The Haunting — Caregiver burnout is a haunted house that you live in

Does spending a weekend in a haunted house conducting paranormal investigations with a bunch of other spooky weirdos sound preferable to spending it with your codependent family members? Yes? Then pack your bags, sister.

We’re heading to Hill House to talk about The Haunting (1968) and its portrayal of caregiver burnout.

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, Registered Psychotherapist and owner of Many Moons Therapy.

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Sources:

Hey final girls — I’d like to take you on a transcendent journey into your psyche through — you guessed — horror movies! More specifically, horror movie monsters and villains. Join me on a very special dark moon/solar eclipse this April 8 for the Final Girls Club where we’ll be exploring How Monsters Show Us Our Guts. Informed by Jungian exploration of myths and fairy tales as portraits of psychic terrain, in this workshop, we will explore how we project our unconscious shadows onto our favourite horror monsters and villains, and imagine the creation of our own monsters as an act of emotional catharsis and reclamation of self. Register HERE.

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Podcast artwork by Chloe Hurst at Contempomint.

West ML, Keller AE. Parentification of the child: a case study of Bowlby's compulsive care-giving attachment pattern. Am J Psychother. 1991 Jul;45(3):425-31. doi: 10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1991.45.3.425. PMID: 1951790.

The Haunted Mind of Shirley Jackson by Zoë Heller

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin

The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski 

Transcript

Welcome ghouls to today’s episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your Horror Barbie host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. If you received an invitation to the most infamous haunted house in North America to spend the weekend with a bunch of other spooky weirdos to explore paranormal phenomenon — would you go? Of course you would and in fact you packed your bags and left before I even finished that sentence, you spooky ghoul you. 

On today’s episode, we're going to take a weekend trip back to 1963 and stay with a bunch of spooky murderios at a haunted house so famous that since its creation by Shirley Jackson 1959, we simply have not been able to stop talking about it. Pack your bags, ghouls, we’re taking a trip to Hill House to talk about The Haunting.

And although you’re all set for this relaxing weekend in this uhhh peaceful murder house, The Haunting reminds us that you can’t exactly run away from your problems. Especially if you’ve been a caregiver for your horrible mother for the past 11 years to the point where you have absolutely no life of your own and you’re so severely burnt out that everything reminds you of her and what she wants including every corner of Hill House. 

Okay — so let’s get right into it. Let’s talk about The Haunting (1963) and its portrayal of caregiver burnout.

Movie synopsis:

We open on Hill House as our narrator, Dr. John Markway (who we’ll learn more about later) tells us about its sordid 90 year history filled with - as he tell us -  “scandal, murder, insanity, and suicide”. Basically, Hill House is a giant spooky house built in Massachusetts by some rich dude named Hugh Craine for him and his wife. His first wife, I guess. Except she died when her carriage crashed against a tree as she approached the house for the very first time. And then his second wife died in the house by falling down the stairs. We aren’t told either or the names of his wives, and in the late 19th century when this was all going women didn’t matter anyways so who cares, but I don’t know like — maybe they died or the house encouraged them to die to get away from him. Anyways! Oh and also, the surviving daughter went mad and died here too. 

In essence, this is not a place conducive to optimal mental or physical health… particularly for women. 

We’re now in present day, in the 60s, and Hill House is owned by some rich lady but it stands empty because she’s not stupid enough to live in it. And Dr. Markway is psyched because he is a doctor who studies the paranormal and gets the go ahead to invite a bunch of spooky random to Hill House for the weekend to study its paranormal goings-on. So he invites Luke Sannerson, who will be the future heir of Hill House, Theodora or Theo, a psychic, and Eleanor Lance who experienced poltergeist activity as a child. 

Eleanor has spent the past 11 years as the sole caregiver for her ailing mother who died very recently. We learn that Eleanor had a very difficult relationship with her mother who was cloying, demanding, and controlling of Eleanor, and that now that her mother has passed, Eleanor has no real life of her own and lives in her sister’s house with her and her mother and their kid and sleeps their couch and is incredibly burnt out and frayed probably from all the suppressed rage.

