Fear 101
my journey into letting go and getting scared
Historically, I have not been a horror girlie. It has taken until now, my early thirties to know the difference between Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, to be able to look at a victorian doll in a movie without exiting the room (barely), or to agree to watch anything at all with blood in it. Like most transformations in my life, I credit this one to BDSM. Let me explain.
As a kid and teen, I was scrupulously fear-averse. I watched exactly two scary movies and entered one haunted house. The haunted house came when I was about twelve, and was reckoning with the fact that I was not only a “big kid,” but on the precipice of being a teenager. In my mind, teenagers were unpredictable, terrifying beings that shoved ahead of you while trick-or-treating, played pranks, and drove their cars too fast through our suburb. They were discussed in hushed tones by the adults around me, like there was something uncontrollable about them, feral, even, as though the moment you crossed the threshold into thirteen, all the sweetness of your childhood would evaporate and you’d become a craven creature scouring the earth for thrills and chills.
It was in the spirit of exploring this threshold that I stepped into the haunted maze. Every year my mom took us to a huge pumpkin patch in the wine country north of San Francisco to seek a bit of East Coast-tinged idyllic fall energy. There were hay bales everywhere, rolling hills covered with pick-your-own pumpkins, and the kinds of decorations that had heretofore been my yearly Halloween companions — slumped-over scarecrows with wobbly grins, pitiful ghosts who looked more scared than scary, and the occasional black cat statue with a jaunty witch’s hat covering its ears. In my opinion, Halloween was for gentle spooks and fresh, crispy Crunch bars. But the year I turned twelve, the dark doorway of the haunted maze inside the threatening barn beckoned, and I answered the call. No sooner had I stepped through the cobweb-strewn archway than some human body sporting a mask lurched forward. I smelled the rubber, thought of the warnings that masks limited children’s ability to see safely while trick or treating that I took very seriously, and I got the fuck out of there. No haunted houses for me, thanks. I was quiet on the ride home, looking out the window and feeling some kind of innocence had been taken from me. And as an eldest daughter in an occasionally rocky home environment, innocence was hard to come by. It was up to me to protect it.
My two scary movie run-ins came about seven years apart. The first, when I was seven in 1999, was the Disney Channel original movie “Don’t Look Under The Bed.” An older kid of family friends got me alone and turned on Disney, which I wasn’t allowed to watch because my mom felt it skewed older and more cynical than the programming I favored on Nickelodeon. I don’t even think we saw the whole movie, it was about the span of content between commercial breaks, but the images stayed with me forever. A child hung her feet out over the edge of their bed, and a hand reached out from a portal to the underworld and snatched her by the ankle. The next thing I remember was the girl’s little brother being thrown in a sack by a disfigured boogie man, and dangled over a cliff from the edge of a garbage filled wasteland. Suffice to say every night for years I leapt onto my bed from many feet away just to be safe.
By fourteen, I understood my relationship to fear and avoidance of it a little better. It wasn’t that I was never afraid — I was always afraid. Despite appearances and the narrative I told myself about having a happy family, my parents were flawed people with poor boundaries who, despite trying their best, were prone to the instability and outbursts one might expect from two people with a lot of trauma and untreated mood and personality disorders. This dovetailed perfectly into a painful triangulation with my younger brother, the golden child, whose frequent physical attacks and the way I’d be blamed for them made me feel like I was bad to my core. I carried other people’s pain and poor coping skills and thought the more I controlled myself, the better chance I had of fixing everyone around me (if any of this rings true, please take a look at Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents, it’s a doozy). It was into this millieu that some friends made me watch The Sixth Sense at a sleepover. With each freakish ghost interaction, I felt terrified of course, but also furious. Why, I fumed, would people seek out recreational fear when life is scary enough? Again, my meticulous efforts to protect my own innocence had been thwarted. Again, I was pissed.
Fast forward eleven years to the early collared days of my current D/s dynamic with my Dom, and the advent of Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios here in LA. If you’re unfamiliar, Halloween Horror Nights is the epitome of the aforementioned craven teen energy. Packs of people fluent in sarcasm roam through a variety of hastily constructed, Universal Studios IP-filled mazes where cheap scares lurk around every corner. On their website this year they describe their haunted houses as “mind ripping.” My Dom, having a secure attachment style and no mental afflictions, isn’t exactly a horror junkie, but it’s His (very normal) opinion that one should be scared a little bit on Halloween every year as is your duty as an American. When He informed me we would be going to get our pants scared off, it was too early in the relationship to disclose not only my general chicken-ness, but aggressive aversion to any and all scary things (and how angry they made me). I would just have to pretend to be slightly cooler than I was and join the roving packs of the fearless up in Studio City.
But I was also the girl who allowed myself to be strung up by my wrists in a doorway and flogged senseless, to be blindfolded, spat on, and pummeled with crops and paddles until my butt cheeks turned entirely purple. I begged to be called mean names until I cried, to be wrapped in Saran Wrap, to find and push edges as often as I could. That old urge to protect my innocence felt absurd in the face of my sexual cravings, but I couldn’t bridge the gap between the two types of chosen exhilaration. Regardless, I hypothesized that maybe there was some way to look at this experience askance and discover the kinky game in it.
