Understanding Maladaptive Daydreaming

Maladaptive Daydreaming is the first clinical guide to a little-known condition in which immersive fantasy becomes both a refuge and a trap, disrupting work, relationships, and everyday life. Accessibly written yet clinically precise, this book combines lived experience with cutting-edge scientific research, validated assessment tools, evidence-based interventions, clinical guidance, and practical resources.

Authored by the clinical psychologist who first identified and named maladaptive daydreaming, this book gives language, structure, and meaning to an experience that millions have struggled to understand. Drawing on more than two decades of clinical work, research, testimony, and international collaboration, chapters explore how maladaptive daydreaming differs from ordinary daydreaming, creative imagination, mind-wandering, ADHD, psychosis, personality disorders, and dissociative conditions. It also examines the roles of trauma, attachment, loneliness, emotion regulation, neurobiology, music, repetitive movement, creativity, fiction, memory errors, and visual art in shaping the lives of people with MD.

An indispensable resource for psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals, this book will also appeal to researchers, people living with maladaptive daydreaming, their families, and anyone interested in the psychology of imagination.