Halloween for an Anxious Person

Halloween brings up some mixed feelings for me, as well as for many of us who were raised in the church, I imagine. I grew up in an environment of "Fall Festivals" at churches, warm, charming pumpkins with sunny smiles, and repeat cat costumes (I don't remember ever dressing as anything else). But this year, as part of embracing my emotions, including fear, I'm immersing myself in this particular holiday more than I normally would.

I'm not sure exactly how to explain myself, but I want to teach Q that fear and sadness aren't evil or even bad--they're just emotions, arguably necessary if we want to achieve contentment and self-actualization. Part of my own therapy when dealing with my anxiety is to stop trying to push it away from me, but to take a deep breath, stop, and look at it. When my vision begins to go blurry or I feel the stabbing pains in my back, I try to look at them and remember the source.

I recall being easily frightened as a child. I could give you many examples, but frankly, it would be embarrassing. As a teenager, I had crippling social anxiety and made my boyfriend order for me at restaurants. Even as an adult, a bad piece of local news or a tense scene in a movie can knock me off kilter for a week.

So I've been taking Q browsing through the Halloween aisles. We press the buttons on the displays and sometimes get a start, but she usually wants to see me press it again. I try on scary masks for her. We bought fake webs and jeweled spiders to decorate our house. She pretends the rocks she collects on our cracked sidewalk are little skulls.

I have been partially influenced by Caitlin Doughty, a mortician who posts regular, interesting mortician-related videos on her website, Order of the Good Death, and wrote an excellent book called Smoke Gets in Your Eyes that mirrored some of my own childhood experience in that she struggled with OCD and a preoccupation with death after a traumatic experience. She believes that we, as a culture, sweep death under the rug to an unhealthy extent. She posits that we should begin talking to our children about death at an early age, reframing it as an acceptable part of life.

I have, to some extent, been taking an open and honest approach with Q. I don't want her to live in fear as I did, and indeed still do. I don't know if anything could have quelled my fear. I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch scary movies or walk through a haunted house. But I discuss death with her, and anatomy, and skeletons, and how babies are born, and physical boundaries, and how everyone gets afraid sometime, and bravery, and personal hygiene, and "tricky adults," and I try to keep an open, honest dialogue with her as much as possible, because she has a beautiful, inquisitive, creative mind, and I think it's good for her. I don't always know if I'm doing the right thing.

We're going to go trick-or-treating tonight, and I know that some things may be scary for her. We've been pointing out all the Halloween decorations to each other, and talking about how sometimes it's fun to be scared, and sometimes it's not. I'll let her decide if she thinks a house is too scary to go up to. And I would be lying if I didn't admit that Halloween makes me a little nervous. Someone like me has trouble processing why someone would WANT to be afraid for sport.

But no matter what, keep in mind that Halloween is only a fraction as scary as this upcoming presidential election.