What are the reasons for people who are timid and afraid of ghosts?

1. When I was a child, I was afraid of ghosts.

As soon as it gets dark, I don’t dare to go outside. If I were asked to go out to pick up something, even if it was just in the yard, I would have to wait at the door for a long time, holding on to my anger, biting the bullet, and the moment I pushed the door open, I would start running and "la la la". Shout twice to encourage yourself.

Run there, run back.

Even if that thing is just two meters away from opening the door. I did the same thing.

Every time I do this, my mother looks at me with disgust and laughs at me: "Why are you so cowardly? I will never become a great person in the future."

This is actually not true Blame it on me, my mother always scared me when I was a kid. She told me not to run around when it gets dark and to go home immediately because there are "ghosts" outside.

You see, parents sometimes have such "double standards". They completely separated the part of scaring the child from the consequences of the child being frightened. In order to stop the children from running around, they scare them that there are ghosts; the children believe it, but in the end, let alone running around, it is difficult to even go out, and they laugh at the children for being timid.

2.

It is actually understandable that children are afraid of "ghosts".

Piaget's "child animism" believes that in the "preoperational stage", that is, between the ages of 2 and 7, children cannot distinguish between what objects are alive and what objects are inanimate. Instead, he will push his consciousness and intention to all objects, believing that all objects are alive, conscious, and emotional just like people. Moreover, during this period, children are in the stage of gradually accumulating knowledge of external things. Parents are one of the important channels for children to understand external things. When children are both afraid and curious about the unknown, parental guidance becomes extremely important. This is why, at this time, if parents scare their children that there are "ghosts" outside, the children will believe it.

Fear of "ghosts" is a kind of instinctive fear of unknown things. If the history of mankind is personified as the history of a person's growth and development, in the primitive period, when human beings' understanding of the world was not so developed, we tended to have the emotion of fear out of a defense mechanism. Fear allows us to avoid danger, protect our safety, and allow species to reproduce and grow. Therefore, people have two instinctive explanations for the unknown mysterious power: one is God, which is a good power and should be worshiped; the other is ghost, which is a bad power. This is embedded in the collective subconscious of mankind.

It is not difficult to understand that children are afraid of "ghosts" due to the influence of human collective subconsciousness and the surrounding environment during individual development.

A reader once asked in the background: What should I do if my children are afraid of "ghosts"?

The above explanation may alleviate some of this reader’s anxiety. It is understandable that children are afraid of ghosts. As parents, we don’t have to worry too much. It’s important to clearly tell our children that I will be with you.

In addition, as parents, when we are worried about our children and ask "what to do", we may need to first be aware of ourselves: Why are we so anxious?

3.

It is not difficult to understand that people are afraid of ghosts when they are children. However, when they grow up, many adults are still afraid of "ghosts".

Many of my friends are afraid of "ghosts", but they seem a little shy to admit it. For example, a friend of mine must turn on the light to sleep at night. This habit has existed since he lived alone after graduation, just because of fear.

Once, I asked him: "What are you afraid of?" Just after I asked him, he, a 1.8-meter-old man, smiled sheepishly, and then said half-jokingly: "Tell you what you are afraid of?" Don't laugh at me. It's actually quite naive. I'm afraid of ghosts." After saying that, I didn't forget to add two more words: "I am an atheist. I know that there are no ghosts in this world, but I am just afraid." As he spoke, he spread his hands to show that "this kind of emotional fear is beyond the reach of my rationality" and that there was nothing I could do.

Because he was afraid of "ghosts", when he first graduated, he even had to live in a shared apartment with others instead of living alone.

There is also a friend who described an image to me: whenever her husband is on a business trip and she is at home alone, when she goes to bed at night and closes her eyes, a figure will appear in front of her. "ghost". This "ghost" came from the dark distance, from far to near, and finally came very ferociously close to her eyes, which was extremely terrifying.

4.

If you are afraid of "ghosts", what are you afraid of? We might as well experience it together.

I used to have the habit of sleeping with the light on.

Think about it. When I was a child, my parents scared me so much that I could only run wildly in the dark. When I grow up, it seems that it is difficult for me not to be afraid of "ghosts".

Feel the reason why I want to sleep with the light on. This psychological activity seems to be like this: I want to see everything around me clearly, and no disturbance can escape my "eyes of discernment" ". It seems that as long as I am vigilant and pay attention to everything around me, then I can control the external environment. The external environment is under my control, and "ghosts" will not come out to harm me.

So, we are afraid of "ghosts", it seems because we firmly believe in one fact: there must be a "ghost" outside, always waiting for opportunities to murder me.

In other words, the outside world is bad.

Take my own experience as an example. When I was young, I grew up with my parents in a city outside my hometown. My parents always believed that our family suffered from serious and ubiquitous regional discrimination. Regional discrimination did exist back then. However, this effect was severely amplified by my parents because of their own personalities and psychological states.

The idea they instilled in me is that as "outsiders" we are discriminated against by everyone. Everyone looks down on our family; everyone is bad. You must be careful when dealing with people around you, otherwise you will be bullied. Moreover, in my memory, my parents seemed to have very soft personalities. They would always say something like "because of my kindness and the other person's ruthlessness" when I came home, and as a result, I was bullied.

So, for a long time when I was growing up, I was very timid, and my life was not stretched at all, it was wrinkled and full of worries. I'm afraid of many things. Especially typical is the fear of "ghosts". Fear of ghosts, in addition to being frightened by parents, seems to have become such a metaphor.

5.

Afraid of ghosts, it may also be that the inner black hole is projected onto the external ghost.

The ghost outside, the self inside.

When the outside world is bad, we will withdraw our trust in the outside world and can only rely on ourselves. When we withdraw our trust in the outside world, we also withdraw our fear of this world. When we place this hostility, defensiveness and fear on ourselves, many black holes will appear in our psychology. And this kind of black hole will be projected to the outside world, thus confirming that the outside world is bad.

For example, ghosts may be projections of one's own "aggression".

Since the outside world is bad, you may hurt yourself at any time. We are likely to have a situation like this: we are very aggressive towards this malicious world, but we dare not express it, because if we express our aggression, this "bad" world will definitely Hit us back and we will be "retaliated".

So, there is an endless loop like "ouroboros": because the world is bad, we become aggressive, but once we attack, we will be retaliated against, so in the world Part of the time, we have to “swallow” our aggression. However, as one of the fundamental driving forces of human beings, "aggression" cannot be swallowed easily. Aggression is ready to stir up in our bodies, and it will always pop up at some point, surprising even ourselves.

One of my clients has obsessive-compulsive tendencies. She is afraid of "ghosts". And the "ghost" she is afraid of is her own aggression.

The visitor’s family conditions are not good and he has been neglected by his parents. Because of this experience, she has always been "aggressive" towards her family, so she used to have a very bad temper. However, something happened when she was in junior high school: After she had a big argument with her father, she forcibly hung up the phone on her father. On the same day, her father died in an accident. Although rationally she thought it was absurd, it gave her an unwavering illusion that it was her aggression that "killed" her father. From then on, her personality changed drastically, and she seemed to get along very well with her family, but at the same time she became very timid and began to be "afraid of ghosts."

This is because she began to suppress her aggression. She believed that her aggression was like the devil.

In order to suppress her aggression, she began to engage in compulsive behaviors to offset her anxious thoughts. What are her anxious thoughts? Whenever she seemed about to lose her temper, she felt that her surroundings suddenly became very scary, as if there was a "ghost" who did all kinds of evil and would harm her family. As for you, you must do something to counteract the devil-like "aggression" that comes out of you: for example, you must turn off the faucet a few times, take a shower a certain number of times, and walk until you reach the pavement. Wait on the gap.

6.

How to break it?

We can try to do it from two aspects:

First, gain a good outside world.

Of course we cannot be raised by our parents all over again. What we can do is: see good relationships, the love in relationships, and the people in relationships. This method is actually "re-cultivating yourself".

For example, when I was a child, the feeling that "everything is bad outside" was instilled in me by my parents all year round, which had a profound impact on me. When I was in school, I used to be very isolated and unsocial. I always seemed to be very vigilant and always felt that if I didn't pay attention, I would be bullied. The reason why this situation will gradually improve is because when I was growing up, no one really hurt me, from friends, to teachers, to intimate relationships, and bosses at work. The most important thing is Some people have expressed enough holding, support, understanding and kindness to me. This love nourished me and changed me, which had a direct effect on my subsequent transformation.

Second, accept your own black hole.

We often cannot find a suitable way to express the repressed emotions such as fear, attack, anger, etc., and thus are suppressed by us. Therefore, when it appears, we ourselves are shocked. The appearance of these things is just a request to be seen, recognized and accepted. You know, nothing appears to "kill" you. Their appearance is just a reminder.

The outside world is good and bad, others are good and bad, and we ourselves are also good and bad. That ghost may always be there. If it is there, welcome it, that ghost that is spurned by everyone, dark, and not accepted and understood.

Third, seek help.

Some children are frightened because they were accidentally affected by scary scenes such as horror movies, dark places, haunted houses, or scary dreams when they were young, leaving fearful memories in their subconscious. The fear of ghosts or the dark caused by this situation can be solved through hypnosis or other psychological treatments.