Posted by badhaircut on March 2, 2004, at 17:32:45
In reply to What do you think?, posted by Dinah on March 2, 2004, at 16:54:28
I've spent most of my life fantasizing. (You're about the first person I've told!) From about the same age as you. When I was little, it was a complex world with recurring characters. Many of my storylines were borrowed from TV shows.
As I got older, the fantasies became more broken-up, but I would repeat my favorites several times a day. They were mostly very boring, mundane topics, although they usually involved more money or prestige or friends than I actually had.
I only admitted to myself last year that I've been a big-time fantasizer. I came to that recognition after realizing that I'm pretty avoidant. When I'm about to think of or feel something uncomfortable, I get up, move around, distract myself, (check Babble!), whatever, just to keep from thinking/feeling something anxious. AND I also slip into convenient stress-relieving fantasies.
I think my fantasies are harmless except that sometimes I've had trouble stopping them. And using them to avoid scary feelings isn't the most helpful tactic.
Once, following David Burns's CBT advice for something else, I counted with a clicker how many times in a day I started fantasizing. In HALF a day, I got to 170.
So now I'm a little more deliberately aware of the fantasizing, and a lot of the times I can ask myself, "Are you avoiding something right now?" And usually it's pretty obvious to me exactly what hairy thing I'd rather not deal with. Not that I do deal with it, even when I interrupt the fantasy in that way.
A few months ago I looked all over the web for discussions of that kind of fantasizing (like you describe). I found only two threads, neither on Babble, but judging by the responses, frequent fantasy is *very* common.
The psychoanalytic writers (who have always been the most creative & prolific in psychology) are the only ones I remember dealing with it. Especially Melanie Klein's people – although they think *everything* is a "Phantasy."
Dinah, I'm so glad you brought it up. It sounds like it really threw your therapist! I've always considered my most shameful secret.
-bhc
poster:badhaircut
thread:319434
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040225/msgs/319455.html