The Danger of Fantasy

 

 

I did a recent YouTube video called When You’re Living a Lie in which I explained that the result of lying to yourself, or lying to maintain a relationship or situation in your life, is an inevitable crash. I mentioned some ways that you could be lying to yourself, and one of those, is through fantasy. 

 

In this episode, I want to go more in depth on the dangers of fantasy as it relates to narcissistic abuse and life in general. This is a big topic for people who spent years or decades in an abusive relationship, and especially those who grew up in a family like that. You might not even realize that this is happening, because that’s the unfortunate nature of lying to ourselves.

  

Are you looking for a licensed therapist to help you in your recovery? As you probably know, I no longer offer one-on-one coaching sessions so I’ve partnered with BetterHelp, an online portal of licensed therapists providing affordable therapy to you from the comforts and privacy of your home. You can talk with your therapist via video sessions, phone, chat and online messaging. BetterHelp is available worldwide and you can get matched with a therapist within 24h. When you visit BetterHelp.com/integration  you’ll get 10% off your first month. You’ll find the direct link in the show notes. That link will take you to their intake questionnaire where you’ll answer some questions about what you want to work on. Be sure to check the box for abuse and trauma so they can match you with a therapist who specializes in that area. If at any point you want to switch therapists, you can also do that at no additional charge. 

 

 

When you find yourself trying to make an abusive relationship work, or hoping that an abuser will change, you’re living in a fantasy. When you’re in a state of untruth like that, you’ll do all kinds of mental gymnastics to rationalize or justify why you make the decisions you do and why you should keep doing it because it’s the right thing to do or because you’re helping someone and that’s a good thing. 

 

Last year I saw Leah Remini on the Joe Rogan podcast, it was actually a show from 2017. Leah was talking about her experiences in, and her escape from, a cult called Scientology. At one point she said, “You really believe that you’re doing amazing things for the world, so you go into it thinking you’re helping yourself and others.” 

 

Getting pulled into a cult fantasy isn’t all that different than a soul mate fantasy that can get you into a relationship with a predator. This fantasy can come about from a childhood in which you weren’t loved unconditionally by your parents. The perfect soul mate fantasy is also promoted by Disney and other toxic culture. Disney movies by the way are full of narcissistic abuse triggers and subliminal sexualization messages. When you’re in an abusive relationship, family or cult and you keep telling yourself that you’re doing the right thing to help others, you’re living in a fantasy. In that fantasy, you can’t see how toxic that situation is for you and how dangerous it is to your health, sanity and wellbeing to keep trying to help someone who is hurting you.

 

Many predators take advantage of a target’s soul mate fantasy and pretend they are everything that person has been waiting for. They are very convincing too. Some people use the term twin flames instead of soul mates and you’ll see a lot of abuse wrapped in spirituality in those communities. They’ll convince you that your narcissist or sociopath who keeps dropping you every time it gets real is just caught in a “runner dynamic”. They’ll even teach you that what you perceive as abuse is merely the rebalancing of past life karma that you had with that person. Um, no. Look, I wanted to believe in soul mates too and that fantasy got me into trouble with abusive men that I was convincing myself were my soulmates. If you still want to believe in soul mates, then at least be sure you also understand that some soul mates are just lessons. It doesn’t mean you need to be together forever. You can learn a powerful lesson from someone without holding onto an abusive relationship. Soulmates or not, an abusive relationship is no bueno. 

 

 

This is often the result of being raised by a narcissistic or other disordered parent or parents, or even a narcissist-codependent couple. That can translate into adulthood where you’re always in trouble and need someone to rescue you from your life or pay your bills. Or, maybe you live a very meager life and spend every day fantasizing about your prince in shining armor who will one day show up and save you from that life. It could also be the opposite where you want to be the rescuer so you fantasize about finding your damsel in distress then swooping in and being the hero. 

