Like millions of people over the last couple of weeks, I’ve fallen in love with Stranger Things. This 8-episode Netflix series not only mimics the style of Spielbergian 1980s sci-fi with surgical precision, it manages to excavate the same strong emotional attachments to its characters and their fates. Classics like Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were expert explorations of our fear of the other and the unknown in the last years of the Cold War. But with America now firmly on top, the thematic preoccupations of modern science fiction have turned inwards, either commenting on American power or exploring more introspective, personal themes. When I watched Stranger Things, I was struck by how clearly its story can be read as an allegory for recovering from childhood trauma—and even more by the show’s quiet but bold assertion that fighting against that darkness truly takes a village.

From here on out, I’m assuming the reader has seen all of Stranger Things. If you haven’t, be warned that the spoilers are extensive.

The key to the allegory is The Upside-Down, the shadow world where Will Byers is held captive by the ferocious Demogorgon. The Upside-Down shares a history with many mythologies that contain an underworld or a shadow realm. It’s analogous to Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, and any fiction that contains a nightmare or ‘bizarro’ dimension. These worlds are mirrors that show us the hidden darkness of our own realm. In Stranger Things, this is a place created by psychological trauma.

Broadly put, traumatic experiences are isolating and alienating. They disconnect us from the people around us and can make us indecipherable or even frightening to others. Modern society’s solutions for trauma, and mental health issues in general, tend towards the private, the one-on-one, and the medicinal. In general, mental health is not seen as as communal responsibility, but an individual one. Fighting or hiding from our demons is something we tend to do alone, or with a professional or a trusted confidante. Thus, the Upside-Down. An internal world of pain, isolation, and fear, and an especially scary one for a child. But there’s hope: we don’t have to go there alone. We’ve just been conditioned to think we do.

Before Eleven’s trauma and abuse at the hands of Dr. Brenner, the Upside-Down is blank and undisturbed. When Eleven is forced into sensory deprivation to heighten her psychic abilities, she explores a blank black world, walking over still black water in scenes reminiscent of Under the Skin. In this world, she can locate other human beings in real-time, lending credence to the idea that the Upside-Down is a type of collective unconscious. Unfortunately, this is also where Eleven discovers the grotesque and rapacious Demogorgon. We often describe our mental health issues as “demons”, and in Eleven’s case this becomes very literal. Her traumatic experiences force her into a forbidden world and even give her some power over it. But they also unleash the Demogorgon, who has the ability to tear physical holes between the two worlds, allowing the chaos of the psychological realm to manifest as violence in the physical.

As the story progresses, Eleven expresses guilt for opening the Gate, because it’s resulted in Will and Barbara being hurt by the Demogorgon. This is akin to the real-life way in which trauma echoes through relationships. Eleven is not just the victim of Brenner’s abusive experiments, but also ground zero for their painful reverberations. These reverberations also go inwards, showing us how self-abuse is one of trauma’s lingering hallmarks; Eleven’s powers take a serious destructive toll on her body, but she uses them without hesitation or concern for her health. To top it off, the show astutely identifies abuse as generational, heavily implying that Eleven’s mother is Terry, a now-catatonic woman who was pregnant while participating in the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA experiments at the hands of Brenner.

Trauma, and our responses to it, can manifest in very different ways. While Eleven explores the Upside-Down telepathically, Will is brought there physically when he encounters the Demogorgon in the first episode. While the Upside-Down links Eleven to a self-destructive power that she never asked for, it leaves Will completely unarmed. He must use his wits and agility to remain undetected by the dark forces that threaten to overwhelm him. Stranger Things makes a smart move by not showing us much of Will’s ordeal. We don’t know what he’s going through, which forces us to fill in the blanks ourselves. It makes his imprisonment more terrifying, but even moreso it underscores the way mental health struggles can be invisible to us unless we know how to listen for them. When we do catch glimpses of Will in the Upside-Down, we see the way he clings to familiar totems of safety — his childhood fort, a song his brother shared with him, his mother’s voice.

As Will’s mother Joyce, Winona Ryder may not get some of the show’s most epic and outwardly heroic scenes. But if this is a story of recovering from trauma, she may be its true champion. When Joyce believes that Will is still alive, despite the skepticism of the town and the cover-up by Brenner’s agents, she is going against the prevailing wind. She isn’t able to convince anyone that Will’s communications from the Upside-Down are real, because they appear in ways that are innocuous and mundane. As the audience, we share in Joyce’s frustration, because like her we’ve seen all the signals and understand intuitively how the dots between them connect.

