Hello and welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, and this is episode 41. And this episode was inspired by a question that I had from one of my clients, , who emailed me and asked, can you be traumatized by a horror movie? Well, yes, the short answer is yes, but it actually reminded me of when I was about 14 and I watched my first horror movie.
Now I was probably, you know, fairly late to the horror movies scene because I was a little bit protected and um, and my parents were very strict about not watching horror movies. But I was over at a sleepover at a friend's house and. This was the year that the most famous horror movie of all time was released, the Exorcist.
And we were having a sleepover and [00:01:00] we were eating mint chocolate and lying in bed and watching this movie. And I have to tell you, it was one of the most frightening things of my life. I remembered that movie. I was quite traumatized from it. And I remember, you know, just lying in bed that night, not. Able to get to sleep and thinking constantly about, heads spinning and, young girls being, , inhabited by the devil.
And like, it was, it was all like pretty, pretty awful for me. So yeah, it was quite a traumatic memory for me, and it meant that I did not watch a horror movie for approximately the next 40 years. So that is a long time for a horror movie to be stuck in my head. But, yes, and then during COVID, I watched my second ever horror movie.
Um, I remember it was a Saturday night, you know, and we had all been home for, I don't know, about six months in a row. In Melbourne, we [00:02:00] had very, very prolonged lockdowns. And so Saturday night, one night I decided to watch whatever was on tv and it happened to be another horror movie. I think it might be called Quiet, something like that.
Anyway, um, that horror movie bothered me so much that I had to do. EMDR. Honor myself, so, so the short answer to that question, can you be traumatized by horror movie? The short answer is yes. It happened to me and I'm sure it happens to many, many other people because horror movies are very carefully crafted to have maximum impact.
They're very carefully filmed and scripted and you know, the psychology is very well worked out to make. Maximum impact to make us as human beings the most scared we can be. So at some stages in our lives, we might be a little bit more prone to [00:03:00] being scared by a horror movie than others. And for me, at the age of 14, I was young.
I had no idea how horror movies were made. I was very gullible and very easily. Impressed at quite an impressionable young age, and I think that probably made a bit a bit of a difference to how much I was affected by the horror movie.
So we do know that with trauma, it affects us more if we are at a vulnerable point in our lives. And for me at that time, being 14 away from my family, watching my first ever horror movie, That was a particularly kind of vulnerable moment, so, I wasn't actually a child at that point. But children are particularly vulnerable to things because they don't have the worldview that adults have.
They don't know. In the case of a horror movie, they don't know that it's very carefully crafted that all of that [00:04:00] blood is just tomato source or, um. I think they use glycerin, liquid glycerin or something like that to give good blood consistency. Um, so children are not kind of aware of all the tricks that they use in a horror movie to make it so horrific.
So children are probably particularly susceptible to being traumatized by a horror movie. Also at some points in our life, like just before exams or, um, when something else stressful is going on in your life, you've got generally higher levels of cortisol and those other stress hormones. So that makes your brain a little bit more vulnerable to being, um, affected.
By trauma, so stressful times in our lives. So if I'd been watching that horror movie before my exams, I can't remember now whether I was or not, but that would've also have been a factor. So they're just a, [00:05:00] a few factors that sort of increase our vulnerability to things like horror movies that make them more traumatic than other times.
So it really illustrates the power of our brain. That we can take something that we know. In theory, we know that a horror movie is a movie, we know that it's made up make believe imaginary. We can take that experience that we know is pretend, and our bodies can react to it in such a way with all the adrenaline and all the cortisol that comes with being scared, and it can etch those images on our brain for.
In my case up to decades, and in some ways this actually gives a lot of credence to some of the techniques that we use in EMDR. So when I'm working with people, I often use a lot of imagination techniques, [00:06:00] so. Using our imagination for say, alternative endings to a scene can actually be a really, really helpful way to kind of erase the bad part of the memory and substitute a nicer ending.
