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Scary Movies

I am haunted by a movie I saw as a kid.

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at Drkenner.com

Here is a question that I received from Lucas, and it's about having seen a movie as a child that kind of freaked him out and continues to freak him out. And I know I certainly had that experience, and perhaps you did too. Hi, Dr. Kenner, I had a childhood trauma when I was quite young. My mom took me to the movies to see the famous Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The film, as witnessed by many, contains a lot of cruel moments, probably not suitable for such young ages. The film started, and I witnessed a man on a black horse killing a gypsy woman outside a church and then thinking of drowning her baby in a nearby well. My mom said that I was a little anxious at the start, up until the scene when the crowd starts humiliating the good-natured Quasimodo. At that moment, I was crying loudly in the theater, and I was begging my mother to leave. So we left, and all this left me with an extra trauma inside. Two or three years after this event, unaware of the trauma, I watched the whole movie again. Obviously, the trauma got worse. The scene where Judge Frollo sings Hellfire, revealing his lustful motives in a room full of red demons, still haunts me. Even nowadays, I can't sleep. When these images come to mind, I sweat out of fear. Any suggestion to help me deal with these images?

Lucas, so Lucas, when any of us have images in our mind that we don't like—maybe it's from a war, if you know someone's returning from a war and they saw bloodshed, maybe they saw their buddies killed in a war. Or maybe it's the trauma of having seen something as a child. It could have been even a horror movie. I think this is called one of Disney's dark movies, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I've never seen it, actually. I was surprised; I looked it up online and saw a few clips of it, and I said, "Oh, I see what you saw." But it could be trauma from your childhood. It could be some sort of abuse, and you get the memories back. How do you deal with that? Well, the way not to deal with it is to just let it go on untended, because then it will haunt you for the rest of your life. The way to deal with it—there are wonderful, wonderful cognitive therapy skills that you can learn that can help you play with the imagery. When I say "play with it," I'll talk about that in a moment. You can really look at what you're saying to yourself when you're traumatized. You can learn how to fade it over time, and you can learn the antidote.

Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we've got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that's it. A very quick ad, and we'll be back. Romance. I wish I knew more about what girls want from a relationship. Well, I wish I knew more about what I want. Where's that ad I saw? Here it is: The Selfish Path to Romance, a serious romance guidebook. Download chapter one for free at selfishromance.com and buy it at amazon.com. Huh? The Selfish Path to Romance—that is interesting.

Really look at what you're saying to yourself when you're traumatized. You can learn how to fade it over time, and you can learn the antidote, which I'll also talk about in a moment. So let's take each one of these. So The Hunchback of Notre Dame—it's a very heroic movie, but it's also a very tragic story. So seeing it as a kid can leave you... it can leave you feeling, "Oh my gosh, the world's a heck of a scary place, and people are cruel, and what's my future look like if it's so dark? You can't trust anybody, and the good people seem to lose in the movie." So how do you deal with... you get that whole emotion when you see those images in your mind again; when they come back, all of that comes back as a package—this dark view of yourself, the world, or other people, or the hope. It may not be dark about yourself, but just "What's the use? Why bother?" To sum it up, good loses, and bad seems to win. Bad seems to win the day.

So what do you say to yourself? What you can do is play with the imagery and come up with your own endings or come up with a different way of looking at it where good wins and bad loses. Now, that's not always successful. I mean, some people have changed; they have nightmares, and they are able to play around in their waking hours with the endings—funnier endings to nightmares, turning them into a playful animated movie or cartoon, or having the people kind of melt, like in The Wizard of Oz, the Witch: "I'm melting, I'm melting!" You can change the imagery, or you can even have it be silly. You know, the bad guy turns into—you pull back the curtain and you see some goofy guy who's got a scary voice that they're making sound scary. So you can play around with the imagery itself, and you could go get some cognitive therapy help for that too. You can go to the website academyofct.org. But you can also change what you say to yourself. If you're saying, "Not again, this will never go away," oh, that's not good, because you're telling your subconscious, "Don't ever let this scary imagery go away." Instead, you want to say, "Oh, just this nonsense from childhood that used to scare me. I'm not going to play that game anymore." And over time, those types of messages tend to dismiss the content a little bit at a time.

When I was a little kid, my babysitter took me to see Edgar Allan Poe movies, and that scared the bejeebers out of me—whatever the bejeebers are. And I have avoided horror movies for the rest of... I will for the rest of my life. But I just don't watch them. Even very dark scenes in movies, even in The Pirates of the Caribbean, I'm not a fan of seeing skeletons dancing and freaky-looking sea monsters. So what do I do? I just don't watch them. And if I do catch a glimmer of them, I remember that these are people putting on silly masks, and they don't scare me. And then the antidote to all of these—what is the antidote? Instead of watching horror movies, watch great movies—movies that make you smile, that make you feel like life is wonderful, exciting, adventurous, that you can achieve great things in life. And one of my favorite movies, if you want to smile, is Singing in the Rain. I know it's an old one, but it's my favorite one. I brought my kids up on it; they watched it umpteen times. There's also Beauty and the Beast, which is a better movie. Tangled—Tangled, if you're looking for Disney movies, gives you a sense that the world's more open to your achieving values. And that's what we want. We want to be able to set these wonderful goals and pursue our dreams.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to Drkenner.com and please listen to this...

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by Dr. Ellen Kenner:

A major source of friction is when partners violate the trader relationship. The refusal of a partner or partners to trade, even in everyday actions, will be perceived as unfair—a breakdown of the give-and-take in the relationship. And the trade involves more than just love. It also applies to character and to everyday relations between partners. Let's say that partners need two incomes to pay the bills. Both have agreed to work, but one partner now refuses to seriously look for a job, preferring to live off the efforts of the other. In addition to being unjust, the partner's refusal to work after promising to do so lacks integrity. When the traded principle is violated, tensions quickly rise. There is a feeling of betrayal and injustice by the partner who is getting the raw end of the deal.

You can download chapter one for free at Drkenner.com, and you can buy the book at amazon.com.