‘Stranger Things’ Is An Amazing Depiction of Trauma
WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for the entire first season of Stranger Things
Watching Stranger Things — the 8-episode sci-fi series released last week by Netflix — is a wholly unique experience. The show has been sold as a merger of John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg, but such comparisons undersell the original tone the show manages to strike between mystery, comedy, horror, and tragedy. It’s a show about parenting, friendship, love, loyalty, and the role all these things play in our recovery from the darkest aspects of our past.
More literally, the show is about the disappearance of a young boy — named Will Byers — from a small town near a government research site in the 1980s. Presumed dead by most, the belief that Will is still alive is held aloft by three disparate groups: His mother Joyce — played by a gloriously resurgent Winona Ryder — and the town’s sheriff who believe the shady government site is behind the missing child; His brother Jonathan, who teams up with girl-next-door Nancy who’s best friend has also gone suddenly missing; and Will’s three friends, a troupe of fantastically Tolkien-obsessed nerds who stumble upon a mysterious young girl with a shaved head and no name.
The girl — whom we call Eleven after the tattooed “011” on her arm — turns out to be an escapee from the government lab suspected by Joyce and Detective Hopper. As we learn, she was taken from her drugged-out mom — a willing participant in the CIA’s famed Project MKULTRA — and experimented upon for her telekinetic abilities. Through nightmarish flashbacks, we see how a man whom she calls Papa experimented on Eleven for her entire childhood, subjecting her to psychologically damaging tests to assess the extent of her powers which, as we soon find out, enable her to access an alternate dimension habituated by a carnivorous beast.
Eleven is a deeply intriguing character, played with subtle emotion and control by 12-year-old Millie Brown. Not only is she our only real eye into the events that led up to Will’s appearance, but her internal adventure becomes eminently clear as we see her experience the simple joys of childhood denied to her — making friends, feeling pretty, eating Eggo waffles. We watch as she grows more confident of the support and trust of the people around her — an advantage that had always been denied to her.
It’s an experience recognizable to anyone who has gone through treatment for trauma recovery. Early childhood trauma and neglect can deny its victims a sense of physical and emotional well-being well into adulthood, and recovering from that damage can often mean learning how to provide those things for yourself. The struggle to do so often inhibits one’s ability to have staved off depression and anxiety or sustain healthy relationships, as well as making them susceptible to flashbacks, self-blame, and suicidalization.
These issues stem from a situation in which a child is denied proper care by a caregiver. From the National Traumatic Child Stress Network:
Through relationships with important attachment figures, children learn to trust others, regulate their emotions, and interact with the world; they develop a sense of the world as safe or unsafe, and come to understand their own value as individuals. When those relationships are unstable or unpredictable, children learn that they cannot rely on others to help them. When primary caregivers exploit and abuse a child, the child learns that he or she is bad and the world is a terrible place.
The struggle to recover from such lasting damage has been a popular topic for Netflix. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has been praised for its lighthearted portrayal of the survivor of an abusive cult whose sunny demeanor hides strong feelings of self-doubt and anger at those she trusted to protect her (as well as flashbacks and night terrors which hint at far darker trauma than the show directly states). Bojack Horseman — the irreverent animated comedy about an alcoholic anthropomorphic horse — regularly portrays its main character as severely damaged by an emotionally-abusive mother as the root of his alcoholism, insecurity, and apparent narcissism. The bleak plot and outlook of Bojack Horseman have earned it praise among critics for its realistic portrayal of the ravages of mental illness.
The more serious tone of Stranger Things enables its lesson of trauma to ring louder for its viewers than either of those shows, but it is also the only one of the three to depict the effects of trauma on a child. When we first meet Eleven — freshly escaped from the horrors of the lab — she is aggressive but frightened, constantly suspicious of those around her.
As she is befriended by Will’s Dungeons & Dragons party — Mike, Dustin, and Lucas — we slowly come to understand the extent of her trauma. She devours the food Mike sneaks her as if she has never eaten before. She lacks basic social skills, often looking frightened at simple jokes. She is prone to flashbacks and fits. When the boys need to disguise her — exchanging her shaved head and hospital clothes for a wig and a dress — and Mike calls her “pretty,” it’s a life-changing experience. It’s almost as if no one has ever complimented her in her entire life.