Joyce may be particularly adept at understanding these signals because she herself is no stranger to mental health issues, including emotional abuse from her brutish and manipulative ex-husband Lonnie. In flashbacks we see that Joyce never belittles Will’s fascination with fantasy worlds, but rather encourages his creativity. Late in the story, she even buys him his first videogame console. These are key details that show Joyce’s natural sympathies for fantasy and psychological expression, a sympathy not shared by many in the town. It’s worth noting that in Stranger Things, the people who belittle and bully others are also the people least capable of creative thought, and therefore the furthest away from the overarching mystery.

This is why Joyce’s creation of the “light map” may be the most heroic moment of the show. Will is trying to communicate that he is RIGHT HERE, despite all appearances to the contrary. When she hauls out the Christmas lights, creating pathways and an alphabet wall, she transforms familiar domestic space into a Rosetta Stone that Will can use to attempt to explain his new reality. Because for Will, trauma isn’t obvious. It doesn’t live on the surface, and the town is content with assigning him a fate that’s easy to understand — he got lost, he ran away, he fell into the quarry and died. Only his mother is willing to interpret the signs, which tell her that Will is trapped in a hell he can barely navigate. It’s no wonder that Joyce sitting under the alphabet wall, clutching an axe, frightened but resolute, has become one of the enduring images of the show.

Of course, not all of the non-believers are bad people. Often, they have to arrive at an understanding of the traumatic place in ways that cohere to their own life stories. Will’s older brother Jonathan is too old to believe in voices and Christmas lights, and is distressed and frustrated with his mother when she won’t help plan the funeral for the supposedly-dead Will. It’s only through his growing relationship with Nancy Wheeler that he begins to see the signs of the Upside-Down. As Jonathan helps Nancy investigate the disappearance of her friend Barb, he discovers a discrete set of clues that he then connects back to the apparently “crazy” conclusions reported by his mother. Sexuality and early experiences of intimacy are powerful agents of personal evolution, and in this case, these are the energies that awaken in Jonathan the possibility that Will’s and Joyce’s implausible experiences are real.

Chief Hopper, meanwhile, discovers the Upside-Down by investigating Will’s disappearance. He’s pessimistic about finding anything and thinks Will’s death is an inevitable conclusion, in large part because of the experience of losing his young daughter Sarah to cancer. Hopper’s disbelief in Joyce’s story comes less from an illiteracy of psychological signposts than an unwillingness to bargain with the likelihood of death. Like Jonathan, Hopper has to discover the Upside-Down on his own terms, and he begins to believe when he sees the powerful forces that are attempting to sabotage his investigation into Will Byers’ disappearance. As Hopper comes to believe that Will is alive, he circles closer to the memory of his daughter’s death, which he has tried to blot out with substance abuse, listless sexual encounters, and an apathy towards his life and relationships in general. When he and Joyce rescue Will, Hopper fully faces the unbearable memory of losing Sarah, resolving his story on a hopeful note.

Unlike some of the older characters, Will’s friends Mike, Lance and Dustin seem more able to accept and go along with the strange, almost magical events occurring in their town. It’s appropriate that their story is the one that dovetails the most directly with Eleven’s, because they already have a built-in vocabulary for everything that’s going on: Eleven has “superpowers”, the monster from the other world is the “Demogorgon” from Dungeons & Dragons, and the Upside-Down is understood first as a fantasy “Vale of Shadows”, and later through the scientific notion of “other dimensions”. A porousness between scientific thinking and fantastical creativity allows them to circumvent the adults’ narrow sense of possibility. They intuitively apply the lessons of fighting mythological demons to the challenges of helping their friends fight psychological ones. Fantasy is an especially important realm for children, because it grants access to a world of psychological expression that might otherwise be closed due to family or societal systems that do not cultivate ways of expressing it.

One of Stranger Things’ most interesting characters is Nancy Wheeler, who is initially portrayed as a familiar trope: the intelligent but naive teenage girl rebelling against her parents by getting involved with a questionable boy. Jonathan accuses Nancy of being this exact cliché, betting that her rebellion will not be sincere but rather a brief aberration before she recreates the staid suburban existence of her parents, which she claims to loathe. But when she is spurred on by the loss of her best friend Barb, Nancy discovers that she is adept at, and even energized by, navigating spaces of trauma. It’s important to note that Nancy is the first character to walk into the Upside-Down of her own volition. She’s the one who holds the gun and picks out the bear traps. She blames herself for Barb’s disappearance because she left her friend to experience her first sexual encounter with Steve, who also begins life as a trope, the badboy heartthrob to Nancy’s teen princess. Barb’s last words to her as they part — “This isn’t you” — become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it’s Barb’s disappearance and death that force Nancy to become someone else. Like Joyce, Nancy isn’t believed when she tells people something bad happened to Barb. An easily-digestible narrative is supplied instead: Barb ran away from home. But her love for and closeness to her friend cause her to doubt the official story, beginning her transformation from cliché to three-dimensional character.

