The author makes an interesting argument, she's a pop culture writer expected to review or discuss media that repulses her (including medical drama), and is trying to see if exposure or learning more about the techniques behind it helps.
I'm a clinical psychologist who mostly does OCD/anxiety work - in other words, exposure therapy. The general consensus in my training was that it was much more difficult to work with disgust than, say, fear or anxiety, because it doesn't habituate in the same way.
It sounds like it may have worked here, at least to some extent, which is interesting.
Oh that’s really interesting, I have OCD and have noticed that disgust-based aversions are hard for me to shake. I know that avoidance is usually discouraged but my therapist and I decided that it’s fine for fictional body horror lol.
I think that it can sometimes be helpful to draw a distinction between like, fear of the literal thought itself vs fear of the content of the thought.
Hahahah I feel like at some point you just have to let the exposure slide. I had a physician tell me I was almost acting like I had OCD because I was avoiding water for a field assignment and didn’t wanna use portapotties; he told me I needed to get used to using them so I didn’t develop OCD while I (diagnosed with moderate OCD) was sitting there like “damn that sounds like it sucks, I really hope I don’t get OCD, thanks doc”
Relayed the story to my exposure therapist and she was like yeah no… let’s work on public restrooms but you’re being reasonable. I would not use a porta potty either
I think a lot of the exposure therapists I worked with would consider the bathroom thing a reasonable exposure if there was concern that you’d dehydrate yourself to avoid it. But also you gotta pick your battles lol. An aversion to something can just be a minor quirk sometimes.
I’ve participated in an intensive program before though so I’m kind of used to the more extreme pro-exposure side of things. Those therapists have everyone doing weird things all day every day
Yeah, I think it's such a tightrope walk, trying not to "collude with avoidance" (as we like to say) while delivering treatment in a way that's honoring your patient's values and autonomy. It sounds like your therapist is doing it!
There are two main mechanisms that we talk about with exposure. One is habituation (gradual fear and anxiety goes down over time). That's the original model. The other isinhibitory learning, which is newer. Basically, we create associations - for example, touching the bathroom sink = contaminated = dangerous = fear/anxiety. Think Pavlov. In exposure, we create new associations - bathroom sink = generally not going to harm you. And you do that over and over and over so that the new association blocks out (inhibits) the old association.
But that's fear or anxiety, and often times disgust doesn't quite work in the same way. People with OCD who have primary disgust emotions have more difficulty, both with habituation and inhibitory learning.
With fear-based OCD or anxiety, typically you're going for overlearning (doing relatively extreme exposures, e.g., we're going to lick the floor). With disgust...usually I take it looooow and sloooow. Here's a blog post about one type of approach.
So that may be one reason that you're having trouble - it just doesn't work like fear. Also, you didn't say whether it's anxiety or OCD-related or not, but the other part of treatment for OCD is response/ritual prevention (i.e., preventing the compulsion done in response to the obsession, like washing your hands). In other types of anxiety treatment, we talk about preventing safety behaviors. A lot of times, if we're having trouble with therapy progress, it's because of compulsions or safety behaviors.
Sorry for the spiel! I don't know if that's helpful, but you hit my niche haha.
Interesting - having undergone OCD therapy for contamination themed severe OCD, I feel like mine was very much rooted in disgust rather than fear, and that it was definitely treatable. Everything made me feel disgusting and icky, not scared. Nowadays I still feel vaguely gross after using the bathroom or shaking someone’s hand but it’s easier to ignore and my brain stops caring pretty quick.
Yeah, absolutely! For some people, it works just fine. I'm glad it did for you. I do think that the end goal of ERP is for your brain to stop caring more quickly. I had a supervisor who called it the "shrug" response to OCD.
> I would like to get over my squeamishness for these reasons: first, the unbearable FOMO. Everyone is watching and discussing gory stuff without me, and they’re loving it, which says to me that either everyone is a desensitized sadist while I am a polite empath or that everyone is an adult who can suspend disbelief and I am a baby who cannot. I’d also like to get over my squeamishness on professional grounds. Being too afraid to watch critically acclaimed films and series — immediately, instead of months or years after they’ve released and I’ve been able to work up my nerve; or in their entirety, instead of in pieces, some of which get disregarded because my nerve never actually got worked up — might be a career killer. (There are only so many blogs to pitch on Dry Leaf.) But is it possible to change a fundamental part of my perception? Could I grow to tolerate blood and guts onscreen, or even grow to love it, as so many of my gorehound friends and co-workers do? Probably not, I thought stubbornly. But maybe, my editor prodded.
