Reader’s Question

I’m 15-years-old and we’re reading the book In Cold Blood in school. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the story of the brutal murder of an entire family, completely out of the blue. Since we’ve been reading it, I’ve suddenly developed a fear of being murdered. Whenever I’m outside at night, I constantly wonder what is hiding in the dark, and sometimes I even worry about it when my eyes are closed. This isn’t the first time I’ve had experiences like this, but they rarely happened, maybe once every 4 months or so. I’m just wondering if this is common, or is there something wrong with me? Also, what can I do to prevent or help this? Thank you so much!

Our Clinical Psychologist’s Reply

People love music, books, art, sports, and other activities because they create emotions in us. Inspirational songs make us feel good and sad songs make us cry. In Cold Blood is one of those books that creates emotions in us as well. When reading In Cold Blood we recognize that the murders happened in “normal” America, without provocation, and in a cold blooded fashion. It’s not uncommon for such books, or movies and television programs with similar themes, to increase our sense of insecurity and fear of assault. Our fears continue due to Emotional Memory — reliving the emotions created by reading the book each time we remember the book or a similar situation. As a child I watched a television program that included a monster under the bed…I slept dead-center in the middle of the bed for weeks.

There is nothing wrong with you. However, it’s likely that you are undergoing a lot of stress at this time. From your description, you have frequent episodes where you feel unsafe or threatened…or you lose your sense of security. When this happens frequently we often find a history of some event that threatened your sense that everything was safe in the world. For young people, this can be marital fights between your parents, a divorce, a significant illness/hospitalization in the family, death of a family member or relative, or another emotional trauma. If you experienced one of these situations in your past, reading In Cold Blood may have triggered those feelings again.

To deal with this, I’d recommend reading my article on Emotional Memory. It describes how the brain makes and operates memories that contain emotions — such as your fears. I’ve listed several methods that allow you to slowly decrease the emotional reaction to your reading and your fears.

As you discovered, the stronger the emotions produced by a book or work of art, the more popular that creation may be. As an example, Whitney Houston sang the national anthem (US) at the Super Bowl (1991) during Operation Desert Storm — a time of intense emotion in the US. There were so many emotions connected to that single singing of the national anthem that her recording actually landed in the Top 20 songs of that time. That single singing of the Star Spangled Banner (1991) is considered one of the top 20 events in all of US television history. In other words, our emotional state, when combined with an emotional experience such as a song or book, can create a memory that lasts forever. Your emotional reaction to In Cold Blood is very common but needs to be gradually decreased using some of the methods I list in my Emotional Memory article.