A Psychiatrist Teaches His Fear to Sit Still
The setup feels like a therapist's inside joke: a man trained to decode human behavior, to trace symptom back to source, had spent forty-odd years simply walking away from a specific genre of film.
This is the real story hiding inside the self-help narrative — how expertise creates its own alibi.
When you're a psychiatrist, you have language for everything: avoidance, dysregulation, intrusive imagery. You can name the defense without dismantling it — the vocabulary becomes a permission slip.
Then something shifted. He sat down and watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein again. The werewolf that had marked him at six was still there, still wrong in his visual cortex, still generating the mismatch between what his body expected and what his eyes reported. But this time he was watching from a different chair, one that held still.
He spent his career identifying defensive mechanisms in patients while his own remained invisible because he'd never sat down to watch what scared him.
”He's not unique — he's just the one who sat down.
