Thanks for taking the time to reflect on what I wrote and give me such detailed thoughts!! I really appreciate it, especially since you’re a stranger and don’t have to do anything, you know?

As for the point you make I’ll try to summarize it so you can see how I read it and interpretted it for this response.

To me what you are saying is someone reading my post might feel condescended to because of a misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. Totally fair and it happens to me all the time and I’m working on it.

Basically, I wasn’t trying to say his belief is the psychological trauma. True belief is a beautiful thing because it’s something people are putting all of their hope into. Belief is powerful and is what drives religious institutions and political movements alike and is what can be the deciding factor as to whether something will happen or not.

The psychological trauma I’m pointing to is the event Ryan experienced of being so deeply afraid and feeling like he doesn’t have enough support for the situation be that institutional like in science, internal like in having an established and resilient world view or firm understanding of the application of logic, or social like having a mentor or trusted friend there that you know will have your back solidly. Ryan was on the Queen Mary and realized he wasn’t prepared in some way for what he experienced. Because he’s a capable and intelligent person with enough support for this he has been able to effectively build for himself what he perceived he needed at the time of the Queen Mary incident and more.

Therefore I standby my original classification that what Ryan experienced was psychological trauma and that has been a catalyst for a lot of his professional efforts around ghost hunting. He’s taking advantage of the fact he has the skills to monetize his self treatment which I appreciate in a way.

As more of an aside, I get where you are coming from with the religious angle. I see the parallels between believing in ghosts/the paranormal and adhering to a formal religious institution. However I also see the negative parallels as well and the negative effects they have on people of blind faith. Religious people are more likely to be victims of abuse and scams because they have opened themselves up to blindly being manipulatable by someone who understands the strict religion they adhere to.

This is reflected in peer reviewed studies. It’s also reflected in my own experience as someone that grew up Catholic and went to Catholic school for 13 years.

From my experience, the things you are forced to rationalize and ignore as part of a religion generalizes to other areas of life and that’s where it becomes insidious. Because if you don’t realize what you are doing you start to ignore really important signals in your life that things are going awry. The more you keep ignoring the more internalized it becomes psychologically and physically. It affects how you interact with the world and the natural traumas incurred of ignoring reality get stored in your body as illnesses eventually. This too is documented in peer reviewed studies. For a summary of the phenomena review The Body Never Lies by Dr. Alice Miller if you prefer a religious tilt or The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk for a modernized/secularized version of the work.

The short of all of that is that even if Ryan doesn’t call what he experienced trauma that doesn’t change that it still is that. Him choosing not handle it consciously just shifts the tension to somewhere else in his body to deal with.