Escape To Fantasy - Escape to Fantasy is sometimes practiced by people who present a facade to friends, partners and family members. Their true identity and feelings are commonly expressed privately in an alternate fantasy world.
Description:
Escaping to fantasy, or imagining an alternate world is a normal activity for most people. From a very young age, we learn to imagine friends, success, opportunity and sometimes we act on that.
Escape to fantasy can sometimes be a healthy, productive way to self-manage depression, disappointment, hardship & lack of opportunity. Some psychologists hypothesize that depression is really a "depressive realism" - a loss of this ability to believe or pretend that things are better than they actually appear.
Escape to fantasy can sometimes be seen in cults and religions where people adopt an alternate persona or begin to believe that they are not responsible for the consequences of their own actions or vulnerable to the actions of others.
Escape to fantasy can be seen in spectator sports, where the spectator aligns their emotional responses to the fortunes of an adopted favorite. They celebrate their victories and feel their defeats as thought they were their own. It can also be seen in some fans of pop stars or movie stars, who emotionally identify with their idol.
Therefore, escape to fantasy can be a normal, healthy human behavior. However, escape to fantasy becomes dysfunctional when it chronically or systematically interferes with an individual's ability or willingness to take responsibility for their own actions and their ability or willingness to make important choices for themselves.
In personality-disordered individuals, escape to fantasy is closely related to Denial and Dissociation, where the individual chronically replaces facts with feelings.
Examples of Escape To Fantasy:
A man spends a significant amount of time and energy cultivating a fictitious online character.
A woman spends significant time planning her future life as a movie star.
A quiet and shy man takes on an alternate aggressive identity when hidden in the anonymity of a sports crowd.
A woman who is withdrawn around her family secretly engages in impulsive promiscuous sexual activities with people unknown to them.
A man asserts that his new religious belief will effortlessly compensate for his destructive behaviors or decisions made.
What it feels like:
Living with a person who chronically escapes to fantasy can make a partner or family member of an abusive individual feel powerless. If their loved-one's actions are not rooted in reality then there is consequently little they can do in the real world to improve the situation.
It's common for abuse victims to retreat into fantasies of their own, where they imagine a better, safer, more successful life for themselves. The danger comes when the abuse victim replaces reality with fantasy on a systematic basis, and thereby denies themselves the opportunity to make constructive choices for themselves or remove themselves from abusive environments. Escape to fantasy is commonly at the root of Enabling in abuse victims.
Learning to Cope:
A little fantasizing can be fun and therapeutic, but the important thing is to base your big and important decisions on reality. A good therapist can help you over time to separate fact from fiction and to identify the opportunities and risks that can impact your quality of life.
What NOT to Do:
Don't feel guilty about your fantasies - they are a normal way to cope with stress and difficulty.
Don't allow fantasies to become accepted truth in your life.
Don't accept responsibility for another person's behavior just because they fantasize their own responsibility away.
Don't assume a person's fantasy is an accurate reflection of what they believe 100% of the time. Many fantasies are temporary mental departures from reality.
What TO Do:
Try to be honest with yourself about what your fantasies are. Work on separating fact from fiction in your own life. A good Therapist can help you with this.
Journaling - or writing them down can help you see them more objectively.
Remember the Clean-up Rule. Clean up your own messes and let others be accountable for cleaning up theirs.
For More Information & Support...
If you suspect you may have a family member or loved-one who suffers from a personality disorder, we encourage you to learn all you can and surround yourself with support as you learn how to cope.
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