So when Eleanor gets an invite to spend the weekend away from everything? She’s like hell yeah I’m going. And even as drives down the driveway at Hill House at begins to get the heebie jeebies and wonders if she should just drive away into the unknown forever where no one will find her or ask her to care for them ever again she’s like you know what — I was invited and this is my chance to get away fro the weekend okay?! I’ll have my own room and I can get some peace and quiet and maybe there will be snacks and no one will ask me to fold laundry or fluff pillows or whatever and okay yeah maybe it’s haunted and there will be some ghosts, but I’m okay with that because I’m exhaust and I just want to lie down on a canopy bed in a room that probably has a fireplace, okay?!

Eleanor does her best to try and make friends and relate, but it seems that memories of her mother loom large and she’s always like “mother this” and “mother that” and it’s as thought the house itself knows about her mom guilt. Like during their first night in the house, Eleanor and Theo are absolutely racked with terror by the extremely loud banging sounds made against the door to Theo’s bedroom and also creepy laughter from what sounds like an elderly lady.  And then, in the morning, the words "Help Eleanor Come Home" are found scrawled on a wall (creepy), and when the group tries to explore the library, Eleanor is so repulsed by the its smell because it obviously reminds her of her mother so she can’t go inside, and Eleanor also almost falls off a veranda because of a ghostly feeling or whatever and basically these hauntings seem to be very targeted at Eleanor and Dr. Markway suggests that she should go home and Eleanor is like DON’T SEND ME BACK THERE I’M FINE EVERYTHING’S FINE LET’S HAVE SOME SHRIMP COCKTAIL so she stays.

As a compromise, Markway insists that Theo moves into Eleanor’s room, but Eleanor is awakened in the night by the sound of a man and woman talking next door and the sound of a child crying. She reaches out for Theo’s hand and holds it in fear, but when the lights get turned on Eleanor realizes that she had moved from the bed to the couch and it was not Theo’s hand that she had been holding. Bleh!

Eleanor begins to get the hots for Dr. Markway and right on cue, his wife Grace arrives at Hill House to see what all the haunted fuss is about. Grace demands a room in the nursery, despite warnings that the nursery is likely at the centre of all the hauntings, but she is a skeptic and stays there anyways which was probably pretty stupid because she too goes mad later. 

That night the group experiences even more hauntings by hearing loud banging on doors, so hard that the door bulges inward, and then they realize that Grace is missing and they’re like I told you so (probably). At this point Eleanor’s mental state is hanging on by a thread, and she climbs Hill House’s spooky spiral staircase. The group is worried she will jump or fall and just as Dr. Markway climbs to the top to help her down, Eleanor sees Grace’s face pop out of a trap door at the top all blegghhhhj soooo that’s weird.

FINALLY Markway is like okay Eleanor seriously you gotta leave and as Eleanor drives back down the driveway away from Hill House, an unseen force like possesses the car or whatever while Eleanor ALSO sees a female figure dart in front of the car in the classic haunted white nightgown of yore, both things causing Eleanor to crash into a tree and die. Turns out the spooky nightgown lady was Grace out for a midnight creep and they’re like girl where have you been and she’s like yo this house got to me.

As the movie ends, Theo, shady but accurate as ever, remarks that Eleanor got what she wanted — to remain at Hill House forever. 

Movie background info:

So  obviously we gotta just talk about Shirley Jackson and her book The Haunting of Hill House. Jackson  and her work have left an indelible imprint on the world of American gothic and horror. During her time, which was the 50s and 60s, she was often dismissed as a wacky, kooky and spooky lady and slinger of high-toned horror tales — “Virginia Werewoolf,” as one critic put it. In recent years, however, Shirley Jackson has rightly taken her place among other American literary horror icons such as Hawthorne, Poe, and James with gothic classic like the short story “The Lottery” and novel “We Have Always Lived in The Castle” (both absolutely worth a read along with the Haunting of Hill House). She even practiced witchcraft! Could she be any more cool? What Jackson was able to explore that the men weren’t, was the silent rage, nightmares, and contradictions present within the secret lives of American women of her era. 

Themes from Shirley Jackson’s own life appear throughout The Haunting — most notably the fraught relationship between Eleanor and her mother. Jackson experienced her mother Geraldine as exceedingly cruel throughout her life. Geraldine is described as, an elegant, vapid woman, who was disappointed by her daughter and who made it clear that she would have preferred a prettier, more pliable one. She told Jackson that she was the product of a failed abortion and harangued her constantly about her bad hair, her weight, and her “willful” refusal to cultivate feminine charm. Long after Jackson had grown up and moved away, Geraldine continued to send letters criticizing her “helter skelter way of living,” her “repetitious” fiction, and her appearance: “I have been so sad all morning about what you have allowed yourself to look like.” JESUS GERLADINE, COOL IT.

