Leaving Fantasy Behind And Returning To Reality
The targets of abuse have a core vulnerability which they often overlook, and their tendency to miss it lies in its very nature: Dissociation.
Targets of abuse often come from emotionally-deprivating families. In many cases, they have also experienced overt abuse. Whether it is the trauma of neglect, the trauma of active harm, or both, the pain of their experience gets too much. The reality becomes too much. To know that the person you love is doing you harm, and to feel the effects of that, is unbearable. The answer to this predicament is dissociation, and with that, drifting into fantasy in order to make the unbearable bearable.
Complex trauma is like a ball of immense fear, shame and guilt which erupts over and over, depending on the challenge or stressor you are currently facing. As complex trauma arises, it overwhelms your mind, internal balance and consciousness. During this time, there is a break in reality. You drift into another realm.
This dissociated state can simply be a gap in memory, paired with a numbness of feeling. It is relief from the immensity of the complex trauma within you. Other times, dissociation is paired with fantasy; a lucid, waking dream which aims to reframe reality to make it more bearable.
You might imagine a brighter future for yourself which requires no input from you; it simply happens by chance, because you are ‘blessed’. You might see a person who intrigues you, and picture what being with them is like. In this fantasy, they probably grow very interested in and fond of you. Maybe you end up married and living happily ever after.
The fact that you have never even spoken to that stranger does not bother your fantasy. The fact that you have taken no active steps toward achieving your imagined success also does not give you pause.
The Consequences Of Dissociation And Fantasy
As you might have realised, it is highly problematic for a person to have constant gaps in their memory, and then to fill those gaps with ‘experiences’ not based in reality.
The tendency to dissociate and fantasise has many dire consequences, such as:
Impeded Learning
We learn about the world when we feel safe. Our emotions are managed, and we can focus enough to absorb whatever concepts we need. Details interest us, and paint our understanding of the world with many shades of grey.
From a dissociated state, however, facts are overlooked. Important concepts are glossed over and become abstractions. The details aren’t filled in.
For example, a person viewing the world from a dissociated state will talk about that street they visited, with all those trees. A person grounded in reality will know the name of the street, where it was located, that it is popular with tourists, remember some of the stores, and vividly recall how it felt to be there. With a grip on reality, knowledge and experience are integrated.
Inability To Handle Emotions
Living in fantasy means a person has little practice in understanding and processing their feelings.
Emotions can come in any intensity, and in any combination. They are often complex and hard to hold. People who dissociate either feel too little and fail to react to situations, or they feel too much and overreact.
An inability to handle emotions can destroy a friendship or relationship. People need constant emotional attunement, and tend to distance themselves if you are too numb or cold. Up-and-down emotions can confuse your loved ones and push them away.
The dissociated person typically has no idea what they are feeling or what they want, and so misses out on getting their needs filled. Emotional dysregulation can also destabilise your life, or hurt your finances or your career when you fail to control your impulses.
Poor Memory
A person who dissociates will have gaps in their memory. It’s not uncommon for the dissociated person to forget most of their childhood. They can be forgetful in general, losing track of objects or forgetting important events and appointments.
The Greatest Danger of Dissociation And Fantasy
A person must be engaged with the world to have control over their life. Yet people who dissociate are not engaged with reality, and will defer their identity and life decisions to others; people who are more engaged and supposedly know better. The dissociated person will relinquish control to an abuser.
This deferral of control leaves you open to manipulation. Because the dissociated person does not have a well-informed ego to mediate and set boundaries, the abuser gets easy access.
In general, fantasy and dissociation arise randomly, and have no real coherence. They are simply coping mechanisms for an episode of complex trauma arising within. However, when you meet a psychopath or narcissist, the haphazard chaos of your waking dream coalesces into a singular fantasy: The perfect world of the narcissist.
The narcissist lathers their apparent confidence and charm on you, and showers you with love. When you tend to imagine perfect, beautiful outcomes, this will appeal greatly to you. Rather than having random fantasies about varying people and ideal situations, you consolidate your fantasy world into a single person.
The narcissist drip feeds you promises of a wonderful future, while soothing you and charming you in the moment. If you lose focus, or begin to doubt the narcissist’s fantasy world, they will provoke your complex trauma by shaming, terrifying or guilting you. Because you tend to escape your negative emotions, you cling further to the fantasy, and the narcissist restores their control over you.
The Treacherous Road Back To Reality
Dissociation and fantasy provide life-saving medicine for the deprived and abused child. These wonderful coping mechanisms carry you through childhood and adolescence like a lush cloud.
Yet as we have explored, there is a great price to pay for this solution. You miss what reality has to offer, you stunt your growth, and you remain vulnerable to abusers.
When you dissociate and fantasise, there is no longer someone in the driver’s seat. Nobody is home to take care of the house. The journey back to reality will therefore involve returning to the driver’s seat, while learning to penetrate reality a bit at a time.
The fantasy realm is like being in a shell which shields you from the turbulence of reality. This shell is made up of a lifetime of layers which have made the fantasy realm become your reality.
If fantasy has become your default, then reality will not come easily to you. This means you will need to make a conscious effort to punch through the fantasy shell and reach into reality to help you transform.
Some methods for penetrating reality are:
Awakening And Deepening Your Breath
When you are dissociated, you typically have no awareness of it. You mightrealise when you have returned from an episode, but only if you are mindful enough.
An aspect of dissociation which is also easy to miss is the tendency to breathe shallow. By reducing your breath to the bare minimum, you numb the discomfort of complex trauma circulating through your body.
