Fantasy as a Coping Skill

Growing up in an environment where your parents did not show you emotional support and made you feel bad for having emotions makes you feel lonely as a kid. It’s a lot for a kid to deal with parents who cannot show emotions and always hope for their parents to give validation and love. It’s common for kids who grow up with this type of emotional neglect to also deal with manipulative parents who use guilt to get their way.

Leaving this way a  child does not give you much room to learn healthy coping skills to deal with your emotions and to notice emotional abuse and neglect in a relationship. Leaving through emotional neglect leads to developing coping skills that are unhealthy and to re-leaving the relationship you had with your parents with other people, such as friends, romantic partners, roommates, etc. 

One of those negative coping skills is fantasy. Fantasy is something you used as a kid to escape reality. Fantasies are usually soothing and give you a chance to achieve something you couldn’t have imagined you could obtain. Imagining that you have loving parents or that one day someone will come to the rescue of you helps you get through the emotional neglect that suffers as a child. Although fantasies are helpful to get you through your childhood, they are not helpful when it comes to having real relationships. Fantasies set up unrealistic expectations of what relationships are supposed to be like. 

Sometimes you might use fantasies not to accept the abusive relationship you are in now. Fantasies make it easier to justify your partner's yelling rather than deal with reality. In the same way you use fantasies to escape your environment as a child; you use them now to escape your relationship. It’s hard to leave fantasy land because it has helped you cope through the years, and you have not learned other ways to deal with abuse. However, nothing will change with fantasies, the abuse will continue, and you will keep suffering, and You don’t deserve that.

Fantasies also create unrealistic expectations that your relationship is supposed to heal you and give you the love you never had as a child. Your fantasies are always going to be better than reality. Therefore, your relationship will never feel like it is good enough. You will constantly look for something that no one can give you because that love that is missing is something you have to work on internally and heal yourself instead of expecting someone else to do it.

If you need help coping with fantasies and want to learn healthier ways to cope, please call us at Harper Therapy (813) 434-3639.