The Haunting is directed and produced by Robert Wise who was already kind of a big deal for producing West Side Story and The Sound of Music. It was adapted for the screen by Nelson Gidding from Jackson's book and stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, and Russ Tamblyn. 

Since then, The Haunting of Hill House has been re-imagined over and over again. One of my favourite interpretations is actually 1959’s House on Haunted Hill — a deliciously and maybe unintentionally campy version staring Vincent Price. House on Haunted Hill was remade in 1999 with Geoffrey Rush, Ali Larter and Taye Diggs, also in 1999 The Haunting with Catherine Zeta Jones and Liam Nesson, and the absolutely stunning TV series adaption by one of the most brilliant minds in horror, Mike Flanagan in 2018 with Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House. 

Suffice to say, we should probably erect a monument to Shirley Jackson somewhere because her work has left one of the largest imprints on horror, haunted house stories, gothic tales, and representations of trauma via the supernatural. So thanks Shirley. I hope you’re casting spells and writing the grimmest of tales in your very own haunted house in the sky. 

Eleanor and Caregiver Burnout:

Okay so let’s talk about Eleanor and the extreme levels of caregiver burnout she is experiencing. Because girlfriend is not okay. Staying in a murder house was more palatable to her than staying with her family for one second longer. 

But first — what is caregiver burnout? Caregiver burnout is a state of physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that can happen when you dedicate time and energy to manage the health and safety of someone else. At this point, the caregiver is so mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically exhausted that they have nothing left to give to anyone else.

Caregiver burnout can be experienced by many different people. Certainly people in helping professions experience caregiver burnout — like doctors, nurses, personal support workers, social workers, and even therapists. But what Eleanor seems to be experiencing is a unique type of caregiver burnout linked to what is called compulsive caregiving. 

Compulsive caregiving is a pattern of adult attachment behaviour in which the person emphasizes the importance of giving care in relationships rather than receiving it. This pattern of attachment is often derived from role reversal or what is called “parentification” in the parent-child relationship. This is when children are tasked with providing care for their parents, whether it be emotional or physical rather than experiencing appropriate levels of care and secure attachment from their parents as children. When a child becomes accustomed to caregiving behaviours directed from a child, this often leads to dysfunctional relationships later in life as the now adult has not formed the ability to ask for care or express their own needs, while yet retaining a pervasive, unsatisfied need and longing for care from others. In adulthood, the attachment and care-giving systems do not balance each other to yield stable reciprocal relationships, but rather reinforce patterns of exclusive care-giving and the suppression of care-seeking. Which means that parentified children, now adults, will continue believing that the way to be in a relationship with someone is to compulsively care for and tend to the needs of others, to the detriment of their own mental and physical health. 

And it is in this place of total burnout, where we meet Eleanor. 11 years! 11 years she has spent caregiving for her mother! And now that Eleanor is an adult, so has absolutely no life of her own. She has a frayed, desperate quality to her and because of her life lived in isolation with her mother — a “desert island” — as she calls it, she also has not developed any real social skills or relationships in her life. She is both awkward and overly-eager to belong once she arrives at Hill House despite repeated indications that something is definitely amiss in this place.

For example, when she meets Mrs. Dudley the groundskeeper, even though she looks all spooky and ominous and is all like “no one will come if you scream in the night, in the dark” Eleanor is like okay girl whatever this is fine maybe we could have get mani pedis later or something!

And when the hauntings intensify for Eleanor, worsening her mental state so that Markway suggests she goes home, she is like do not send me back to that place for the love of god / I literally have nothing to return to this is a wonderful place and I belong here!! 

And like good for Eleanor right. She’s doing all the right things to try and break free from her caregiver role and make a life for herself. Girl’s trying. But what Hill House is an extremely rude haunted house and seems to have a history of picking on women by amplifying their internal struggles. Hill House is like — ohhhh no no no no no. You can’t just pass go and collect $100. You gotta feel the hell out of these repressed feelings in the most dramatic fashion possible.

