Healing in the Upside Down: What Stranger Things Reveals About Trauma and Growth

As a therapist, I was surprised by how deeply Stranger Things mirrors the real-life healing process, showing how trauma, relationships, and self-acceptance shape our ability to grow. But before you go any further, if you haven’t watched the final season of Stranger Things yet, you may want to skip this post until you’ve wrapped that up. There are spoilers below!

Like many people I have been a fan of Stranger Things since it first came out. My husband and I kept up with the seasons over the years and we fell in love with the characters. We laughed and cried (and I cringed at some of the more excessively gory scenes). When the final season was released a few months ago, we were eager to watch and get closure to the storyline we’ve theorized about for nearly ten years. I expected the usual bag of tricks – nightmarish monsters, 80’s references that would make me smile, D&D references I wouldn’t understand, and of course jaw-dropping twists-and-turns along the way – all while hoping my favorite character’s wouldn’t be killed off (I’m just saying that Robin, Steve, and Dustin are national treasures…).

Why Stranger Things Resonates With the Healing Process

What was not on my bingo card however, was the Duffer Brothers writing a piece of fiction that offers a surprisingly accurate portrayal of trauma-informed therapy and the emotional work of healing. What played out on screen was a visual representation of the importance of having someone with you on your healing journey, the impact of both being fully witnessed and accepting yourself for all of who you are, and the necessity of accepting hard truths as reality. There are many examples of this throughout the series but a few examples from the final season stand out.

How Relationships Help Us Survive Trauma

We don’t always have words to explain the significant or traumatic events that we experience, so it’s natural to lean into relationships with the people who were with us. It gives us comfort to know that we are not alone. We see this in several of the romantic relationships and friendships that form between the characters living in Hawkins. Sometimes these relationships are able to grow past the event to become deeper and richer (like Joyce and Hopper) and other times they begin to feel suffocating (like Nancy and Jonathan). This doesn’t mean that the relationship isn’t genuine, but it may mean that it has run its course or that it is no longer mutually beneficial to those in it. This can be a hard truth to accept about a relationship (or honestly, about any of our coping strategies that are no longer serving us). For Nancy and Jonathan, their relationship helped them survive a death-defying event, but left them feeling stuck as they continued to mature. In the final few episodes we see them turn toward each other to face their presumed physical demise and the death of their relationship. Their acknowledgment and acceptance of this truth, as difficult as it is, is indeed an end, but it is also a freeing new beginning.

The Courage of Self-Acceptance

Similarly, Will’s journey toward awareness and self-acceptance spans much of the series and shows the power of facing reality and being true to oneself. We see through his story how vulnerable we can become to the expectations and lies of others when we hide our true identities from ourselves and those we love. This isn’t meant to induce shame about such things, it’s expectable, especially when we are young and have been protected (perhaps overwhelmingly so as we see Joyce do with him) or been told by society at large that we risk everything when we don’t conform (as the Mind Flayer leads Will to believe). When we test this boundary and the resistance only increases, it’s no surprise that we believe that we are unlovable. Yet, when we see another live into their own truth and encourage us to do the same (as Robin does with Will) we get a glimpse of what is possible (like when Will taps into the hive mind and is able to control the Demogorgons and Vecna), and it helps us find the strength to confront the powerful lies that control us. Will’s coming-out scene in episode seven is powerful because it is the point when he accepts all the parts of himself and takes the risk of exposing his truth to others. He trusts that the moments of finding himself along the way will carry him through, and they do.

Moving Through Trauma

One of the most striking series of scenes in the last season is when Max walks Holly through all of her memories with Henry to help her get back to her body. In a pivotal moment, they are watching Holly’s most traumatic memory, when the Demogorgon attacks her and her mother, and we see that Holly’s terror watching the scene is as real as it was in the actual moment. Max disrupts her trance and reminds her that the memory is not real and that she is currently safe from that physical threat. Then, just before they begin their (cinematic but painfully slow) return to their bodies, Holly begins to panic. She feels ashamed that she did not do more to save herself, her mom, and later Max, when they were each attacked. She is scared and believes that she failed, but Max offers her a different perspective. Max doesn’t tell Holly to stop overreacting or downplay the significance of the situation, instead she tells her the truth. Max reminds Holly that she was a child in a terrifying situation and that she did what she needed to do to survive. She was brave by protecting herself and not giving up. Max stays with Holly and helps her make sense of what she is experiencing so that she can tolerate it enough to move through it. This is the good, hard work of trauma-informed therapy.

Will does something similar for Henry in the final episode. Through the hive-mind he witnesses Henry’s most traumatic moment and extends empathy toward him. Will tells Henry the truth. Henry was a child who experienced something horrible, and that the Mind Flayer lied to him. Will offers Henry a way out, a way back to reality, and back to his true self, but Henry declines. Henry chooses what has become familiar to him and claims his alter-ego, Vecna, as his only identity. It pains me to say that this is also, unfortunately, how things sometimes go in therapy too. It is hard to let go of the stories we’ve believed for so long and even harder to forgive ourselves for it. Shame keeps us believing the destructive lie that we are better off by doing so because we’ll be rejected otherwise.

Healing Is Not “Fixing”

Now, all metaphors break down at some point, and Stranger Things is certainly not an exact parallel to real life let alone therapeutic healing, but I think we can still learn something from it. As many critics have already noted, too many storylines are wrapped up with a neat and tidy bow, giving several characters closure, but somehow that doesn’t feel satisfying. I think this is because real life doesn’t always wrap up so cleanly, even when we want it to. This is worth paying attention to because sometimes what we think we want isn’t what we actually want, and often healing isn’t about “fixing” what is broken as if the thing had never happened in the first place, but instead is about coming to recognize and accept the reality that something terrible did happen, that you survived it, and that you aren’t broken but human. Healing involves accepting and grieving the complexity of our realities, so that they can be tolerated enough to allow us to move forward.

Grief is part of the process and we can’t run away from it. We have to turn toward the pain to keep it from controlling us. This is understandably difficult to do, but as we find the strength to lean in toward it, and we allow others to be with us and help us contain our pain (whether it be Robin, Max, Will, or a therapist), we begin to see the truth that who we are is enough and we do not need to hide from our traumas or fears. We can grow and heal.

If this post stirred something in you, I hope you’ll take a moment to listen to that. Healing often starts with noticing: What moved you? What hurt? What felt true? Whether your next step is journaling, talking with someone you trust, or seeking professional support, may you remember that you don’t have to walk this path alone.