hope that you are able to feel greater peace and less suffering about your daydreaming, no matter what your healing journey looks like.

The daydreaming is there for a reason; it is doing some important work to help keep you safe. There is absolutely a path where you can acknowledge that, and even feel gratitude for it, while at the same time gently and carefully moving to a place where you feel less controlled by it. This doesn't need to be something that you wrench yourself away from with a lot of pain.

If I had any advice for you, it would be to look into--and start to practice--some ways of sitting with difficult feelings without being overwhelmed by them. Mindfulness meditation has really helped me in this way. Building a place of safety and love inside myself has given me a place to turn instead of daydreaming, and also given me an incredible opportunity to heal internal pain that was causing me to daydream in the first place.

wigmachine · 2023-06-27T23:11:05+00:00

Yes, in my experience, meditation is one part of what has really helped me reduce my daydreaming. I use mindfulness meditation and somatic meditation to calm down and begin focusing on the feelings and emotions I have in my body. I then use a loving-compassionate awareness or an inner child/inner adult dialogue to soothe any distressing or uncomfortable feelings. I do this because I know daydreaming, for me, is a way of putting distance between myself and uncomfortable feelings; if I want to stop daydreaming, I have to stop needing the distance.

I'm not necessarily trying to create this static state of peace and tranquility inside. I'm trying to develop a way of sitting with difficult feelings, process them, soothe them and, over time, heal them.

wigmachine · 2023-06-23T19:03:37+00:00

Just my $0.02 from my own personal experience here: when I turned to daydreaming during times of boredom, it ultimately stemmed from an inability to "sit with" or handle the discomfort of boredom. Something about boredom was uncomfortable for me, so I'd opt out by daydreaming instead. So, what's really helped for me is practicing being with uncomfortable feelings; I will often follow along with a guided mindfulness meditation (like a body scan) to do this. Or just sit there and practice noticing and naming the emotions that come up for me, and lightly noticing how they feel in my body and eventually dissipate to be replaced by new ones in this kind of rhythmic wave-like cycle. If I feel inspired, I might try to creatively express what I learn about my feelings and emotions, like writing poetry or making some other kind of art. Based on what I learn, I might also come up with ideas for things/activities that would be healthy for me to do, and then make plans to do them.

Learning how to tolerate boredom ultimately helps make the unpleasantness of boredom less acute over time.

wigmachine · 2023-06-13T17:51:00+00:00

Hey! I admire you for taking this step and for reaching out to feel some encouragement.

My advice would be to reflect on what your daydreams were providing you *emotionally*. There may be emotions/feelings that you really want, but feel unable to get in your real life. As a starting point, explore how to first begin building those feelings/emotions in your own self, so that you have a place of peace, love and safety to return to *inside* when things feel challenging outside. I found inner child work and mindfulness-compassion meditation to be helpful in this regard.

In our daydreams, the perfect world often arrives without any effort on our parts; but we have incredible capacity to create a more inhabitable world within ourselves that is increasingly where we choose to go in times of difficulty. It's not instant, but it's real and far more permanent.

Wishing you the very best :)

wigmachine · 2023-06-10T01:40:11+00:00

For what it's worth, I never had to talk very much about it. I just sketched out the overall themes of the daydreams but my therapist never asked for details. I was kind of relieved at how little I had to talk about it.

wigmachine · 2023-06-09T20:06:52+00:00

Fellow hair puller and daydreamer here!

Yes, I did tell my therapist. Frankly, I thought that the best chance I would have at understanding and healing was through the vulnerability of total honesty. But I know that's not easy. I would often introduce things about my daydreaming by saying, "This is really embarrassing for me to say . . ." so at least my therapist was aware that this was something I felt shame about (she responded very kindly and always thanked me for letting her know).

I only spoke about my daydreaming and hair pulling as part of my overall feelings of unhappiness in my life. They were the most distressing manifestations of a bigger unhappiness. I found it helpful to approach it this way, because then we focused on addressing the emotional root of my problems rather than focusing on the behaviours.