Final Girls Club — How Monsters Show Us Our Guts Ad:

Hey final girls — I’d like to take you on a transcendent journey into your psyche through — you guessed — horror movies! More specifically, horror movie monsters and villains. Join me on a very special dark moon/solar eclipse this April 8 for the Final Girls Club where we’ll be exploring How Monsters Show Us Our Guts. Informed by Jungian exploration of myths and fairy tales as portraits of psychic terrain, in this workshop, we will explore how we project our unconscious shadows onto our favourite horror monsters and villains, and imagine the creation of our own monsters as an act of emotional catharsis and reclamation of self. Register by visiting manymoonstherapy.com/finalgirlsclub.


The Pounding

I would like to propose an alternate title for The Haunting, and that alternate title is The Pounding. Let me explain why.

The Pounding features very prominently in this movie as a reflection of Eleanor’s own feelings of guilt concerning her mother’s death. This pounding is relentless! There’s a pounding on the first night when Eleanor is trying to get some shut eye, there’s a pounding on another night when the group is trying to bond over their love for murder houses, and yet another pounding that is so enthusiastic that it starts knocking mirrors off the wall! 

After one such pounding, we learn that Eleanor has a personal connection to pounding. She tells us that on the night of her mother’s death, her mother pounded on that wall so hard to get her attention and that Eleanor did not come to her aid. Eleanor tells us that her sisters is convinced that she wanted her mother to die.

*audio clip*

When Elearnor initially hears the pounding, she wakes into a liminal space where she initially believes it to be her mother asking for her, saying half asleep “alright mother — I’m coming!” She is so used to caring for her mother, that this is her default.

The pounding, and other such hauntings, seem to intensify whenever Eleanor makes attempt to develop her fractured sense of identity and individuate herself outside of her caregiver persona. When Eleanor dances and enjoys herself in a candid moment, a door violently flies open. When Eleanor begins to make friends with the other house guests and begins making a connection with Markway over breakfast, she awakes to the message “Help Eleanor Come Home” scrawled on the wall and it’s like goddamn it no I will not help a single other person back him it’s been 11 years can I please just get a mimosa with this omelette!

Theo, the in-house psychic, is able to sense Eleanor’s inner turmoil whenever she attempts self-development. For example, when Nell changes her hair, Theo teases her “why are you all done up in that new hairstyle” and she also teases Eleanor that perhaps she was the one who wrote the message on the wall because she actually likes the attention. And all these things may be true right — yes, maybe Eleanor IS trying to spice things up with a new hairstyle, and you know what maybe Eleanor DOES like the attention to be on her for once in her goddamn life but all Eleanor knows is to be ashamed of these things, to be ashamed of her own desires to recognition and care, so she often blows up at Theo like THIS SAUCY HAIRSTYLE WAS LITERALLY YOU’RE IDEA OKAY.

The following morning, Markway attempts to soothe Eleanor, telling her that she was tired and disgusted, and that she is not a saint or a martyr but his attempts at getting Eleanor to see her own feelings and her own personhood are in vain, because Eleanor carries the guilt that she was not there in her mother’s final moments deep inside her psyche.

This is something often experienced by those going through caregiver burnout. Feelings of guilt are quite common for the person who confronts the reality that while their identity has been formed around the idea that their only value is how much they can take care of others, but that in the end, they have limits. They cannot do the work to make someone confront their own demons, and they cannot actually save another person.

It is here where we confront the shadow side of the caregiver archetype.

Shadow Side of Caregiver Archetype 

Archetypal figures are universal, inborn models of people, behaviours, and personalities that play a role in influencing human behaviour. The founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, developed a model of 12 main archetypal figures, of which we all find ourselves part of and flow dynamically between. 

Each archetype has a light and shadow side. The light side being its positive attributes both to self and others, and it’s shadow side, meaning that if the goal of the archetype is taken to an extreme, it can cause harm to self or others.

For the caregiver archetype, they are motivated to maintain order and structure within societal settings. They see altruism and self-sacrifice as the pinnacles of maintaining the social structure. They are selfless and generous in their actions and wish to make their loved ones fulfilled and happy through their undying care and dedication. They wish to give freely and be recognized for their care and dedication. 

The shadow side of this, however, turns towards martyrdom. There may be a tendency to want to rescue others to the determent of their own mental health, however, this may actually foster a secondary gain for the caregiver who has entered martyrdom of feeling morally superior to those they care for and others not as invested in a caregiver identity. This can help bolster a fractured sense of self created within the caregiver who does not experience secure attachment through mutual relationship, but rather, can only find a sense of self by martyring themselves above others. 

