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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DD, age 15, is scared of ghosts. 
If there's a strange noise in the house, or leaves rustling against the window, she's crying. I don't know how to help her. She's seen ghosts on TV and is a deep believer in them. 
Thanks for any help in dealing with this. Sheesh, with all that's going on; she's doing so well academically in Zoom school; making new friends in a pandemic, and being a sweet, helpful teenager (some of the time)--THIS is what is making her crumble. 
And Happy Halloween, everyone. [/quote]

This is anxiety related. Strategies that work for anxious thinking should help her work her way through this. She needs to recognize that her anxiety “alarm” is faulty around this particular trigger and challenge her thoughts. At 11, my daughter learned about carbon monoxide poisoning and went through a period where she was convinced we were all going to die in our sleep. We did a few sessions with a therapist on CBT strategies to teach her about anxiety and it helped. [/quote]

This.

Also, one thing that help my son (who has anxiety) with this when he was younger and had this was a thought experiment where I asked him to think about what the world would be like if ghosts were real.  We talked about how most living people he knows are nice, so most ghosts would likely be nice.   And if there were a way for any part of a person to remain after death, wouldn’t the strong, determine people who loved him in life and had died (grandparents and uncles) hang around to take care of him and his cousins after death, especially if there were any possibility that mean ghosts would bother him?  He knew that mom would absolutely have hung around to play with him, so he really realized that if she didn’t become a ghost, nobody does.  We also talked about the fact that things that really exist show up in the newspapers and in real documentary evidence (not just grainy, fake looking video on shows that make a profit from duping naive people).  So there would be stories in legitimate media about ghosts and hauntings.

This kind of rational talking back to anxiety is really important, and incredibly powerful when kids learn to do on their own. [/quote]

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