In this paragraph she managed to get at why I love body horror!
> I don’t feel I have abandoned my empathy or desensitized myself to gore, which I still find repulsive. If anything, I feel a kind of expansion of thought — a newfound curiosity about bodily transformation and the theater of play that isn’t as pure as Sherman or Deo’s, but it’s there. When I feel myself becoming fixated on how grotesque it would be to have your head coming out of your abdomen, I have created some space to marvel at the wildly fake contortion a team of filmmakers and artists brought to screen.
What's not discussed in the article is that it's not that I can enjoy gore because it doesn't disgust me. It's that I enjoy it because it disgusts me. I find experiencing that strong negative emotion thrilling. It's similar to how people enjoy eating spicy food, or riding roller coasters.
As a Pro SFX artist thank you so much for saying this! It’s funny because the Horror world of it all has some of the best people. It’s where I started out before working on bigger projects - but there’s nothing better than creating something from your imagination and presenting it at Monsterpalooza!
Man whenever I get a small injury like a bleeding cut or an unexpected injection, I get SO uneasy. I’ve passed out, thrown up, the whole thing. I’ve never been more anxious than the way I felt when I broke my wrist because my body was just slinging this feeling of “something’s really wrong” at me - it didn’t hurt enough to make me cry or scream but I was laying on the ground trying to force myself to vomit because that internal message made me SO nauseous.
And that’s why I love body horror - that same visceral ugly feeling but I’m far enough removed from it that it’s not gonna make me sick.
InnerKookaburra | 11 hours ago
Why would you want to?
ankhmadank | 11 hours ago
The author makes an interesting argument, she's a pop culture writer expected to review or discuss media that repulses her (including medical drama), and is trying to see if exposure or learning more about the techniques behind it helps.
UntenableRagamuffin | 11 hours ago
I'm a clinical psychologist who mostly does OCD/anxiety work - in other words, exposure therapy. The general consensus in my training was that it was much more difficult to work with disgust than, say, fear or anxiety, because it doesn't habituate in the same way.
It sounds like it may have worked here, at least to some extent, which is interesting.
compulsive_nonsense | 10 hours ago
Oh that’s really interesting, I have OCD and have noticed that disgust-based aversions are hard for me to shake. I know that avoidance is usually discouraged but my therapist and I decided that it’s fine for fictional body horror lol.
I think that it can sometimes be helpful to draw a distinction between like, fear of the literal thought itself vs fear of the content of the thought.
whattheknifefor | 9 hours ago
Hahahah I feel like at some point you just have to let the exposure slide. I had a physician tell me I was almost acting like I had OCD because I was avoiding water for a field assignment and didn’t wanna use portapotties; he told me I needed to get used to using them so I didn’t develop OCD while I (diagnosed with moderate OCD) was sitting there like “damn that sounds like it sucks, I really hope I don’t get OCD, thanks doc”
Relayed the story to my exposure therapist and she was like yeah no… let’s work on public restrooms but you’re being reasonable. I would not use a porta potty either
compulsive_nonsense | 9 hours ago
I think a lot of the exposure therapists I worked with would consider the bathroom thing a reasonable exposure if there was concern that you’d dehydrate yourself to avoid it. But also you gotta pick your battles lol. An aversion to something can just be a minor quirk sometimes.
I’ve participated in an intensive program before though so I’m kind of used to the more extreme pro-exposure side of things. Those therapists have everyone doing weird things all day every day
UntenableRagamuffin | 8 hours ago
Yeah, I think it's such a tightrope walk, trying not to "collude with avoidance" (as we like to say) while delivering treatment in a way that's honoring your patient's values and autonomy. It sounds like your therapist is doing it!
ziper1221 | 10 hours ago
Could you elaborate? I've had not much trouble getting over disgusting things (human sewage, gutting fish, etc) just by repeated exposure.
UntenableRagamuffin | 8 hours ago
Hmm yeah...I might get nerdy here for a sec.
There are two main mechanisms that we talk about with exposure. One is habituation (gradual fear and anxiety goes down over time). That's the original model. The other is inhibitory learning, which is newer. Basically, we create associations - for example, touching the bathroom sink = contaminated = dangerous = fear/anxiety. Think Pavlov. In exposure, we create new associations - bathroom sink = generally not going to harm you. And you do that over and over and over so that the new association blocks out (inhibits) the old association.
But that's fear or anxiety, and often times disgust doesn't quite work in the same way. People with OCD who have primary disgust emotions have more difficulty, both with habituation and inhibitory learning.