In this process, the caregiver is repressing all of their own needs for mutual relationship and caregiving, often creating a lot of repressed anger. And we sell Eleanor’s anger begin to build throughout her stay at Hill House as she is increasingly confronted by her own caregiver burnout and feelings of guilt at any attempts to individuate herself. She shouts at one point “am i the public dump for everybody’s fear?” and says “even if I played solitaire in my room, she’d bang on the wall and make me feel guilty for leaving her alone just that little bit.” Eleanor is very angry but in the 60s, were women allowed to be angry? I doubt it so instead Eleanor gets herself a new hairstyle and gets good and drunk. Thatta a girl. 

Burnout and the nervous system 

As is the case with burnout, many do not realize they are in one until they are REALLY in one. Because for Eleanor the compulsive caregiver, her nervous system has become so wired towards a state of hyperarousal or hyper vigilance — always aware of and tending to her mother’s needs, waking in the night and instinctively believing her to be calling out for her to help — that her nervous system does not know how to calm down.

After one particular pounding/haunting, Eleanor tells us what it’s like to be in a burnout and have a nervous system stuck in a fright/flight mode — “I can remember knowing I was frightened, but I can’t remember actually being frightened.” She is unable to identify any specific threat, but just knows that everything feels threatening, in a constant and unrelenting sense. 

Even as Eleanor knows she is terrified in Hill House and that everything inside her house feels like her mother, she has little awareness of how to leave. As the house digs its claws further into her, the more she feels like this is where she needs to be as Eleanor has no other templates or models for healthy attachment in her life. Towards the climax of the movie, Eleanor is drawn towards the library, the room where she felt her mother’s presence the most, proclaiming that she was going home. She climbs that iconic spiral staircase that is super rickety and unstable towards the top, a metaphor for the afterlife, in an attempt to rejoin her mother — the only home she had ever known. And just as things potentially go south for Eleanor at the top of that staircase, she is rescued by Markway, someone she had begun to form a relationship with at Hill House. Someone who seemed to take a genuine interest in her and her life and isn’t that just such a perfect metaphor? What rescued her was connection from someone other than her mother. 

Because this is how one begins to heal from a caregiver burnout. It’s of utmost importance that the caregiver acknowledge that they too are a human person that is having a lot of feelings at the moment, and that it’s okay to talk about and process them. As Drs Emily and Amelia Nagoski say in their absolute banger of a book Burnout — to heal from a burnout, you must complete the stress cycle, which means acknowledging, feeling, and moving through the stressor. 

The caregiver must then begin to see themselves as a person outside of their caregiving identity, which can be a challenge in particular for the parentified child (now adult) who has surpassed their needs to such a degree that they struggle to even recognize what they are. Talking to a therapist can help you identify these needs, pluck them out, and begin working on ways to get them met. 

And finally, the recovering compulsive caregiver must begin forming relationship attachments where the attachment pattern is reciprocal and balanced. Which can absolutely be a steep, uncomfortable learning curve for someone practicing this for the first time but hey, we all gotta start somewhere you know?


Conclusion: 

Eleanor got stuck in her caregiver burnout and due to uhh vacationing at Hill House, simply had her burnout amplified back to her to a very extreme degree. Her fate, the evil house decided, was to continue repeating the pattern of compulsive caregiving that she practiced with her mother forever and into eternity. As she begins to drive away from the house and an unseen force… but like perhaps there was no force… we can’t be sure… starts to take over the car, Eleanor says “See! Hill House doesn’t want me to leave! Something is happening to me!” Eleanor waited her whole life for something special to happen to her but it turns out, the only way she knew how to feel special was to care for others. Even if that “other” was a haunted 90 year old house that honestly seems really misogynistic.  

Outro:

And that my ghouls is the story of The Haunting. I really wanted it to work out for Eleanor, you know? Girl was so worn out and I’m sure would have just been happy to lie in a dark room with a cold compress for a few hours with no one asking for her for anything. And maybe an appetizer platter or something. Oh dear. Thank you for journeying into the depths with me and I hope to find you in the darkness again soon. 

Visit my website manymoonstherapy.com to register for the the April edition of the Final Girls Club — How Monsters Show Us Our Guts — where we will explore how we project our unconscious shadows onto our favourite horror monsters and villains and make up our own monsters! You can follow me on Instagram at @manymoonstherapy and you can also learn more about me and my services through my website manymoonstherapy.com. 

OR you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Bright blessings.