🔼: [[Protector Strategies 🛡️]], [[🛡️ Distracting]] ###### Fantasizing - Victory or success - Being rescued - Being loved by somebody in the way we want. When some survivors are taken over by these parts, they might have affairs or try to recreate scenes in sex that their Exiles are stuck in, to try to get a different outcome to get the love they didn't get then. - Reading can be fantasizing. - [[🛡️ Denying|Denial]] is fantasizing. - Magical Thinking - [[🛡️ Maladaptive Daydreaming]] %% ##### Notes - Reading - Planning, mapping out - Denial ###### Questions - Rather than pushing fantasies out, yes—why not expand them? Add to them, bring more in. Not just making them “better” in a conventional sense, but making them fuller, more dimensional, with more space for care, intimacy, presence, or even just curiosity. Maybe instead of discarding certain desires, it’s about finding ways to root them in something that feels real rather than just stimulating. As for fantasies, some ways to expand them could be: - Instead of just replaying a memory or a scene from porn, bringing in more sensory details—what’s the lighting like? The sounds? The smells? How does the air feel against skin? - Adding context—what happened before the moment in the fantasy? What might happen after? How does this change the energy? - Introducing new emotional dynamics—what happens if there’s more laughter? More slowness? More mutual curiosity rather than just going through familiar beats? - Experimenting with whose perspective it’s viewed from—how does it change if it’s seen through the other person’s eyes rather than your own? - Asking what’s missing in the fantasy—if it’s good but not great, what element would make it fuller, more nourishing, more real? - How do I want to experience desire? - The right questions can be more useful than any framework because they bring us into alignment rather than obedience. - The parts that feel urgency probably fear stagnation or getting stuck, but maybe there’s a way to assure them that tracking is movement—it just moves in a different rhythm. - The moralizing thing is tough because yeah, once something is labeled bad, then everything becomes about whether to obey or rebel against that label. And if the moralizing part is also attacking you for not obeying, it’s a no-win situation. If the goal isn’t to get rid of it but just to make its voice one voice among many, then maybe the question isn’t is this bad? but what does this part of me fear will happen if I do this? and what does it fear will happen if I don’t? That might reveal the deeper stakes. A framework can be useful, but when it becomes about obeying a structure instead of feeling into what’s true, it just replaces one set of rules with another. Maybe some good questions to hold instead of rushing to frameworks: - What is my body actually telling me right now? (Not what should it be telling me, not what do I wish it were telling me, but what is it actually saying?) - If I could pause the pressure to decide and just be in the experience, what would that feel like? - If I imagine moving forward in this direction, does my body relax or tighten? If I imagine stepping away, does it relax or tighten? - If there were no fear of making the wrong choice, what would I want? - What’s the smallest experiment I can do to feel into this instead of theorizing about it? - With that girl, maybe it’s not about rushing to decide whether it’s a yes or a no, but just slowing enough to feel what’s actually there. And maybe that’s the real shift—not deciding what’s true but allowing what’s true to emerge. %% [^1]: