Is it possible for a phobia to give someone PTSD-like symptoms?
Unfortunately, yes. Especially if that person is already autistic and highly sensitive to emotions lol.
I’ll get into that more at the end of this post, I just needed a bit of context before I recommended some good horror stories and songs that’ve been cathartic for me.
First off: Ptolemaea by Ethel Cain
You can read the lyrics here: https://genius.com/Ethel-cain-ptolemaea-lyrics as well as find a brief description of what the song is about, in the context of Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter album.
This is a song about violence committed against a person, though the feeling of terror is applicable to…well, anything that makes you terrified. Like I read from somebody somewhere on the internet, this is a song to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
And to re-iterate what’s said on the lyrics page, Ptolemy/Ptolemaea is from Dante’s Inferno, which is a story written in the 1300s about someone who journeys through 9 circles of hell. Ptolemy is part of the final (i.e. worst) circle, reserved for those who are traitors to guests in their home.
So speaking of horror themes and homes…
Get Out of My House by Kate Bush
This song, in my opinion, is not as terrifying as Ptolemaea, but it’s still a bit spooky and off-putting. Kate Bush has said it was inspired by The Shining from Stephen King.
But also, part of the song is Kate Bush braying like an actual mule, and I think that’s so random and funny and also iconic.
Third, Don’t Let the Forest In by CG Drews. This novel was recommended by this youtube channel and I fully enjoyed this book, but like the other things on this list, it’s very much horror and by “enjoy” I don’t mean “gave me all the fun feels.”
Super quick summary, this boy lives at a boarding school and he has to fight monsters in the forest which are based on drawings he’s made in the past. There’s also body horror and queer relationship struggles and an eating disorder (so trigger warning if that’s not for you).
Fourth, The Summer Hikaru Died. I watched the animated show close to a year ago, but there’s also manga you can read. The premise of this is, Yoshiki discovers his friend Hikaru’s body has been possessed by a demon/spirit thing, and the real Hikaru died months ago.
But, they live in a rural town in Japan and Yoshiki (a closeted gay person) is terrified of being alone, so he doesn’t get rid of the demon like a sensible person would do.
So yep that’s the list.
What’s really strange is, I didn’t use to be a person who liked horror. As a kid, I cried at Disney movies whenever anything mildly dangerous happened, and I was afraid that villains from middle grade mystery stories might be lurking outside my window at night.
And then, you know…you wind up in a place where you’re daily confronting this awful phobia you have, and logically you know it’s not physically dangerous and this is such a stupid thing to have nightmares over, but emotionally you start fearing the actual sensation of the fear…
And it gets so bad that you start turning to horror stories because you can control those. That spooky tv villain, that’s just props and makeup and cgi and good acting. (That phobia though, is too real and always lurking.) The monsters in this book, boiled down they’re just words from someone’s brain–and that’s cathartic because someone else’s brain has felt like this.
Ptolemaea is like the part of my brain screaming for this to stop but I can’t make it stop. Can’t get it out of my house.
For me, horror stories are a way to neatly box up all the overpowering emotions and put them on a shelf where they can be observed and studied. They let me control some type of fear, even if it’s only adjacent to the real life fears/circumstances in my life. And they help me believe our fears might all be explained away, and if they aren’t, at least somebody out there gets it.
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