 

The rescue fantasy goes beyond romantic relationships too. We now have a growing percentage of people in society with this same fantasy. It wasn’t like that in the generations of our parents and grandparents. Maybe because of the aftermath of The Great Depression, people learned that there was no savior, no one was coming to feed their children, so they had to grow their own food and figure things out or starve and watch their kids die. Nowadays there is a cultural shift where people are projecting a rescue fantasy onto politicians and the State, hoping that some authority figure or system will save them from their life and give them free stuff to make life easier. We are seeing a rise in the popularity of socialism nowadays as this rescue fantasy trend grows, especially among millennials. What’s scary is that people forgot what socialism brought to society not even 100 years ago. Hitler’s party was the Socialist party of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s party was also the Socialist party of Fascist Italy. Socialism is about the State controlling all the resources. When the State is run by psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, and perhaps a very small percentage of decent people who unfortunately also lack integrity, nothing good will come of that.

 

History is doomed to repeat itself if we keep fantasizing that things will be different this time because we finally have that one hero with integrity who is going to save the day and actually do something good. “This one is going to be different this time!” The very definition of insanity.

 

As George Carlin said, politicians are a result of garbage in, garbage out. It’s all garbage on the political stage and if you are expecting to get rescued by any politician or State, you’re living in a fantasy. I see a similar but opposite rescue fantasy here in Mexico as a lot of people don’t want this socialist president and they're hoping for the USA to step in with another neoliberal coup d’etat to save them and run off with their resources like the huge amount of lithium discovered in the northern part of the country. As if history doesn’t warn us just how destructive is USA’s history of carrying out regime change around the world. I’m not even talking distant history. Bolivia was just a few months ago. 

 

It’s not your fault if you fell into these rescue fantasies promoted by society, just as it wasn’t your fault if you developed a rescue fantasy due to the failure of your parents. When you feel victimized, it’s natural to want someone to save you and make it all better. 

 

However, the bottom line is, it is no one’s responsibility to rescue you but your own. We have to save ourselves. When you surrender your power to a rescue fantasy, you are setting yourself up to be abused by someone who shows up masquerading as the rescuer that you’ve been waiting for. That can happen on an interpersonal level and also a societal level. If you’re so focused on the fantasy of being rescued, you’ll minimize, rationalize and justify any signs of abuse that you see. 

 

It’s important to understand once you’re an adult, that mommy and daddy aren’t going to rescue you. Neither is your favorite presidential candidate. The Powers That Be have a vested interest in infantilizing the population so that people are locked in a state of immaturity, irresponsibility and helplessness so they don’t take responsibility for themselves and instead they keep looking outside for an authority figure to rescue them. They anaesthisize the masses through mind-numbing entertainment and fear propaganda in the news. If people don’t wake up to reality and take responsibility for their lives, we are surely headed toward a state of Idiocracy as the 2005 movie projected. Looking around, you might agree that we are well on our way. 

 

 

Fantasy corresponds to Flight in the 4F stress response states that Pete Walker writes about in his book on C-PTSD. Flight is escapism and avoidance. A fantasy is about escaping reality. 

 

If you notice the tendency to indulge in fantasy as an escape, it may be helpful to look back at childhood and see how that served you as a survival mechanism. It’s totally understandable to have relied on fantasy to get through an inescapable situation where you were completely dependent on an abusive person or maybe simply in a horrible situation or living conditions. However, it’s also important to notice how, now as an adult, that tendency to escape into fantasy isn’t really helping you in life, and in fact, it’s probably setting you back. You can engage in the fantasy of having a better life or you can take action to make that happen. Now of course you have to dream up the possibility first because your imagination is what starts the process of manifestation. But you can’t stay in your imagination and hope that things will just show up for you or that someone will save you. You actually have to take action, to do the work, in order to transform your life. And you won’t be able to create the changes you want to see in your life if you’re not grounded in reality. 

