Retreating into one's imagination is an unhelpful way of coping. From one angle, it involves an innocent imagination, with detailed visions of ideal worlds. On the other, it reflects a deep dissatisfaction with life. Some of us swing from intense efforts to fix our broken reality to withdrawing into our minds, where our failures are magically transformed into more positive feelings, similar to what many expect from therapy. This type of imagination is known as maladaptive daydreaming, which is an excessive preoccupation with one’s invented worlds. Maladaptive daydreaming is linked to a sense of hopelessness and an inability to tolerate even minor inconveniences. The individual, in this case, constantly feels dissatisfied with life, as few of its aspects can ever meet his expectations.
Imagine living a life where you stay unhappy unless you achieve your full potential. This describes how perfectionists feel, which stems from the extremities of their upbringing.
Many people use daydreaming to escape the harshness of daily life, hoping that one day, their dream future will make up for past and ongoing abuse and neglect. Others use it to escape from the stifling pressures put on them by overbearing parents, who would not settle for having ordinary children; they believe they deserve, and owe it to their families, to be and have the best. For perfectionists, daydreaming provides a break from reality and potential outcomes, helping them escape inevitable disappointments that can turn into major setbacks. Maladaptive daydreaming is a contradictory and paradoxical behavior. As it provides one the blueprint for better days, it taints every victory and emotional connection. As the dopamine rush fades, and a new mental baseline is inadvertently created (the adjustments of the hedonistic treadmill), the perfectionist tendency to dismiss what’s in one’s lot reemerges, helping the mind wash away past glories. Good may be the enemy of great, but greatness is the enemy of peace.
Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams, in describing some of the tendencies of perfectionists, states, “There is a constant ‘ranking’ process that narcissistic individuals use to solve any problem that faces them: Who is the ‘best’ therapist? What is the ‘best’ preschool? Where is the ‘most rigorous’ training? Practical benefits and drawbacks may be completely overridden by concerns about comparative prestige.” Here, the implication is that the apparent best may be deceptive, as we tend to overestimate and undervalue the wrong things, our judgments being based on an unrealistic and distorted lens. Ultimately, we are not great at predicting what will make us happy; perfectionists are remarkably bad at it.
Narcissism, in short, is an inability to truly care for oneself adequately. Doing one’s best for oneself is not synonymous with having or being the best.
Nothing meets the perfectionist’s exacting standard, so everything then must be discarded. She fails to see how she might receive love and happiness because they do not perfectly fit her fantasies. She, at times, reshapes the world to fit them, or tries to. At other times, she eagerly rejects it, giving the universe the cold shoulder on her way back to her own mind.
One of my patients, who calls themselves a perfectionist, shared an fitting analogy with me. She said she was determined to get to work at a specific time. As she was rushing, she decided to overtake two people ahead of her. Immediately after she did, she was stopped by a red light, which allowed them to catch up to her. She learned a life lesson, she said, realizing that no matter how hard you try, setbacks may always thwart your efforts; you can’t create the perfect life. Nor is it owed to you, at least not in any realistic sense.
There are no easy solutions here. However, there are some you can try if daydreaming has taken over your life. You can date and be friends with people who aren't your perfect match, and evaluate if those relationships are worth it despite their imperfections. You can continue to explore who has the life you envision and ask yourself if you’re accurately assessing that individual’s level of life satisfaction; we tend to only compare our negatives to another’s positives, consistently failing to do the reverse. And we can remind ourselves that our overthinking will never cease. After enough evaluation (based on similar experiences, determining that thinking further will likely yield minimal returns and that not acting will be more significant), one of my patients with OCD told me he just does what he needs to do. He makes decisions and assesses them as he goes. This was something he had to constantly strive to do over the years before becoming more comfortable with it; he started with, what he deemed to be, insignificant choices.
Often, due to overwhelming thinking, perfectionists believe that one decision precludes others, which is true, but more so, that it blocks the possibility of pure happiness, as if it’s just waiting for them. I encourage my dreamers to compare their ideal lives with those who are already living them. Most of the time, they realize, there are no good and bad lives (mostly); there’s just life, with its bundle of compromises, annoyances, and, yes, even joys.
The maladaptive daydreamer could try to sit with her unpleasant emotions, like boredom, frustration, and sadness, and discuss them, rather than avoid them. Due to the low frustration tolerance, it can be hard to experience them as well as share them. Often, the daydreamer thinks sharing them “makes them worse,” which, just as often, is not true, at least not in any long-term and meaningful way. As the dreamer increases her ability to talk about and feel her feelings (and even consider them to be justified), they begin to appear less frightening, making it less likely that she’ll need to cling to her dreams desperately.