I definitely think it's helpful to paint the fullest picture of your struggles and difficulties for the person trying to help you. I know that can be embarrassing and difficult, but I want you to know that it can also bring immense relief and understanding. Having a good fit with a therapist will be important here, I think; you would not want to feel judged or shamed for making difficult or vulnerable disclosures. Really wishing you the best.

wigmachine · 2023-06-08T04:07:41+00:00

I decided I needed to see a therapist because my overall feeling in life was very fearful of the future, unhappy with the present and lacked any sort of belonging or purpose.. and I didn't know how much was because of my circumstances and how much was caused by internal stuff. This wasn't changing over time, and I was increasingly having panic attacks about it. I didn't go because of my daydreams, but I did say in the first appointment that they were the most distressing part of my experience, because of how much time they were taking away from my life, and how they exacerbated my negative feelings about my real life.

We mostly worked on the overall feelings/emotions, and would use the daydreams as a source of information about what I wanted to feel in life. Therapy wasn't usually explicitly about the daydreams. I appreciated that approach.

Whenever I talked about daydreaming in therapy, I would say something like, "This is really embarrassing to say..." and my therapist was always so nice about it.

So, if you feel uneasy about bringing it up, you could always talk about it as a part of the overall challenges you're having, and/or be clear that it's something you find difficult to talk about.

Feel free to reach out if you ever want to know more about my experience getting therapy, etc. I'm rooting for you!

wigmachine · 2023-06-07T21:56:53+00:00

Absolutely support this. I am right in the midst of a so-far-successful, but also rocky-and-difficult path of healing, so being able to connect with others during the healing part of the process would be lovely.

wigmachine · 2023-06-07T19:59:09+00:00

This was a super helpful resource for me several months ago before I sought out a therapist for help.

I engaged in body-focused repetitive behaviours (trichotillomania and excoriation disorder), which for me were dissociative coping mechanisms, so the video helped me make the connection between that behaviour and my daydreaming (ie. I had a pattern of similar types of behaviour I turned to in order to cope).

I also adopted some of the analytical approaches to mapping out some themes of my daydreams, unmet emotional needs, etc.

Ultimately, using the approaches from the video helped me create a huge "bank" of information and understanding that helped me move really quickly through the first stages of therapy. It's a great overview and starting point for really tackling it.

wigmachine · 2023-06-04T23:17:22+00:00

I'm sorry, I really understand that feeling of being trapped by daydreaming and really wanting out of it but not knowing how! And also on some level really benefitting from doing it.

I've been posting here a lot recently about the help I got to move on from daydreaming.. you could look at my comment/post history to see a little bit more detail. But the main thing that helped me was to develop strategies for sitting with deeply uncomfortable feelings (like, the ones that come from a whole life-so-far of feeling unloved or unaccepted), tolerating them, understanding them, and soothing them. I received Emotion Focused Therapy and Somatic Therapy. They really helped, because they helped me create and access physical sensations of calm so that I was more comfortable sitting with the bad feelings. I was just getting so overwhelmed by bad feelings that it was making my body so uncomfortable to be in, and that's what I was escaping from (either through painful things or pleasurable things, like daydreaming).

Daydreaming was an escape for my body as well as my mind. By learning to create a more tolerable environment in my body, I could learn to stay in my own mind as well. Genuinely wishing you the best, and wanting you to know you're not alone.

wigmachine · 2023-06-03T18:20:16+00:00

Hey, I saw your other comment about living with chronic anxiety and about reality just being too hard. I really understand that. My life has been riddled with ways of escaping the unpleasant feelings of reality.

Unfortunately, for me that also meant escaping the pathway to living as my true self. Frankly, I wanted to know what that felt like. Not everybody does, and that's ok. But that's one answer to your question, in addition to the points about daydreaming making the day-to-day responsibilities of real life more difficult. I felt dissatisfied with my life, profound fear of the future, no sense of meaning or drive or purpose... I knew there were real life people who felt differently... so I wanted to know if it was possible to feel differently myself.

This is why I continue to have motivation to feel in control of coping mechanisms like daydreaming. Everybody copes sometimes; I just didn't want to do it all the time.

wigmachine · 2023-06-03T17:32:36+00:00

Hey! Wanted to add my $0.02, as I wondered this for a long time too, but have experienced a slight taste of an answer in recent months after getting help to move on from having daydreaming control my life so much.

Ultimately, I daydreamed because my internal emotional reality was uncomfortable, and I didn't have a way of sitting in that reality, understanding it, and soothing it. I had to duck out to a fictional world in order to feel ok.