Of course, we know that that didn't happen, but our imagination is really powerful. And it can actually replace the, um, difficult memory with something a little bit nicer and a little bit more wholesome, a little bit more, uh, loving or safe or, whatever it needs to be. So. In some ways, knowing that horror movies and the imagination that we can take those images from the horror movies and be traumatized by them in exactly the opposite way.
We can use our imagination for good, not evil or horror, and use our imagination to create better movies, to [00:07:00] replay in our brain better ways to think about the trauma that we've been through. And I wanna talk about imagination and horror movies in a couple of other different scenarios that are really, I believe, very related and quite relevant.
So one of these is intergenerational trauma. So quite often, say for example, when we are working with, say, second generation. Survivors of the Holocaust, like children of survivors of the Holocaust, they may have heard their parents or their grandparents talk in very vivid detail about what happened to them.
And especially for children. If children listen to these stories, which are kind of like horror stories, they are very, very horrific as are. Any stories of war in any country. This is not specific [00:08:00] to the Holocaust, but um, this can be related to stories of war in any country. So if we take those stories of war and we expose children to them, like the stories that we hear that are our intergenerational stories as the stories of our family, our family history.
Children will take those images and they, those images will be kind of seared into their brain a little bit like a horror movie. So some of the work that I do with people who are, um, children of survivors of war, is taking those memories that are not their own memories, but their stories of intergenerational trauma.
And using EMDR to help reduce the horror, the sadness, the grief, the [00:09:00] desperation, the despair of that intergenerational trauma. So we sometimes use imagination for that. We use some other techniques, but it can be really, really effective in erasing those horror movies of the intergenerational trauma. I hope that makes sense.
The other aspect of horror movies that I wanna talk about today is the horror movies of birth trauma. Now this is kind of a serious, uh. Aspect of trauma because quite often when young women are talking to their, young friends who are maybe mothers, you know, a year or two ahead of them, and they hear stories of birth, sometimes those stories are not very pleasant.
So they may. Even take the form of kind of like a horror movie to the person who's listening, especially if those young women are contemplating having babies in the near [00:10:00] future themselves. They listen to those stories with great attention. they want to hear what is it like to have a baby and if they have friends or relatives who.
have not had good experiences who and who tell those stories in great detail, then they may absorb that a little bit like a horror movie. And we can get vicarious trauma from other people's stories. We know that as therapists, we know that very deeply vicarious trauma can be a thing and a bit like a horror movie.
Those other people's stories can become kind of etched in our brain and they can create a real fear response. So that is something that I work with women on also, not just their own birth experiences, but sometimes their, imagined view or their imagined version of the stories that they hear their friends talking [00:11:00] about, that vicarious trauma.
So vicarious trauma is not just confined to therapists or doctors. Doctors have a lot of vicarious trauma, vicarious trauma can be experienced by anyone who hears or witnesses or observes or watches a movie about something very traumatic.
So just talking about birth trauma next week, on Tuesday, the 29th of July, uh, I'm presenting a webinar in conjunction with a marvelous psychology group called Moms Matter. And the webinar is about EMDR and birth trauma or EMDR in the perinatal period. So if you would like to, if that's a topic of interest to you and you wanna come along, even if you just wanna hear a bit more about EMDR, it will be kind of focused on perinatal [00:12:00] experiences.
But if you would like to come along and hear a little bit more about EMDR, in particular in relation to birth trauma. You can [email protected]. I think there might be a au on the end of that. So moms Matter psychology, and if you go to the webinars section, it will be there and you can register and, um, have a look at that and hear a little bit more about me talking about my very favorite thing, which as you may have guessed by now, is EMDR.
All right. I hope that's been helpful to you or interesting in some way. It's a bit of a short and sweet, uh, topic this week. Um, so I hope that's been interesting for you. Have a great week. I will talk to you again next week. In the meantime, take good care. Bye for now.