With fear-based OCD or anxiety, typically you're going for overlearning (doing relatively extreme exposures, e.g., we're going to lick the floor). With disgust...usually I take it looooow and sloooow. Here's a blog post about one type of approach.
So that may be one reason that you're having trouble - it just doesn't work like fear. Also, you didn't say whether it's anxiety or OCD-related or not, but the other part of treatment for OCD is response/ritual prevention (i.e., preventing the compulsion done in response to the obsession, like washing your hands). In other types of anxiety treatment, we talk about preventing safety behaviors. A lot of times, if we're having trouble with therapy progress, it's because of compulsions or safety behaviors.
Sorry for the spiel! I don't know if that's helpful, but you hit my niche haha.
whattheknifefor | 9 hours ago
Interesting - having undergone OCD therapy for contamination themed severe OCD, I feel like mine was very much rooted in disgust rather than fear, and that it was definitely treatable. Everything made me feel disgusting and icky, not scared. Nowadays I still feel vaguely gross after using the bathroom or shaking someone’s hand but it’s easier to ignore and my brain stops caring pretty quick.
UntenableRagamuffin | 8 hours ago
Yeah, absolutely! For some people, it works just fine. I'm glad it did for you. I do think that the end goal of ERP is for your brain to stop caring more quickly. I had a supervisor who called it the "shrug" response to OCD.
scruntbaby | 4 hours ago
Good way of wording this. Nice to be able to click X on the "⚠️🚨 HANDS ARE DIRTY🚨⚠️" popup window in my brain these days
m50d | 9 hours ago
That's an indisputable reason but also a kind of uninteresting one, since most of us don't have a job with this particularly unusual expectation.
JasonZep | 11 hours ago
Yea, I’ve actually gotten more sensitive to it over the years and don’t have any interest in being desensitized.
Ob_Necessitatem | 11 hours ago
Third paragraph.
> I would like to get over my squeamishness for these reasons: first, the unbearable FOMO. Everyone is watching and discussing gory stuff without me, and they’re loving it, which says to me that either everyone is a desensitized sadist while I am a polite empath or that everyone is an adult who can suspend disbelief and I am a baby who cannot. I’d also like to get over my squeamishness on professional grounds. Being too afraid to watch critically acclaimed films and series — immediately, instead of months or years after they’ve released and I’ve been able to work up my nerve; or in their entirety, instead of in pieces, some of which get disregarded because my nerve never actually got worked up — might be a career killer. (There are only so many blogs to pitch on Dry Leaf.) But is it possible to change a fundamental part of my perception? Could I grow to tolerate blood and guts onscreen, or even grow to love it, as so many of my gorehound friends and co-workers do? Probably not, I thought stubbornly. But maybe, my editor prodded.
[OP] melancholymagpie | 12 hours ago
Archive link
_antique_cakery_ | 10 hours ago
In this paragraph she managed to get at why I love body horror! > I don’t feel I have abandoned my empathy or desensitized myself to gore, which I still find repulsive. If anything, I feel a kind of expansion of thought — a newfound curiosity about bodily transformation and the theater of play that isn’t as pure as Sherman or Deo’s, but it’s there. When I feel myself becoming fixated on how grotesque it would be to have your head coming out of your abdomen, I have created some space to marvel at the wildly fake contortion a team of filmmakers and artists brought to screen.
What's not discussed in the article is that it's not that I can enjoy gore because it doesn't disgust me. It's that I enjoy it because it disgusts me. I find experiencing that strong negative emotion thrilling. It's similar to how people enjoy eating spicy food, or riding roller coasters.
LouCat10 | 10 hours ago
Yesssss. You describe it so well! This is why I love body horror too.
Due_Tower_4787 | 9 hours ago
As a Pro SFX artist thank you so much for saying this! It’s funny because the Horror world of it all has some of the best people. It’s where I started out before working on bigger projects - but there’s nothing better than creating something from your imagination and presenting it at Monsterpalooza!
_antique_cakery_ | 8 hours ago
And thank you for making the awesome, gruesome effects that I love to watch!
whattheknifefor | 9 hours ago
Man whenever I get a small injury like a bleeding cut or an unexpected injection, I get SO uneasy. I’ve passed out, thrown up, the whole thing. I’ve never been more anxious than the way I felt when I broke my wrist because my body was just slinging this feeling of “something’s really wrong” at me - it didn’t hurt enough to make me cry or scream but I was laying on the ground trying to force myself to vomit because that internal message made me SO nauseous.
And that’s why I love body horror - that same visceral ugly feeling but I’m far enough removed from it that it’s not gonna make me sick.