The Day You Found Out :)

I would say that I found MD not in a day but during a course of many days. So it wasn't shock or anything. Also I denied having anything different with my brain and instead I blamed my lack of willpower. I had to go really downhill before accepting that MD is real and I have it.

Haha I remember googling something like “can’t stop daydreaming” and scrolling until I saw “maladaptive daydreaming” for the first time, and instantly knowing. I remember I googled it because I was having a hard time staying focused on homework (was still in high school at the time). Though it took me months to emotionally process it.

Hey Erpelmama,

    I also felt that I was doing something that no one would ever understand. I was also shocked by the word 'disorder' though I knew my thoughts and behavior was problematic. I hope one day to be able to call myself an immersive daydreamer instead of a maladaptive one. Your reaction sounds familiar :). The calming effect seems to have been necessary from what you described. I'm so glad you're doing better today. I hope this continues now that you know you have a community to support you.

One and a half year ago, I was on vacation in a summer house with my family and I was watching YouTube videos in the evening. It was about something else, I think maybe a video from The School of Life or something similar, and I scrolled through the comments where someone asked the channel to make a video on maladaptive daydreaming. When I read the term I was knew instantly that that was what I had been doing since I was a child, and I ended up reading many articles that night and looking through the Wild Minds forum. I was relieved and I probably cried, but I also daydreamed A LOT during that vacation, and I still feel bad when the summer is mentioned. Something about knowing it was a 'thing' other people also had made me just give into it.

First memory of it for me was one time I was sitting on the rocking chair at our family's house, acting out some scenario out a movie - like John Wayne or Tarzan or someone like that - and my oldest sister came up onto the porch and asked "Did you get 'em all?"
I didn't think of it as anything of a disorder then; I thought it was something that little kids do.
When i was in the 3d grade I was humiliated and shamed by my siblings when they let people know that I used to act out scenes from movies at night in bed and they would yell at me to shut up.
I can remember now that in those years - 6 to 8 years old - I used to be so afraid at night when my father would drunk out of his head at night and stalking around our big old house and raving and banging into walls and getting lost and then I experienced seeing ghosts come in to scare the hell out of me, horrible faces of creatures that came out of their graves, like in the horror movies that some people liked to watch and I could not stand, that they were real. So I thought that by day-dreaming I was distracting my mind from the undead creatures haunting me. I tried to explain this to people but no one could understand what I was talking about - no one could understand it now and I could not understand it if some child tried to express that to me now.
I am old now and I have been trying to get this craziness under control since I found DDiB last year and as of today: I went through some cycles of acting out - "stimming" - when alone in my room, while my g/f was out.
What triggers this ? - people ask. If there was a triggering event it was feeling put down, disrespected by the bankers online who are just taking money from me despite all I try to do to stop them; to communicate with them; treating me like I have no power to do anything to them.
Being disregarded by people anywhere it seems brings up this lifetime of hatred for what has been done to me and I want to fuck people up and cripple them and make them suffer.
Being happy can be a trigger; listening to someone talk and he/she says something I think is untrue and then he says to just "let me finish," or " listen to this first," or something like that and then I do not get to say what I have to say and I feel the prick is not at all right or wise or valid in what he says - it is just that he thinks he can dominate me and so I hate him and myself for being submissive and I have to re-play the scene and make him shut up and listen to me.
That I go through a lot of the time and along with it a lot of pains from the muscle tension , and sometimes, weird looks from people when they see me doing this shit and then I am unbearably shamed.