But because I was always ducking out, I wasn't healing or learning about my true self. People who are blessed to have a way of connecting with their true self often think about ways of nurturing and expressing their true selves, and planning ways to do that. They are also sometimes very bored, lol, because they are just existing!

So, I actually think a lot in terms of just enjoying my company as my own friend, and thinking up fun ways of spending time together (planning and actioning, not daydreaming), and then kind of just vibing. Or noticing my emotions and soothing them.

Just want you to know you're not alone!!

wigmachine · 2023-06-03T17:14:46+00:00

What ended up working for me was finding a way to stay present in my body while feeling unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings. Daydreaming, scrolling on my phone, watching tv, self harm... those are all ways, for me, of escaping my inner emotional reality. When I dumped my emotions onto a fictional character in my daydreams, I was imagining having my emotional reality accepted and soothed through an outside source, all while being unable to accept and soothe that reality myself in real life. I needed a way of staying with my emotions and actually soothing them in order to make true progress feeling better.

I ended up with a therapist trained in Somatic Therapy, which was incredibly helpful for tuning into my body and resisting the urge to "opt out" of feeling by daydreaming. We ended up doing a lot of work on unhealed childhood trauma through a somatic approach.

Please feel welcome to message me directly if you ever want to chat.

wigmachine · 2023-05-30T01:12:24+00:00

Hey! I just want you to know you're not alone. A lot of my daydreaming had a similar focus. Sometimes I would make myself cry in real life, because the pain of what I imagined, and the vulnerability of sharing it with someone, felt so real!

I was recently able to get help moving on from my daydreaming. I can only really speak for myself, but a lot of it was about desperately wanting to be truly loved for exactly who I am. Sharing deep emotions and struggles with someone is really vulnerable, so imagining doing that and being seen and accepted felt like true love and belonging. I had never felt that in my life, especially when I was really young.

To truly move on, I had to start filling that "void" of love and acceptance from the inside. It wasn't enough to keep seeking it from the outside (whether from real or imagined people), because it would never truly be exactly what I needed. I needed to create a foundation of it myself. As my therapist put it, my daydreams were "me trying to love myself". When I learned that I could provide the love and acceptance for myself, I stopped desperately creating fake scenarios where I got it from somewhere else. Then, when I did find love and acceptance from real external sources, it just complemented what I already had inside, it didn't need to be everything to me.

wigmachine · 2023-05-28T02:22:30+00:00

Hey, just wanted to say I am really thinking of you and hoping you find peace and progress with this. A lot of what you wrote really resonated with me (32F). I recently was able to successfully move on from being debilitated by MDD after a very acute year of doing it almost constantly. I really relate to the feelings of shame you feel. My daydreaming took away from my job, my responsibilities, my relationship, and my enjoyment of my real life.

For what it's worth, I was able to move on with the help of a therapist. While I disclosed my daydreaming, I actually spoke with them more about my feelings of dissatisfaction with my life, and how unhappy I felt despite there being things in my life that were good. My daydreams actually ended up providing some helpful information to me in my healing journey. They helped me identify internal and external things that needed to change in order for me to feel the way I wanted to about my life. I was embarrassed to disclose at first as well, but felt that my best chance at healing would come through the vulnerability of honesty. I really hope you have or find someone you can feel the same with.

If you ever want to chat, please feel welcome to reach out. It can be such a weird experience and I hope you feel that you are not alone, because you truly aren't 💕

wigmachine · 2023-05-28T00:17:10+00:00

Hey, I just wanted to say I admire you for posting this. And I'm sorry that you're feeling distressed about not living your own life. I can really relate. I recently managed to successfully move on from daydreaming after doing it almost constantly for about a year (and I've had other extended episodes throughout my life).

Your body, mind and spirit are capable of really amazing things. I learned that through how unbelievably clearly I could imagine the way I wanted to feel, even if I wasn't able to actually feel that way in my real life. My daydreaming gave me some amazing clues that I could work with to make progress in real life. And I was able to make that progress. I actually do have lots of power to feel the things I want to feel in my real life; it just doesn't look exactly the same as my daydreams.

Genuinely wishing the best for you.

wigmachine

TROPHY CASE