Hello, I was struggling with what I was calling ‘maladaptive daydreaming’ when I started therapy. My therapist was skeptical of the term but suggested that it was a symptom that will lessen once I addressed my childhood trauma and learned to ground etc. I thought for a while after that it was a form of dissociating, probably true. I came to see though that in my super intense childhood (where I rarely was emotionally or physically safe in the moment) my main way of coping became to imagine a future safe world and mentally live there. I also imagined a future perfect male figure and future perfect family and future perfect body so forth (lol that’s caused me lots of fun struggles lol) – anyway I made a safe world and was able to live day to day and meet the extremely high expectations placed on me. I brought that into adulthood. The good news: it’s no longer my default setting. After a lot of trauma therapy, I could then learn to attend to the present moment, something I believe was impossible for me before and I’ve started to notice I only have these ‘daydreaming’ type of episodes when i’m trying to avoid the reality of something. Like for example if my gut / inner wisdom is screaming at me to walk away from something and my inner child or adult self (ego) wants to cling to it – I notice myself slipping into these escapist types of tendencies. If I attend to my inner wisdom and let all emotions flow freely even the scary ones and am making choices that make me feel safe in my body, I come back to center. I’m not sure if this makes total sense but I definitely have experienced this.