 

Let me illustrate this point with an experience I had in 2012. I was living in California and working online teaching English to people around the world, while doing holistic healing on the side. I didn’t want to be teaching English, I wanted to be thriving in my holistic healing business but it wasn’t coming together. When I wasn’t working, I was on Facebook. I mean, it was an addiction. It was my life. And it was pathetic, really. Because of the amount of time I spent on there, the Facebook newsfeed became my main source of reality. Of course I didn’t consciously articulate that to myself, I didn’t even realize what was happening. I was having more interactions on Facebook than in real life. Everything I did in my real life, I would have this mental program that kicked in trying to figure out if it was Facebook-worthy of posting. Made a healthy meal, put that on FB! Juiced today, put that on FB! Saw something interesting, post that on FB! I was valuing my time on Facebook more than my real life and I was using Facebook as a barometer for what was real. Facebook was my escape from a life I didn’t want to be living. 

 

One day I scared myself when I broke through my own fantasy. I was sitting at my laptop, on Facebook, of course, when something happened and I suddenly, consciously realized that I was looking to Facebook as my reality. It actually felt more real than the real life I was living. I’m not sure what happened, it was just a sudden insight that everything was all backwards and I didn’t even realize it before. It really scared me how that could happen. Of course, I didn’t like the reality I was living in at the time so obviously it was preferable to escape into Facebookland. The idea of not going on Facebook for a day felt like insanity, when in reality just the opposite was true. At the time, I was still way too connected to abusive people in my family and I was surrounded by other narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. Instead of dealing with the mess of my life, I’d just open Facebook and shift into that reality. It took me a while to break that addiction and I actually had to take the Facebook apps off my phone in 2017. Finally by the end of 2018, I would barely go on there any more even from my laptop. 

 

Social media is currently the most powerful entity or entities curating the perception of reality for millions of people who misuse it as I did. I fell right into the psychological manipulation trap! The press and other forms of media is another very powerful controller of the narrative, and these sources often show up in your social media feed. Facebook has declared itself an authority on reality by censoring posts it deems to be fake news, while promoting mainstream media channels that have been promoting fake news for years. Other social media sites do something similar. They’re selling a fantasy and exploiting human psychology, and very covertly. Many people are getting their news from their Facebook or Twitter feed, which is scary. What’s scarier yet are recent studies showing that most people only read the headlines. Headlines are often a gross misrepresentation of the truth used to provoke an emotional reaction and push a political bias or narrative. What people perceive as reality is often gaslighting, misinformation or highly manipulated information. The nature of reality is much different than we are taught to believe. This year, in 2020, hopefully more people will start to see that as society and its structures begin to dismantle. Saturn and Pluto meeting in Capricorn on Jan 12th is going to bring a powerful reckoning with reality in society’s structures that will last for decades until those 2 planets meet again in another sign. It can be scary to face reality when it’s ugly, but ultimately it’s much healthier to be standing on something real. 

 

The subconscious mind can’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined. The same body responses are produced if you’re just imagining something or if something is really happening. Hormones are released, emotions are felt. So if you’re fantasizing and lost in your imagination, you could be generating emotions that aren’t based in reality. But the emotions feel very real. That can cause confusion when you are being confronted with reality. That confusion will cause you to make poor decisions based on the fantasy, not reality. It’s even more difficult to trust your emotions when you’re not sure if they’re about something real. If you want to be able to trust yourself more, you’ve got to be honest with yourself. 

 

A couple months ago I did a podcast episode called Prisoners of Childhood, about Alice Miller’s book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. She writes about the very short window of opportunity for us as newborns in our first days and weeks of life to get the healthy attachment experience with our mothers and receive unconditional love. For those of us who were raised by a mother with a personality disorder, or a codependent mother who was distracted with care-taking her abusive partner, or really a variety of other things like war trauma, poverty and illness, in these cases, we didn’t get that healthy emotional attachment or the unconditional love that we needed at a very crucial time of our development. Miller’s work tells us that we can never recover that early life loss. If we missed the opportunity, it’s gone. I think this is why we can overcome our codependency patterns and greatly improve the CPTSD symptoms, however we never entirely heal because we missed that window of opportunity to get the secure emotional attachment. The experience of insecure attachment with the mother can create in the child who grows into an adult, a fantasy of finding unconditional love in another human. This is merely a fantasy of an unmet need from childhood. However, it’s not reality to expect this from a partner, friend or anyone else. The bad news is, it’s no one else’s job to love you unconditionally as an adult. 

