Are Ghosts Hallucinations?
If ghosts are not hallucinations, what are their function psychologically and narratively?
I have been examining my personal history with ghosts and I realized something concomitant with ghosts: abuse. In my family, talking about ghosts was considered an appropriate topic of conversation while abuse is not a topic to be discussed at all. Outside of the family, ghosts are things that don't exist that people within the family see; abuse is something that does exist while no one in the family sees it.
I could talk to my grandmother about ghosts. My grandmother would talk to my great-grandmother about ghosts, hold seances with a ouja board at the witch table (a teak wood tea table that I now own), and read tea leaves to prognosticate. My mother would talk about ghosts. My male cousin would begrudingly admit to enciuntering ghosts. Beside the common thread of blood ties, each of us have all been abuse victims.
I am wondering if this normalization of the paranormal is a way to relieve the psychological pressure of abuse. When you cannot talk about the abuse, something has to take its place. Living in an abusive situation places a person is a state of hyper arousal: sounds that normal people don't hear are completely audible to you because you are lstening for the tread of feet that is a prelude to violence, shadows are sharper and the mind prepared for danger sees them move and menance.
Speaking of ghosts to outsiders also offers abusers the added security of their victims being perceived as lacking credibility - if a victim ever tries to seek help their credibility in being a victim is already ruined. "Ghosts aren't real and neither is the abuse you claim to suffer."
I stopped experiencing the paranormal in my waking hours when I escaped from my family in 2014. Where my ghosts hallucinations? I don't think so, I think they were a cypher.
I have been examining my personal history with ghosts and I realized something concomitant with ghosts: abuse. In my family, talking about ghosts was considered an appropriate topic of conversation while abuse is not a topic to be discussed at all. Outside of the family, ghosts are things that don't exist that people within the family see; abuse is something that does exist while no one in the family sees it.
I could talk to my grandmother about ghosts. My grandmother would talk to my great-grandmother about ghosts, hold seances with a ouja board at the witch table (a teak wood tea table that I now own), and read tea leaves to prognosticate. My mother would talk about ghosts. My male cousin would begrudingly admit to enciuntering ghosts. Beside the common thread of blood ties, each of us have all been abuse victims.
I am wondering if this normalization of the paranormal is a way to relieve the psychological pressure of abuse. When you cannot talk about the abuse, something has to take its place. Living in an abusive situation places a person is a state of hyper arousal: sounds that normal people don't hear are completely audible to you because you are lstening for the tread of feet that is a prelude to violence, shadows are sharper and the mind prepared for danger sees them move and menance.
Speaking of ghosts to outsiders also offers abusers the added security of their victims being perceived as lacking credibility - if a victim ever tries to seek help their credibility in being a victim is already ruined. "Ghosts aren't real and neither is the abuse you claim to suffer."
I stopped experiencing the paranormal in my waking hours when I escaped from my family in 2014. Where my ghosts hallucinations? I don't think so, I think they were a cypher.