From NoSleep to Resilience: How Horror Impacts My Therapeutic Approach
If you’ve been around Reddit for any real amount of time, odds are you have at least heard of the popular subreddit r/NoSleep. This subreddit has a storied and unique history, rising from obscurity as a place for people to share scary stories into a trove of unique, incredibly written, heart-racing, palm-sweating tales of horror, sorrow, and dread. In fact, the subreddit has become so popular over the last decade that many of its original contributors have gone on to become successful and sought after writers, organizers, directors and more within the various fields of horror fiction media. The lauded audio dramas “The Left-Right Game” and “Borrasca”, the brilliant Netflix adaptation of “The Haunting of Hillhouse”, and dozens of successful books have started as a post of r/NoSleep.
My personal favorite way to consume NoSleep stories is through the highly awarded and acclaimed “NoSleep Podcast”. The creator and host of the podcast, David Cummings, captures the essence of NoSleep in one of the long-standing introductions to the show:
“For the dark hours when you dare not close your eyes. Tales of horror to frighten and disturb. Join us as the sleepless hours tick past. Brace yourself… for the NoSleep Podcast”.
For many, the consumption of horror fiction is habitual. Horror, after all, provides our brains with a large release of pleasantly activating neurochemicals and who doesn’t like the warm fuzzies that come after that fight-or-flight response resolves itself in a controlled environment.
Often, it is that very sense of control that brings people to the genre of horror in the first place. If you take a group full of people who love horror fiction media, I would be willing to wager that two of the most common denominators would be surviving trauma and living with anxiety and depression. One of the things that first drew me to the horror genre was the sense of control it allowed me to have over my own internal experiences. As a person living with C-PTSD, AuDHD, and OCD, sudden, random anxiety is a common experience in my day-to-day life. I’ve heard that same experience echoed across most of the horror genre fandoms. For some people, playing a survival horror game like Resident Evil or Outlast gives them a sense of focus for anxiety that would otherwise just be hanging around making them miserable. For others, writing and reading scary stories is a wonderful way to process experiences that are too painful or complex to hold all at once.
As a therapeutic tool, horror also has significant benefits in helping people move through their own experiences. I use horror writing to help clients describe, defeat, outsmart, escape, or confront elements of their own life experiences that are difficult to verbalize. I also encourage clients to engage in horror iconography if they find the creation of visual art to be of benefit; It may be difficult to describe how anxiety, trauma, or dissociation feels, but maybe drawing it is just enough description to convey the essence of the experience. I have an ever-evolving list of NoSleep stories and Creepypastas that I use as exposures to specific triggers and themes to help clients navigate automatic responses and reduce distress.
Of course, you know me, my favorite thing to do in therapy is play games. Whether we are using a horror video game to help practice regulating the nervous system with coping skills or I have crafted a horror tabletop campaign with the purpose of intentionally triggering anxiety within the safety of a process group, using horror as a game mechanic has always been one of my favorite, and most effective, Geek Therapy interventions.
It may not sound like it’s all that fun, and to be quite honest, sometimes it isn’t. But, while gaming interventions have the added benefit of often being enjoyable, this is rarely the purpose of the therapeutic use of gaming. The people in my current “Anxiety Game”, as we lovingly refer to it, spend every two or three sessions processing their lack of desire to start playing the game, because they know that it’s intentionally going to be a triggering experience. And who can blame them! I would be resistant, too, if my therapist was like “hey, what if I put 4 to 6 neurodivergent introverts with anxiety into high stress, high tension, and high stakes scenarios where they have to experience the fight, flight, freeze, faun, or flourish response in real time, surrounded by other people”.
But it is in these environments that my clients get to experience real growth. Guiding clients as they utilize the triggers, fears, and darker processes of horror to grow, learn, and adapt to their own real-life experiences is one of the most profound experiences I have had as a therapist, an educator, or a geek. Those clients who choose to face that darkness and work through it, whether individually or as a group, walk away with a type of resilience that you can’t build anywhere else. I think that is because horror, as a medium, represents life in its truest and most visceral forms. Sure, a romcom may make you feel good, and comedies may make you laugh; dramas and thrillers may stir up some cathartic experiences and sci-fi/fantasy can push the boundaries of the imagination, but horror takes the camera and points it directly at a person’s most vulnerable self.
Horror reminds us that we’re all afraid of the dark…
Happy Halloween