 

Derrek Jaxn wrote in his book Don’t Forget Your Crown, “Unconditional love is dangerous.” He goes on to say that unconditional love, “turns a woman’s intuition off when it’s telling her she’s supposed to leave. It offers her denial when a man’s actions say he’s not doing any better than he was before the last time he apologized. It removes consequences of actions that don’t align with words. It allows the line between imperfect and not worth it to blur... It’s no coincidence that everything in life worth having comes with conditions. Conditions like abuse, toxicity, and yes, infidelity should absolutely be conditions.” 

 

It’s a great book and I highly recommend it. Of course men can apply those same principles to women, it’s just that the book was written mainly for a female audience. 

 

I was brainwashed by some spiritual mentors and partners to believe that we were supposed to love others unconditionally. For years, I had an inner conflict with that because I had seen that tenet used to justify and excuse abuse within spiritual circles and in relationships with spiritual narcissists and psychopaths. When I read Jaxn’s book last year, I finally got it.

 

 

The problem is that those of us who missed the early life secure emotional attachment that Miller wrote about, will unconsciously look for unconditional love in others as adults. This is something that codependents can find themselves doing as well as narcissists or other personality disordered individuals. This is actually what we have in common with them and this is why people with codependency and narcissism form such a perfect abuse dynamic. As Miller wrote, we have to do the inner work to face the feelings and grieve the loss of what we never had and never will have, so we can stop repeating those painful experiences compulsively as adults. Until we do that work, we will keep allowing people into our lives who treat us like we were treated in childhood due to the fantasy of unconditional love. 

 

If you’re still projecting a fantasy onto one or both of your parents that one day they’ll love you unconditionally or be emotionally available to truly love you, this will cause an extension of that fantasy onto others. The compulsive fantasizing as a child can also lead to pleasure-seeking and immediate gratification in adulthood. These behaviors will often manifest as addictions and those won’t help you to create fulfilling, healthy relationships or success in life. 

 

 

Idealization is dangerous because it’s a fantasy. It’s about the ideal idea of a person, not a real person. We often talk about the idealization phase when the narcissist or other abuser love-bombs the target, but we don’t usually talk about how, through this process, the target learns to idealize the abuser and others. I did a video a couple years ago called The Flipside of Idealization that you might want to check out. You can end up idealizing anyone that you admire or view as an authority figure and that can blind you from seeing who they really are. Even if they’re not abusive, it’s not healthy for you to put someone on a pedestal because one day you will feel disappointed when you when you realize that they are human and not the ideal of perfection that you might have thought. lt’s also not fair to them because that’s a lot of pressure to feel like you have to live up to someone else’s ideals or expectations. When you’re idealizing someone, you’re seeing a fantasy and you don’t see the person. 

 

Idealization can cause another condition called Oneitis. I think just about everyone has suffered from this at least once. Oneitis is when you get the dangerous idea that someone is the One for you, when you barely know this person. You’re simply infatuated with the idea of who you think that person is and how perfect they are for you. The hormones and emotions will convince you that you’re right, he or she has to be the One. This can cause you over time to overlook or forgive abuse, low value behavior or lack of real life compatibility. It can also make you not see that he’s just not that into you, which is the title of another really helpful book. I imagine that book could be somewhat useful to men as well, even though it was written for an audience of women. The movie was cute but the book is better. 

 

When you indulge in a fantasy, that puts you into the dopamine seeking feedback loop where you need more and more to get the same feeling of euphoria. The fantasy becomes an addiction and all addictions will affect your life in a negative way. The crazy thing though, is when you’re in the fantasy, you can’t see reality. You might get flashes or glimpses of lucidity but the gravitational pull of the fantasy and the dopamine rush is very mesmerizing. 

