Halloween Is Exposure Therapy

Halloween is therapy.

All holidays are therapy. Halloween is exposure therapy. Its screaming skulls and faux headstones aren't mere cheap thrills. They force us to remember death and what it does.

Each holiday helps us address and process some profound aspect of human life, from nationhood to changing seasons to those awesome and appalling mysteries that some call God.

So Halloween happens at what, in the northern hemisphere, is a morbid turning point. Early fall lulls us with its dry brightness and sapphire skies; in late October, trees go bare, as does the sky when birds fly south. Nights chill and suddenly it's dark at 6pm.

For bygone generations, this seasonal shift signaled post-harvest hunger, barren orchards, killer storms, deep freezes, and dark months spent locked indoors.

It's no surprise that All Souls' Day, a somber festival commemorating the departed, has been observed on November 2 since the 11th century.

And while few of us are forced anymore to spend our winters starving, snowbound, and confined in cold sheds until March, we still need Halloween.

That's because, free as we might be, we still feel fear.

The sources of fear shift from land to land and year to year, but our amygdalae are tiny police sirens built into our skulls to signal danger.

This keeps us alert and, thus, alive. What was that sound? Do I smell smoke? But fear can build up in our brains and bodies and stay stuck there even without clear and present threats. This is anxiety.

Holidays aren't just for fun; they serve psychological purposes

Here's how holidays work: Each one isolates a certain human need or profound shared experience. Over a certain span of time—the same span every year—its special rites, foods, music, games, displays, and other demonstrations help celebrants hyperfocus on its meaning. Doing this in public, watching others doing what we're doing, mirroring our feelings, deepens the holiday's impact and helps us feel less isolated in the face of history, eternity, and mystery.

That's why we have and love a major holiday focused on fear. Is any state of mind more universal, painful, and potentially crippling, and yet required for survival? Could any feeling connect us more?

And yes, Halloween is major: The National Retail Federation’s latest survey predicts that Halloween spending in the U.S. will reach $11.6 billion this year.

Here's how Halloween works: Just as plumbers force air and water down pipes to "flush out the line," dislodging and clearing debris, Halloween forces fear into our consciousness. In shops and our own doorways—places we associate with safety—swinging skeletons and devil masks and spooky sound effects fuel our darkest fears. They all scream "Death, death, death! Remember death? You'll die someday, and so will everyone you know!" But in our ostensibly safe environments, amidst our families and friends, those terrors are "flushed down the line." They still feel real but at least more endurable.

It's an annual initiation into the unthinkable

Death is a brutal fact that we must all acknowledge and accept. Facing this fact together, from a relatively early age, initiates us into the most adult truth we'll ever know. However horrible, such revelations help us face the brevity, thus preciousness, of life. We literally, brilliantly, temper each other's terror and our own with treats and laughs.

But although fear is universal, we aren't all alike. If Halloween is our exposure therapy and we want to make the absolute most of it, you and I would seek different sets of decorations, costumes, sounds, and store displays, based on our deepest triggers, traumas, phobias, and fears. They'd all be scary, but your version might have sharks instead of ghosts because you don't believe in ghosts but you have seen a surfer torn to shreds. My version might lack skeletons, because I find bones beautiful, but it would have hospital machines and speeding cars.

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But if we all played up our own deepest triggers, to yield the maximum exposure-therapy effect, we'd also need to find fellow shark-, car-, and defibrillator-fearers with whom to party and feast. Facing our deepest fears alone would be too scary—which is, and also is not, the point of Halloween.