As we descended the long escalator from the main theme park to where the haunted houses were kept, I turned to my Dom awash in realization: “You just want to scare me so I’ll cling to You!”
“Obviously,” He answered simply, smiling.
Armed with a solid way to be a “good girl,” and Do This Right, the haunts were much more manageable. To be clear, I still screamed and crumpled and had to restrain my punching arm when a guy in tattered bloody bandages got too close, but overall… I survived. A catharsis began to settle. The point of this (and all of life by extension, maybe?) was not to never experience fear and beat yourself up for failing at staying cool, it was to be afraid sometimes and realize you’re not going to die.
That said, my instinct to remain un-scared has persisted through the subsequent years of high-quality LA haunted houses. Don’t get me wrong, I attend, but I also protect. In 2023 and my arsenal of fear-avoidance tactics is more robust than ever before. I’ve learned to place my back against walls as I enter new rooms, blur my vision here and there, and always stand at the center of groups so nobody can get me.
But something funny happened on the way back from Pomona the other night. We went to see Delusion, a cross between a haunted house and immersive theater that is both playfully written and truly scary. I employed all my tactics as we went through the haunted house, ran through a misty graveyard, crowded into a claustrophobic basement, and got chased by a spider the size of a smart car. I did my wall sidles, averted my gaze here and there, and generally braced myself against the unknown. And as we drove home, I felt a bit of a deflation. I’d shut down my vulnerability to the experience to protect myself, and only experienced one jump scare as a result. The catharsis was missing. I wanted to go back through, fresh, unknowing, and let the fear take me. This was new.
What I’m really noticing this year is that Halloween Fear and fear fear are two different genres, and the former may actually be an antidote to the latter. When I read I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, Michelle McNamara’s brilliant book on the Golden State Killer, I got up from my bed to latch and re-latch my windows several times a night. I was unsettled to my core. But when I watched Halloween this year, I got to experience my phobia of men breaking into my house to kill me in a contained, linear way. The jump scares allow me to let off some of that steam from the fear fear. Also, the fact that these kinds of jump scares can be universal is somehow comforting — others share my fear, and while it’s not debunked or necessarily soothed, at least we’re not alone.
None of this is new, just new to me, but I’ve noticed that these ideas map directly onto BDSM fear play. Creating fear within the context of the mutual respect and trust good scenes rely on is actually a lot trickier than people may think. Fear is an elusive privilege that you have to really chase. It takes an ability to suspend disbelief, strong knowledge of each other’s psyches, and really boils down to good writing. It also takes great vulnerability — there is no sidling along walls or blurring vision. Fear among trusting equals can only be curated with deliberate intent. And it’s exactly that clear-minded focus that beams a mega-watt flashlight on the things that really scare you, showing their outlines, their simplicity, their smallness. Things get transformed under that light. Signs and symbols take on new meaning. Suddenly, getting kidnapped in this safe container is the hottest thing in the world. Because for someone to make you safely afraid, they have to see you, want you, care for you.
I’m sure all of this sounds completely foreign if not cancellable to the uninitiated, but for the iykyk group it’s important to put into words. So we can remember that real life is often there to supply us with new colors for our BDSM paint palette, and vice versa — that BDSM helps us turn on the light in the proverbial haunted houses of our own minds, our families of origin, what have you, and look at everything there for what it is, evaluating the true threats from the ones projecting their looming shadows on the wall. Further, we gain the power to face what is terrifying to others and watch those signs and symbols curl up on our laps to be pet, purring gently.
Take the Devil tarot card for instance: foreboding, ghoulish. The people shackled next to him look dejected, trapped. That is until you read a description of their plight as “chosen bondage.” When the Devil turns up in a reading, they say it’s time to analyze where and how you may be choosing situations in which you feel trapped — and who better to analyze how this feels than those of us who have willingly and gleefully climbed into consensual shackles? That’s a somatic privilege that helps us break those non-consensual ones. Now when I encounter the Devil, rather than pulling away or shutting my eyes, I breathe a sigh of relief. I know what he’s asking me to do. It’s old hat. A far cry from the nervous kid who jumped from many feet away onto her bed, fearful if she broke the ritual she’d be punished for it. Now I know that wading waist deep into fear from time to time is the only way to get washed clean.
So maybe this time of year at the thinning of the veil and appearance of frights big and small is another moment to look at the light and shadow of fear, the consensual kind and non-consensual, and get a little witchy by traversing the liminal space between. Who knows what could be transformed?
"BDSM helps us turn on the light in the proverbial haunted houses of our own minds, our families of origin, what have you, and look at everything there for what it is, evaluating the true threats from the ones projecting their looming shadows on the wall." ugh yes this is one of the things that I love about BDSM.
You’re such a talented human and fantastic resource for kinky folks with trauma. Well written!