April Newsletter

Downtime is a work in progress. My runs, dog walks, and morning commutes are still a rotating mix of trauma research audiobooks, clinical theory, and business podcasts. I try to throw in music, but learning usually wins. So when a health and wellness influencer on my feed recommended a fiction thriller as "the perfect read to take your mind off things," I was sold.

I downloaded it immediately and plowed through seven hours of a mostly mediocre story with what I can only describe as some of the most brutal, grotesque things I've consumed in a long time, woven through. That kind of psychopathy and sadism I was genuinely unprepared for in essentially a beach read. I complained about it, but I also finished it. I am not a quitter.

It wasn't until I was describing it to a friend that something clicked: the content wasn't actually that different from recent headlines. The endless bombardment of one incomprehensible thing after the next had worn down the edges of my rage and sadness so gradually I hadn't noticed. The difference with the book is I'd taken it in as entertainment, and while disturbing, I didn’t think to stop reading it. That's when I noticed how numb I'd become to something we don't talk about enough as a category of trauma: horror.

Not just the cinematic kind. Horror, in a broader sense, is an experience that changes what we believe the world to be. And right now, we are living these experiences constantly. The algorithms feeding our phones aren't calibrated for well-being; they're calibrated for attention. Outrage holds attention. Fear holds attention. I grew up with a newspaper that mixed the difficult with the mundane, local weather, a hard story, and something good. That ratio has shifted. And what I keep thinking about clinically is what this continuous exposure does over time. Not one acute event, but a slow accumulation. 

We define horror in trauma as experiences in which we witness, or are party to, something deeply disturbing, an accident, violence, atrocity, or cruelty,  that signals to the nervous system that the world is not safe and that humans can and do intend each other harm. It is one of the more primal trauma categories. The responses it evokes are instinctive, animalistic: a bracing in the body, a drop in heart rate, a narrowing of the visual field. And unlike fear, which mobilizes us to run or fight, horror tends to produce freeze. Because there's often nothing to do. No action available. No way out. The body charges up and then has nowhere to send it.

What makes horror distinct from other trauma categories is that particular quality of helplessness, not just "I was overwhelmed" but "I saw what human beings are capable of, and I could not stop it." That tends to go deep.

Here is what I think is happening to a lot of us right now, and what I couldn't stop thinking about after I finished that book: we are getting chronic, low-dose exposure to exactly this kind of material, with no context, no interruption, and no discharge. What’s happening in the world and our country right now, the news cycle, the algorithm, the comment sections, the true crime podcast, none of it is structured to help our nervous systems metabolize what we're taking in. There's no communal ritual around it. There's no held container. We just scroll, absorb, and move on to the next thing. Or we think we do.

What I'm seeing clinically, and what I noticed in myself, is that the accumulation doesn't disappear. It settles. The freeze that's designed to be temporary becomes a kind of background noise. Or worse it can metabolize into nihilism. 

What we may actually be in, collectively, is grief. Grief for a sense of safety we haven't quite been able to locate, for a world that is harder to trust than it used to be, for things we've witnessed that have become so normalized we stopped calling them witnessing. We are living through something that doesn't yet have a shared name. And the absence of that name is part of what makes it so hard to metabolize.

So what do we do with it?

Naming. The nervous system doesn't distinguish between something that happened to you directly and something you witnessed. Horror that enters through a screen still enters. Naming that, even just to yourself, is not catastrophizing. It's accurate.

Orienting. One of the most fundamental self-regulating capacities we have is also one of the simplest: orienting. Orienting is the act of letting your eyes and attention move toward what is actually present in your immediate environment. So look up from your screen and look around. Focus on the room you're in. The temperature of the air. Whether your feet are on the floor. This is a return to what's real and immediate, which is the only place the nervous system can actually settle.

Discharge. This one gets skipped most often. The activation that horror produces is biological; the body mobilizes energy to respond to a threat, and when there's no action available, that energy doesn't just evaporate. It has to move through. Movement, breath, shaking, crying, making something with your hands, grieving. The goal isn't to feel better on cue. The goal is completion. Incomplete activation that has nowhere to go is exactly what becomes chronic freeze, numbness, resignation.

And finally: Community. Our nervous systems are designed to take cues from each other. The presence of someone who is genuinely calm and present actually helps move your own system out of freeze in a way that willpower alone cannot. Telling your story to someone who can actually receive it is itself the repair, because horror breaks our sense that the world is safe and that others can be trusted, and it is only in relationship that those things get restored.

None of this undoes what's happening. But there is a meaningful difference between a nervous system frozen in accumulated horror and one that is moving, even slowly, toward completion. That difference is not small. It is the difference between despair and the capacity to stay present for your life and for each other.