Halloween Therapy: What the Spirits Can Teach Us About Living
This Halloween, I found myself drawn not to costumes or sweets, but to the heritage behind celebrating the souls of the dead, as well as to some of the most famous ghostly tales. In Mexican culture, Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — is a time to remember and celebrate loved ones who’ve passed, surrounded by colour, music, marigolds, and stories. It’s a tradition that brings death to the table, not as something to fear, but to honour and celebrate.
In other parts of the world, grief looks very different. Funerals are solemn and shrouded in black, and after the service, the person is rarely spoken of again. You are not encouraged to “drag it out”. Open emotion is frowned upan — a “stiff upper lip” is the norm. For many Irish and British people, not crying at a funeral was seen as a badge of honour. Alcohol might encourage more emotion at a wake, but the booze could be blamed the following day. But when we silence grief, it doesn’t disappear; it lingers. The ghosts we avoid become the ones that live inside us. Ghostly costumes were created initially to trick the old spirits in not finding the living. How many of us are still running from our past, unable to face the effects of our darkest experience?
In Irish Celtic folklore, ghosts and monsters often reflected the unspoken terrors of the time — famine, disease, and the darkness within human nature. The Celts initiated Samhain, what is now known as All Hallows’ Eve, to ritualise the cycle of death and rebirth — the death of each summer and harvest, and the birth of a new year and new crops. Tales such as Abhartach, the blood-drinking revenant, or Dearg Due, the woman who drained men of life, symbolised power, fear, and repression. Centuries later, Bram Stoker transformed these myths into Dracula, a man who preyed on innocence and empathy. Modern psychologists, including Carl Jung, borrowed that image to describe the dynamic between the empath and the narcissist — where unchecked need and a lack of boundaries drain compassion until nothing remains.
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray carried a similar message: what we refuse to face within ourselves becomes the source of our decay. In therapy, we might call this “shadow work” — learning to acknowledge the darker parts of ourselves instead of denying them. When we accept our contradictions — grief and joy, rage and tenderness — we move closer to authenticity and self-acceptance.
Our fascination with these archetypes lives on in modern retellings, such as Nicolas Cage in Renfield, where Dracula’s familiar struggles against remaining in an abusive, codependent relationship. Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein on Netflix also attests to our continued inner conflict in striving for perfection, at any cost.
Perhaps that’s the real invitation of Halloween. Beyond the plastic pumpkins lies a chance to face the parts of ourselves we’ve buried — the unspoken losses, the relationships that still haunt us, the beliefs we cling to out of fear. In grief therapy, trauma counselling and integrative psychotherapy, this act of acknowledgement is often the beginning of healing.
So if there’s something in your life that feels undead — a memory, a relationship, or a self-belief that keeps resurfacing — maybe this is the year to face it. Hold it to the light, face it in the mirror. Like Dracula, our shadows only survive in darkness.