 

 

Culture is collectively grooming us to indulge in fantasy so we don’t question or see reality. It’s just like when you meet an abuser. They’ll immediately start curating a fantasy, often personalized for you and your hopes and dreams for the future. This is called future-faking. They’ll combine that with embellishments so you think you’ve found your soul mate (in a romantic sense) or everything you’re looking for in a friend or work situation. You’ll become so lost in the fantasy that you’ll later refuse to see reality even when hard evidence appears before your eyes. You won’t want to let go of the fantasy, the idea of it all, and you’ll likely fight for it at your own expense. That idea of what it was or would be, is often the hardest thing to let go of after an abusive relationship. 

 

We are seeing an increase in technology-generated fantasies lately and this trend will likely grow into the 2020s. Studies show that when children watch violence on TV, video games or online, it's indistinguishable to them from real violence. If you notice your kids having aggressive impulses and you’re not modeling the acceptability of aggression through your relationship with their other parent, then you probably want to take a look at what media they’re ingesting. The iChildren of today live in a very different reality than how I grew up. We had TV back then, but just 3 channels of crap plus the public broadcast channel. I didn’t have cable TV at home until high school and that advent was suddenly like exposure to a very different reality. Around that time the internet was starting to become available to the public. It took 15-20 minutes to load Yahoo, so it certainly didn’t have the horsepower it does today. TV also isn’t interactive like the tech devices kids have today. The social media phenomenon requires feedback from the hive and all of that forms part of a user’s perception of reality, which in most cases, is a fantasy. 

 

Kids are becoming ever more desensitized to violence through video games, entertainment, music, movies, series and other online activity. Violence is becoming normalized to their nervous systems through repeated exposure. Of course that’s going to lead to an increase in fantasies of violence, which is going to lead to more people acting out those fantasies in society. 

 

In Chinese medicine they say, where the yi goes, the qi follows. Where the mind goes, the energy follows. Be careful where you’re sending your energy because that’s what will grow in your life. If you’re sending your energy to a fantasy, then you’re growing your avoidance and escapism from reality, and one day that bubble will burst. If you’re channeling your energy into revenge fantasies, you’re reinforcing your victimhood and you’re growing feelings of bitterness, resentment and aggression. What you think about a lot, you can end up acting on if you aren’t careful. And that could have consequences that you don’t like. 

 

We are also seeing a cultural trend of promoting empathy for for psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists and normalizing their behavior through movies and series with characters like Dexter, Arya Stark, Joker, Lucifer and Joe from the series YOU. You’ll hear justifications for their heinous actions with phrases like “you did what you had to do”. This is a very dangerous fantasy to believe that you can abuse or even kill people as long as you justify that it’s just what you had to do. There’s no self-responsibility when a person is using their victimhood as an excuse for carrying out violence. I feel like the Powers That Be are planting these ideas into people’s minds through Hollywood in order to induce viewers into the fantasy of revenge killing and violence while minimizing it as merely justice or necessary. It’s scary to see how many people had a Stockholm reaction to the recent Joker movie, justifying his violent actions, idealizing him and blaming society for what he chose to do of his own free will. It goes along with the faction of Social Justice Warriors who justify any kind of violence as long as it’s a reaction to abuse, or worse yet, as a reaction to feeling offended by someone’s opinions. This is not sane and it will only lead to more violence and fascist censorship. We have to take responsibility for ourselves and not allow our minds to drift into the cultural fantasy. 

 

Our current culture is promoting other toxic fantasies through reality TV drama, celebrity worship, and books like 50 Shades of Gray that promote the abuse fantasy disguised as love. 

