Halloween Therapy: What the Spirits Can Teach Us About Living
How to experience grief
This Halloween, I found myself drawn not to costumes or sweets, but to the heritage behind honouring the dead and the stories we tell about ghosts. Across cultures, Halloween has long been a threshold between worlds — a time when the living are invited to acknowledge those who have passed, and what still lingers unseen.
In Mexican culture, Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — is a vibrant celebration of remembrance. Loved ones are honoured with colour, music, marigolds, food, and storytelling. Death is welcomed to the table, not as something to fear, but as a continuation of relationship and love.
Silenced grief: the ghosts we carry
In contrast, grief in many Western cultures is muted and restrained. Funerals are sombre, emotion is contained, and mourning is expected to conclude swiftly. For many Irish and British people, maintaining composure — the “stiff upper lip” — was once a mark of strength. Emotion, if it surfaced at all, could be excused by alcohol at a wake and dismissed the next day.
But when grief is silenced, it doesn’t disappear — it lingers. The ghosts we refuse to face become the ones we carry within us. Early ghostly costumes were designed to confuse spirits and hide the living. How many of us are still disguising ourselves, running from unresolved loss or the impact of our darkest experiences?
Folklore and fear: shadows made visible
In Irish Celtic folklore, ghosts and monsters often embodied the unspoken terrors of their time — famine, disease, and the darker aspects of human nature. The festival of Samhain, now known as All Hallows’ Eve, ritualised the cycle of death and rebirth: the death of summer and harvest, and the promise of renewal.
Stories such as Abhartach, the blood-drinking revenant, or Dearg Due, the woman who drained men of life, symbolised fear, repression, and distorted power. Centuries later, Bram Stoker reworked these myths into Dracula — a figure who feeds on innocence and empathy. Modern psychology, including the work of Carl Jung, has drawn on this imagery to describe the empath–narcissist dynamic, where unchecked need and poor boundaries drain compassion until nothing remains.
Shadow work: facing what we avoid
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray carried a similar warning: what we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves becomes the source of our decay. In therapy, this process is often referred to as shadow work. Carl Jung wrote extensively about learning to recognise and integrate the parts of ourselves we would rather deny.
By accepting our contradictions — grief alongside joy, rage alongside tenderness — we move closer to authenticity and self-compassion. What is brought into awareness loses its power to haunt us.
Modern myths: the stories still speak
Our fascination with these archetypes continues in contemporary retellings. In Renfield, Nicolas Cage’s Dracula becomes a symbol of an abusive, codependent relationship, while Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein reflects our ongoing struggle with perfection, control, and the cost of denying our humanity. These tales warn of the dangerous world of the empath without self-awareness and boundaries.
The invitation of Halloween
Perhaps this is the true offering of Halloween. Beneath the plastic pumpkins lies an opportunity to face what we’ve buried — unspoken losses, lingering relationships, and beliefs rooted in fear. In grief therapy, trauma counselling, and integrative psychotherapy, this act of acknowledgement is often the first step toward 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. Look at it in the mirror. Like Dracula, our shadows only survive in darkness.