Like most trauma victims, Eleven suffers from a severe and restrictive sense of guilt. Through the memories of Eleven and the unwitting help of their science teacher, the boys come to understand Will has been taken by an interdimensional beast they compare to the Demogorgons from DnD. Eleven first came to know the creature when her experimenters exposed her to it by isolating her in a sensory deprivation chamber. Using her powers to unwittingly open a gate between its dimension and our own, Eleven tearfully confesses to Mike she feels responsible for the damage the creature has caused. Mike refutes it, combatting Eleven’s guilt with a reminder of the good she has done.
Guilt is one of the more curious aspects of trauma recovery. Although survivors can intellectually recognize they are not to blame for their trauma, an Internalized Blame of Self (IBS) can become deeply rooted in their lack of self-worth as a way of “mastering” the fear induced by the event. Like Eleven, victims are often left without a sense of control over their lives. IBS is the psyche’s way of moving past the fear the trauma could reoccur by convincing the victim that, if something they did caused it, they can avoid being victimized again.
Because many of the traumatic events her caregivers subjected her to center on her special abilities, Eleven is deeply troubled by any use of them for reasons other than survival. Not only does, say, lifting an entire van to aide in the boys’ escape seem to wipe her out physically, but such telekinetic episodes seem to trigger her flashbacks — as if she is working around the idea that her actions caused the events in the first place.
What makes Eleven so remarkable as an example of trauma, however, are the hints at recovery the show gives us across its eight episodes. While she not only becomes more confident and outspoken, we see her creating new associations between her actions and their consequences. So instead of fearing further experiments when using her abilities, Eleven is rewarded for them by her newfound friends with gratitude and amazement (they debate whether she is more like a wizard or a Jedi).
The most distinct example of this, however, comes late in the show’s run, when Joyce Byers and Sheriff Hopper find Eleven and connect her with the lab they’ve been investigating. Joyce is ecstatic when she realizes Eleven can connect her with Will, who is stuck in the alternate dimension with the beast and is likewise asked to venture back to that dimension to find Nancy’s friend Barbara.
When a homemade deprivation chamber enables Eleven to revisit the hell where her initial trauma began, she stumbles across the image of Barbara’s corpse, rotting and mutilated. Eleven freaks, seizing up and screaming at full volume. Curiously, however, her fears are almost instantly calmed by the voice of Joyce who, recognizing a frightened child, simply repeats the phrasing It’s okay, honey. I’m right here. You’re okay.
It’s an extremely evocative and tear-jerking scene, bringing to life the power of love on a mind only fed abuse. Eleven’s fear and alarm are settled by a simple message — You’re okay.
You’re okay is perhaps the hardest lesson for trauma survivors to learn. You’re okay is the antithesis to every message a traumatized individual has internalized. You’re okay is the sound of security often ringing in the ears of people who were raised in secure environments while those who didn’t find only silence or self-hate. You’re okay, once adopted into the traumatized individuals mindset, can rewrite the mental gymnastics thas has led them to experience a near-constant sense of shame and fear.
As much as Stranger Things is a science fiction show about a murderous creature from an alternate universe, it’s also a show about connection. It’s a show which highlights how our families and friendships reflect who we are and how we think about ourselves. We need these relationships to help us understand the world and our place in it. If they’re taken from us — or we never had them in the first place — we’ll believe and do anything to sustain them.
Without getting bogged down in further plot details, Eleven’s fate is left uncertain at the end Stranger Things (she appears to sacrifice herself to destroy the monster but a leftover stack of Eggo waffles says differently). But her absence at the show’s end highlights what she was able to gain. We revisit the parental relief of Joyce and the companionship of Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and a recovered Will. We see how they benefit from the structure and love Eleven never had. At the beginning of the show, Eleven is treated like ET — a stranger lost in unfamiliar territory. By the end, we can understand the only thing truly separating her from her peers was her own need for the love and acceptance they had enjoyed all along.
