You wonder what lies in those shadows outside your window, at the end of the hallway, in corners or under your bed. The dangers exist, you know that. Vigilance helps you survive by alerting you to risks, but it can also keep you trapped. Excessive concern about potential danger, hypervigilanceinterferes with real life. At the other extreme, insufficient concern or responsiveness to risk, hypovigilancecan lead you straight into the monster’s mouth. To help you find and navigate the ever-changing line between the two, you mentally and emotionally rehearse your fear responses in safer contexts and times.

Grave of Victor Frankl. Vienna Central Cemetery.

Source: HannaH30, Wikimedia Commons, shared under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0.

Existential psychologists suggest that human beings’ awareness of our fleeting mortality will motivate most of the choices we make and the things we do. We want life to be worth living in the moment, to stay alive, and to find ways to continue existing beyond physical life. For the psychologist Viktor Frankl (1946–1947), who later spread existential psychology throughout the world, many of his ideas on the subject were born from his years spent surviving the horrors of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. To continue, we want our fear and pain to matter. We dread the idea of ​​suffering for nothing. Frankl concluded that we are not simply trying to find meaning in life. Instead, to survive and even thrive, we feel driven to TO DO that means something.

In a modern and more scientific version, terrorism management theory suggests that the mental conflict between desiring life and experiencing death inevitably creates a terror that we continually strive to control (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 2015). In this line of thinking, death anxiety not only drives us to seek to prolong life and hope for life after death, but it also guides and empowers almost everything we do: we want the symbolic immortality of leaving an impression on others, of ‘to have an impact on the world, and to know that it will matter that we were here. Spiritual Beliefs can arise from the need to believe that we exist beyond the grave, as can reproductive and creative endeavors. Terror management Theorists say that terror never really leaves us, which is why we do what we can to work with it rather than drowning in it. More than a hundred years ago, psychologist William James (1902) paved the way for Frankl and others when he called the knowledge that we must die the “worm at the heart” of human existence.

When you read a horror novel, watch a scary movie, or tell your own scary story, you are making an affirmative choice: you will face this worm, not hide or run from it. You will practice your hereditary survival response in a manageable way so that you can strengthen yourself and overcome the power of the worm to harm you: you exercise to exorcise. This is just as true when you follow strange poetry, like that of Edgar Allan Poe, through one strange line after another. Even reading a relevant poem, essay, or article on this website helps you work with the worm rather than against it, because even the freest, least structured verse transforms abstract terror into concrete text.

Instead of letting terror crush you, you share a scary story because it allows you to ride the worm and maybe push it to take you where you need to go. You don’t just walk this tortuous line between the extremes of alertness. You ride on it.