#trauma reenactment

[simpletricksandnonsense]

🔪 Why Is Horror Funny? 🤔💀 🎥 The Monkey (2025) - Fatalism, Freud, & Trauma Explained 🎥

Horror isn’t always just scary—it can be hilarious. But why do we laugh at horror? 😱😂

Oz Perkins’ The Monkey (2025) is a wild blend of fatalism, trauma, and dark comedy, making us question: what happens when horror stops being terrifying and starts being absurd?

In this breakdown, I explore:

🧠 Fatalism & Learned Helplessness – Do these characters ever really have a choice? 🎭 Freud’s Theory of Humor – Why do we joke about death and fear? 🎬 Incongruity & Benign Violation Theory – What makes horror deaths funny instead of terrifying? 🌀 Trauma & Repetition Compulsion – How does Bill’s childhood shape his obsession?

👁‍🗨 Do you find horror scarier or funnier when it gets ridiculous? Drop your thoughts in the tags or comments!

[retiredchildsoldier]

A few signs your trauma is real and valid:

1. You have denial, that's to be expected and it would be weird if it never happened. Denial can look like more than just "it never happened" but also: "it doesn't matter", "it's not that big of a deal", and the classic "was it even bad enough to be trauma???"

2. You reenact parts of your trauma, often for me this happens in odd ways that seem counter intuitive.

3. You experienced amnesia, not everyone gets this but it is very common. I experience it regularly.

[unwelcome-ozian]

Trauma Reenactment Unconsciously repeating relational or emotional dynamics from earlier trauma—often to seek resolution or mastery. The behavior feels familiar, but rarely healing.

[ears-awake-eyes-opened]

Hayffie = #2 (i.e. trauma reenactment)

My Hayffie fics and headcanons are rooted in my perception of Haymitch and Effie in emotional addiction (which is also referred to using many other terms).

On a personal note, 1-5 don’t interest me anymore in my own life. Partly because of years of self-recovery work. Partly because emotional drugs don’t really exist where I live the valley of the shadow of death. That said, I enjoy writing Hayffie, in particular, so in that sense I’m *feeling* the emotions I write for them. But it’s a much more academic experience than actually being on the roller coaster of emotional addiction.

Most people find my inner life somewhere on the spectrum from boring to disturbing, depending on their sensitivities. I lost the friends who used to get high from relating with me and visa versa. I don’t miss those people, but I don’t like feeling the void they used to play a role in filling.

Still, there are much worse pains than anything that lies in the void.

[ourhopefulrecovery]

I've slowly come to realize my therapy is just a stage for trauma re-enactment. After 4,5 years of horrible suffering I'm relieved the truth is no longer dissociated from me.

What do I do now?

[retiredchildsoldier]

Things that can make memories feel different: (CW for all sorts of Ramcoa and trauma stuff)

1. How old the memories are

2. How much you've processed and healed from the memory

3. How many splits and alters were between you and that memory (other alters memories feel different)

4. The age of the memory (old memories are easier to handle)

5. The intensity of the memory. (Some events, while crazy intense, simply don't hit the same as others.)

6. The relationship with the abuser/individuals involved (if there was an abuser) (ex: being attacked by someone who care about hurts more than being attacked by someone you don't, similarly harming them will feel different as well for my forced perpetuation survivors)

7. How healthy your recovery of the memory was (using methods to force it up early will make the memory more painful, I have one of these methods and the memories came back full force, very painful)

8. How normal it felt at the time to the alter who was fronting.

9. If you were in some way intoxicated, not exactly rare with RAMCOA survivors due to programming methods.

10. How in control you felt during the event, this is not to be confused with how in control you actually were.

11. The level of dissociation you experienced at the time.

12. The location of the event (no clue why but it can make things feel different)

13. How often that event happened. The 1st is the worst in my experience, that can even be the first for one particular alter.

14. Your individual skill at handling memories

Examples:

My memory of being forced to fight for my life against a friend named Sabrina: I'd done this multiple times, I had a semi-familiar relationship with her, I'd already fought for my life multiple times, the memory is very old, I've healed a fair bit from it, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and similar memories, I got the memory back naturally and without force, and I'm separated from the event by possibly dozens of alters. As a result of all this I can handle the memory pretty easy for me to handle.

My memory of the first time I ever had to hurt someone else for the org that raised me: it's even older but I had a closer relationship with the person involved, I care more, but I'm still separated by dozens of alters and over 20 years, as well I've done plenty of healing. It's not super hard to handle but it can be a bit much at times.

My later memory of being SA'd by my adoptive father: I had a very complicated and long term relationship with that man, and I ended up still having to live with the creep for years after. It had happened many times before, but becuase I find him especially repulsive the memory hits different.

[unwelcome-ozian]

Is it normal to seek out “abusive” sexual encounters for people who went through sexual assault? In person and in form of brutal pornography (like consensual non consent)? Because I feel absolutely rotten about it and I don’t want to do that anymore and I just don’t know why I keep on doing it. It makes me feel terrible. I know there’s people who genuinely enjoy things like cnc but I don’t. It triggers me very badly.

Reenactment is an expression of unresolved trauma, It is the tendency a person can have to reenact some aspect of their original trauma.

“Reenactment can be defined as an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the intense survival energy mobilised for defence against a perceived life-threatening experience.”

Here’s some more information:

Compulsion to repeat the trauma Re-enactment, revictimization, masochism A Helpful Way to Conceptualize and Understand Reenactments Traumatic Reenactment

Oz

[ears-awake-eyes-opened]

But what do you do when family dysfunction is playing out on a worldwide scale? When nearly the entire human population is effectively reenacting the trauma of our collective lineages? When Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, and government totalitarian elements are capitalizing on that widespread dysfunction/addictiveness to fear? When nearly the entire human population (unrecovered from generations upon generations of violence/trauma) slams the people who have been doing the work of self-recovery and self-reclamation? Slams us down and says, “Nope. Your body is not sovereign, you selfish jerk. Your individuality is irrelevant. The power of speech you’ve shattered and rebuilt your self, your *soul*, to reclaim is dangerous and must be censored.” What do you do when nearly the entire human population is force-muzzling and shoving you into the box that you’ve shattered your self, your *soul*, to emerge from? Facing flames of this magnitude of collective dysfunction in my experience burns a person to nothing. The long work of self-recovery feels irrelevant now in a world that places no value the individual and is burning self-reclaimed people at the stake *for the greater good.* Being strapped to the stake brings no peace to anyone. What then do you say to your children?... “I’m sorry I failed.”