 

Along the lines of idealization and fantasy, men can get caught up in the fantasy of pornography where they see an idealized version of a woman who appears very willing and available to be objectified and have her body desecrated at the service of his pleasure. So men who view a lot of porn, unconsciously seek out this fantasy in real life women, only to be disappointed by the reality that most women don’t want to be treated like that and most women find that kind of sex disgusting. Likewise, women can get caught up in romance novel or RomCom fantasies of an idealized version of a sensitive, romantic guy who makes dramatic gestures of love only to find out that men like that don’t exist, and the ones who pretend to be are usually predators in disguise or poor guys who have been castrated and emasculated by their mothers or radical feminists. The reality is men just don’t think about love and relationships as much as women and they certainly don’t enjoy sitting around talking about feelings like women do.

 

  

Are fantasies all bad? No, they can serve a purpose to help you figure out what you really want in life. If you keep fantasizing about a certain career, lifestyle, or goal, it might mean that you need to start taking action on that instead of just daydreaming about it. You can ask yourself if the fantasy is literal or symbolic of something you want in life or some quality or characteristic that you want to become. 

 

But if you notice that you have an unhealthy fantasy, meaning if you acted on that fantasy and it would not be good for you, others, your relationship, your career or your life in some way, then work on getting yourself grounded in reality again. When you catch yourself fantasizing, always ask yourself, what would be the consequences (to myself and others) if I acted on this fantasy? If the answer is not good, then it’s a good idea to stop allowing yourself to indulge in the fantasy because the more you think about it, the more likely you are to act on it. This is why I don’t like when people justify fantasizing about someone else when they’re in a committed relationship. Some people will argue that it’s harmless to fantasize about cheating, but I would argue that this is exactly the step that comes before people actually cheat. 

 

So maybe as you are listening to this, you identified an unhealthy fantasy that you have and want to get rid of. When you spend months or years repeating a fantasy over and over again, it won’t just go away when you decide you want to be done with it. It will keep intruding into your mind because it’s like a program that keeps running. Repetition is what writes the fantasy into your reality script even though it’s totally not real. But remember your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between what you’re imagining and what’s really happening. If you want to stop the fantasy from replaying, you’ll need a confrontation with the truth and reality. This means you’ll need to catch yourself and interrupt the fantasy any time it takes over, then remind yourself why it’s not based in reality or truth and what you need to pay attention to instead. With practice, you’ll eventually stop your mind from that fantasy repetition so you can get on with your real life. 

 

Maybe your fantasy involves another person who is in your life. You might be confused about the relationship due to the fantasy blurring the lines of reality. In this case, you might need to get a reality check from the other person. The best way to do that is to speak the truth. You’ll quickly find out if it’s real or just a fantasy. The fantasy will always collapse under the light of the truth. If the relationship or situation can’t survive the truth, then it’s not real and doesn’t belong in your life unless you are looking for more suffering. Standing in the truth and accepting the consequences can be tough, even painful. No one wants to find out the ugly truth that we didn’t want to see. However, it’s better to get it over with so you can get realigned with what’s real. The longer you put it off, the worse the crash will be and the more time and energy you’ll have lost. 

 

This isn’t based on anything scientific, just a speculation of mine. I think we will eventually realize that dementia unexplained by organic causes is the inevitable result of living a life of fantasy. I’ve never met or heard of anyone who had dementia that wasn’t that way. I’ve seen in my family and heard of other cases where narcissists develop dementia, and I believe that’s because of their life-long fantasies of grandeur, superiority, entitlement and whatnot. I've also seen in my family and heard of other codependents who never did the recovery work, who also developed dementia. I think that’s because codependents who don’t do the work of recovery are also living in a fantasy world where they’re telling themselves that they’re fine and everything is great, but it’s not. 

 

 

A little fantasy won’t hurt anyone, but when it becomes a pattern of escapism and avoidance, it’s surely having a negative effect on your life. I highly recommend you give yourself a reality check around any fantasies that you’ve been indulging in and speak the truth in your relationships so you can see what’s real and what belongs in your life. Your ability to discern fantasy from reality is going to be an ever important life skill as technology advances and manipulation like collective gaslighting becomes even more subtle and pervasive.