You sat down to handle one small thing — a form with a deadline on it, a load of laundry, an email that needed four lines. You are still sitting there. Your computer screen has gone dark while you weren’t looking, and somehow it is already late afternoon.
Your hands never moved the whole time. But you weren’t doing nothing. In your head you were somewhere else, somewhere better, where you were stronger and quicker and everything went the way you decided.
A hurt child has three ways to go
When a child is hurt badly at a young age — abused, or scolded and brushed aside every time they try to speak up — the child has to react somehow. The reaction usually takes one of three forms.
The first is the good child. To make their mother happy, this child does whatever she asks, and does it well. Keeping her pleased becomes the child’s whole job.
The second is the angry child. This child doesn’t keep the anger inside. It comes straight out, and the child turns defiant and aggressive.
The third child neither tries to please the adults nor openly fights them. This child shuts the door on the outside world, stops expecting comfort from people, and retreats into an inner world of their own, where the child is in control.
Why the third child ends up daydreaming
It is the third child who drifts into daydreams. Not the good one. Not the angry one. The one who went quiet and stayed that way.
The reason is simple. When being with people keeps ending in scolding, shame, or a fight, the child learns it is safer to look for comfort inside their own head. In real life, the child cannot change so much as the look on a parent’s face. In their head, the child decides what happens, gets the praise real life doesn’t give, and is stronger than anyone. A child who does this for hours at a time, again and again, ends up with a habit: whenever something hurts, the mind slips into a daydream on its own.
I was the third child
I was the third one.
My mother and I could never really talk to each other, and I was scolded and punished constantly. I’d like to tell you that was unfair, but I know how it started. Doing what she told me felt like losing to her, as if I were handing her the win myself.
So I refused, every time. Refusing got me punished more. The more I was punished, the more everything between us felt like a contest, so I refused even harder. In the end, pulling away from people felt easier than being with them.
I didn’t become the good child, and I didn’t become the angry one either. I closed myself off and stayed inside my own world.
My daydream never changed
I had one daydream. Just the one. The details moved around, but the story underneath never changed.
In it, I was powerful and capable, and I controlled everything: nothing happened unless I had already decided it would. I had a castle of my own, and in that castle I was king. I was the strongest one in every room I walked into. I knew everything before anyone told me. Whatever I wanted done got done, and it got done immediately.
In real life, I was the exact opposite of all that. I had no power and nothing of my own, and I was always in trouble with my mother.
In that daydream I gave myself the comfort I couldn’t get from people. I won’t pretend that comfort was nothing. The daydream was the one place I got to rest, so I kept going back and staying there.
In the castle, I lost track of time
The trouble was that once I was inside the castle, I stayed for hours. One thought led to the next, and that one led to another, and nothing in the story ever told me to stop. I had no idea how much time had gone by.
Meanwhile I sat perfectly still in a real chair, in a real room, with real work to do.
The page I never turned
There was schoolwork waiting for me. There was cleaning waiting. My body stayed exactly where it was.
In those hours I could have turned one page of the book lying open in front of me. Just one page. I could have put a load of laundry on. I could have washed the dishes already sitting in the sink — not every dish in the house, only those.
I did none of it. Not one page. Not one load. Not one plate.
The same thing happens at any age. A daydream makes the feeling of helplessness go away at once, so you keep going back to it. But while you feel strong and comforted in your head, the form, the email and the laundry stay untouched. By the end of the day the task is still there, and now you are also ashamed of yourself for not doing it. So you go back into the daydream, where you are strong again, and the cycle starts over.
You probably have a castle too
Your daydream probably doesn’t have an actual castle in it. Mine did, because the castle gave me power, and power was exactly what I didn’t have in real life.
Whatever happens in your daydream, notice what it gives you. That is usually what you are missing in real life. If you are always being praised there, ask yourself whether you feel that nobody around you ever gives you credit. If you keep picturing yourself making someone give in, ask yourself whether there is anger you have never said out loud to the people in your life, or a line you have never told them not to cross.
Outside the walls, the day went on without me
I won’t tell you the daydream was my enemy. It gave me the comfort I wasn’t getting from people. I rested there, and I kept going back.
Inside the castle I was king. Everything answered to me and nothing could reach me.
Outside the castle, the day went on. The daydream protected me from feeling powerless, but it also kept me from doing small things, like turning one page or putting on one load of laundry. Real power comes from finishing small things like these. Each one you finish shows you that you can actually make something happen in the real world.
Related
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board