By awakening and deepening your breath, you bring your inner reality into focus by regulating your nervous system. Sometimes just one deep breath can be enough to make you realise how anxious, panicky or emotional you are beneath the surface. Above all, you can always be sure that a breath is real. It is always accessible to you, and can ground you in reality.
Two potent exercises for awakening and deepening breath are:
Box Breathing: This exercise is great for relaxing your nervous system and allowing your authentic Self to come into focus. Box breathing involves inhaling and exhaling through the nose at even intervals, all while holding your breath at the end of every exhale and inhale for the same interval. For example: Inhale over a 4-second period, hold your breath for 4 seconds, exhale over a 4-second period, hold your breath for 4 seconds, and repeat. Doing this for anywhere from 10–30 minutes can gradually ease off the fight/flight response. You can find guided box breathing meditations on YouTube.
Wim Hof Method: This exercise helps clear your blood and create a clean slate to feel your inner reality from a calm and awakened baseline. The idea behind this method is to flood your body with oxygen with rapid in and out breathing, breathing out fully at the end, then holding your breath and allowing the remaining oxygen in your blood to circulate for as long as possible. Wim Hof has a guided version of this breathing exercise on YouTube which you can follow. You can do this once or twice daily, especially when you first wake up.
Sharpening Your Visual Focus
How often do you truly see your environment? How often do you truly see people?
The dissociated person often abstracts reality into a ‘photoshopped’ image in their mind. This allows them to never be truly impacted by the fullness and harshness of reality.
When reality gets challenging or threatening, you breathe shallow, abstract people and places, and remain with one foot in the fantasy realm. A practice you can do at any moment is choosing a singular object or person, and directing your visual focus completely on it/them.
If it is something like a table or a painting, take five minutes to just train your sight onto it. Thoughts will arise. You might even lose your focus and dissociate. If so, wait until you return, then sharpen your focus again. Over time, if you stay with it, you will get a sense of what it is to be present and see reality as it is, rather than from a dissociated, abstracted state. The more time you put into this exercise, the more opportunities you give for reality to penetrate.
Another exercise is to make an effort to truly see people. Look into their eyes, relax into your body, and welcome their presence into you. Through your energy and through your eyes, communicate that you see them.
In either case, you will likely be overcome by fear, anxiety, shame or other negative and heavy emotions. This is the power of focusing into reality. You not only see outer reality as it is, but you also feel your inner reality as it is.
Monitor Yourself
With awakened breath and sharpened focus, you will have more access to your feelings than ever. What to do with this emotional storm?
Feeling Into Reality
One option is to default back to dissociation and fantasy. This typically happens by itself without you needing to do anything. However, what you can do is to catch yourself when this happens.
Anxiety, panic, overbearing heaviness; there is a good reason for the dissociation. It is somewhat unfair that you also need to feel the emotions of a lifetime of repression. The releasing of these emotions is hard work.
Faith will guide you through the storm. Letting go is crucial. Expanding into the emotions without engaging in critical thought allows the feelings to release in their own time.
Eventually, you will come to understand the purpose of emotions. You will appreciate the wisdom of them, and how they are trying to help you. Fear is the raw energy you need to take on the unknown and evolve. Anxiety is the readiness to perform in difficult situations. Shame allows you to feel at one with your tribe and empathise with others.
The Driver Emerges
You will dissociate many times a day. There is no need to judge yourself or get upset. Simply make a habit of checking in and being mindful of where you are at any moment. You might catch yourself wondering what happened the last hour as you sat there on the train. Sometimes you will catch the moment where you come back to reality.
As you practice monitoring your connection to reality, you might begin to ask who is the one that notices these shifts from fantasy back into reality. Who is the one that meets you on your return? With this shift, you will begin to notice the emergence of the driver. Your consciousness. Your Higher Self.
Call it what you want, but it is there. It sees all, it knows all, and it feels all. As you deepen your connection with it, you will learn to expand your capacity to remain with it as you welcome more and more emotion into your consciousness. As complex trauma erupts within you, you will reach a point where the driver remains, and the intensity of what you are feeling becomes manageable. You are able to remain with and contain the emotional intensity.
Monitor Your Relationships
This is by far the most difficult to get right.
Fantasy can be so insidious that you fail to realise that an entire relationship is based on fantasy. This is always the case with a narcissist. In other cases, you might even have a psychopath in your life who is pulling your strings, while you continue to interact with them through a fantasy projection.
The first step is to acknowledge this as a potential truth.
Many people will deny facing the truth of their relationships. They fail to investigate how grounded these relationships are in reality. They might see someone who is exploiting them as a fair and loving friend. They might decide that someone who abused them continually is the one who loves them most. Such is the power of fantasy.
Testing your relationships against reality is beyond the scope of this article. Yet as you practice meeting and integrating reality, realisations about your relationships will begin to hit you. The question is: Are you open to the truth, and all the consequences that it brings? Only you know the answer to that.
By remaining present in the moment and feeling your emotions fully, you have a chance to investigate. Your feelings will give you all the wisdom you need — if you allow yourself to feel them.
It makes sense that the more you integrate reality into consciousness, the more space you have to know it. More reality means more truth. Losing the comfort of fantasy is painful. More truth means discomfort and pain.
Yet truth also comes with power. You gain the capacity to not only know reality, but to impact it and shape it. That is your reward for the treacherous journey back from the other side.
Browse more of my articles:
Narcissistic Relationships | Knowing The Narcissist | Abuse Recovery | The Narcissistic Family| Exploring Narcissism | Borderline & Histrionic
Check out my Books on Narcissistic Abuse. You can also Buy Me A Coffee to support my writing.