Many of us with insecure attachment issues created fantasies as a child in order to escape reality and survive. To support those fantasies, we developed tools to use whenever the outside world conflicted. My tools were perfectionism and people-pleasing, which I used to keep me from being alone and abandoned. We may have created several fantasies, but there is often one dominant pattern (avoiding abandonment was mine). Fantasy worked really well when I was a kid. It allowed me to check out of my home environment, and gave me hope that things would get better when I didn’t want to be where I was. I would create fictitious characters in my head, making anything possible.

The problem is, we bring these fantasies, and the tools to support them, into adulthood. They continue to “work” in the way they were designed, but they no longer serve us and often lead to dysfunctional relationships rather than fulfillment. I went from one dysfunctional relationship to another, on one level seeing reality, but on a another level I was still caught up in the hope that my fantasy just might become reality. It’s a painful place to live and I cannot tell you how far in the past that is for me. No fantasy surpasses reality because emotional presence FEELS better. It builds confidence, which is really important in breaking those old patterns. If you are confident in yourself and your ability to live in reality, those old tools are no longer needed.