How Fantasy Affects Your Relationships

What are your fantasies?

At first glance, you might be thinking that I’m talking about sexuality and fetishes.

I’m not.

I’m talking about the root cause of our Trauma Bonds.

Picture this:
you grow up in a childhood where you experienced the wounding of:

abuse,
loss,
abandonment
rejection (bullying)
emotional neglect,
maturing too early,

or shaming….

and you didn’t have attuned parents who could hold space for your emotions,
and help you regulate through them…

Then chances are, you as a child/teen
escaped into FANTASY in order to cope with that harsh reality.

It’s not your fault.

It’s a BRILLIANT mechanism that helps us survive.

Unfortunately it has harsh consequences in our adulthood.

It causes us to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves and our relationships,
INCLUDING OUR PARENTING,
which stifles our ability to be present with what is,
and create inspiring outcomes in reality.

This then becomes fertile breeding ground for Trauma Bonds,
attracting the insecure relationships and
narcissistic / codependent relationship dynamics
which always begin with love-bombing and pedestalizing one another.

See if you can recognize the pattern here:
“I love you, so now you must change and do whatever you need to do
in order to silence my insecurities and avoid saying or doing anything
that triggers my anxiety, because your job is to fulfill my desires and meet
my needs without ever disappointing me.”

Oh and I forgot— variation #1:  “if you don’t do this, then you’re the problem, you’re toxic,
and I can find someone who will love me for who I am.”

Variation #2: “if you don’t do this, then I’m going to complain until
I get what I want”.

The sad part?

In this exhausting game, you’ll notice that IT’S NEVER GOOD ENOUGH.

Nothing will quite satisfy the fantasy— the desire to bring it back to
when the initial phase loaded with oxytocin and dopamine. 

Fantasy is defined as "the faculty or activity of imagining things,
especially things that are impossible or improbable.”

And finding something OUTSIDE of us to fill a childhood void is highly improbable.

And if you can resonate with what I’m sharing here, just know that you’re not alone,
and you aren’t doing anything “wrong.”

You simply haven’t learned the high level attachment skills necessary for secure love to thrive.

And 90% of that deep work is dissolving our fantasies,
detaching from our addiction to dopamine,
releasing the expectation of someone to rescue us from our childhood wounding,
and mastering the art of healing our attachment wounds that get activated in ANY relationship.

In other words, without mastering the art of the conflict/repair cycle,
dissolving our people pleasing/fawning responses and learning how to set elegant boundaries,
our relationships CAN’T be grounded in reality.

We regress to a child like state to cope with challenges,
we fawn and people please and abandon ourselves for the fantasy
steeped in pornography and romance novels,
instead of learning how to BE with what’s in front of us and create TRUE INTIMACY.

When I did this, my relationships completely changed.
I was able to set firm boundaries and the way people treated me completely changed.
I was able to find love that is secure, not chaotic and volatile.
I stopped trying to find love and validation OUTSIDE myself,
and found it within,
and when I did,

Secure love found me.

Now, instead of being my problem to solve,
I am with a woman who is MY PEACE.

This is what you deserve.
We were born for it.

But to get there, we must be willing to examine the root cause
and resolve it at a nervous system level,
shifting fantasy and mastering the ability to navigate reality.

When you do, you experience something truly magical,
being able to find magic in even the mundane moments,
no longer seeking intense and volatile passion (which means “to suffer”— look it up).

You deserve it.

Your wingman on the adventure,
Nima