Some viewers may have been frustrated that Nancy chooses to go back to Steve. I experienced that frustration too. But the more I thought about it, the more this move endeared me to Nancy. She’s gained an affection and respect for Jonathan — and the interiority and outsiderhood that he represents — but elects to return to the dubious Steve, who is firmly centered in the fabric of the “normal” world. Steve has wounded Nancy, first by downplaying Barb’s disappearance and refusing to go the police to protect himself from parental scrutiny, and later by encouraging his friends to put up graffiti denigrating Nancy after he sees Jonathan consoling her in her bedroom. But he eventually redeems himself in her eyes by abandoning his own high school clichés and joining her, albeit accidentally, in her fight against the real threat. Nancy’s power move is that she fulfills Jonathan’s prophecy about her return to suburban normalcy while debunking its implicit premise that normalcy and navigating the shadow realm are mutually exclusive. She acquits herself better than most at monster-hunting, discovers her agency as a person, and then returns to the “real” world to enjoy the spoils of her labor. Unlike Eleven and Will, Nancy has the option of leaving the Upside-Down behind her. She enters it, and then walks away, of her own free will. Though initially positioned very far away from the psychological battleground of the story, she becomes, after Eleven, its toughest combatant. Instead of being destroyed by the fallout of her sexual initiation, Nancy reclaims those energies for herself. She begins as a neophyte being led by the men in her life, but by the end she is wielding the agency in her relationships with Jonathan and Steven. Nancy demonstrates that friendship, self-determination and normalcy have tangible value as counteragents to trauma and isolation, and reminds us that returning from trauma to normalcy can be an act of power rather than an act of capitulation.

As for those characters who remain true disbelievers, they are cast as unimaginative dopes, like Officers Powell and Callahan, or as unrepentant bullies like Steve’s friends Todd and Carol, or Troy and James, who torment Will’s friends. Bullies, as we know, are usually the most frightened people of all, and in Stranger Things they lack the insight to even conceive of the Upside-Down. The comeuppance for their myopia is not in their physical defeat, no matter how primally satisfying it is to see Eleven break Troy’s arm. Rather, the show punishes them by forgetting about them entirely, abandoning them in the third act to live out their lives of cruelty and fear, with no possibility of looking inward. These characters remind me of a great line from Ursula K. LeGuin: “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”

On the other hand, the Demogorgon itself isn’t a bully at all, but rather a supernatural animal, a creature acting purely on an instinct for predation. A key symptom of psychological trauma is maladaptive responses of the limbic system, overcharging trauma survivors with fear and other emotions or desires, even at times when the external world is not presenting any corresponding stimulus. The Demogorgon is an apt metaphor for the difficulty of facing the aftermath of a traumatic event. You can’t “get over it” in the way that society often instructs the traumatized to do, because the monster is still alive, and not only does it live in your internal world, it also has easy access to your external world. Psychological trauma lives on in the mind as well as the body, and that interrelationship is typified by the body horror elements of the story — Eleven’s tortures and nosebleeds, Will’s discovery of the Demogorgon’s insects inside of him.

In the end, both Eleven and Will are permanently connected to the Upside-Down, the lair of the Demogorgon, an interior world that can seem bestial, otherworldly, repulsive and strange. Surviving trauma does not mean that you ever leave it behind you. Though the fates of Eleven and Will are unclear at the end of Season 1, it’s implicit that they both remain linked to the shadow world. They have not destroyed it, but rather called upon their friends and allies to help them disempower it.

That’s the very real power that Stranger Things is insisting that we all have: the ability to collectively believe and validate people struggling with traumatic histories and mental health. One by one, Eleven and Will’s friends and loved ones come to believe in the truth of their stories: in Eleven’s powers, in Will’s imprisonment. In our society, we aren’t taught the language of mental illness and often have to jury-rig our own, as Joyce does with the Christmas lights. That’s a systemic issue that can’t be fixed overnight, but even so, all it takes is one person willing to believe and advocate, making the effort to listen and translate, to create a ripple effect in the social fabric. On the surface, the climactic moment of Stranger Things would seem to be Eleven sacrificing herself to destroy the Demogorgon while Joyce and Hopper finally rescue Will from the Upside-Down. But I think the truly climactic moment of the show comes a little earlier, when all the disparate clusters of characters have come together at last, shared everything they know, and created a full picture of Will’s imprisonment and a plan to free him. In order to do that, they surround Eleven in a homemade sensory deprivation bath so she can fully access her powers. But instead of being forced into and confined to the water as she was when she first encountered the Demogorgon, she is now there of her own volition, surrounded by friends and held by a sympathetic Joyce instead of coerced by the abusive Brenner. Once this community forms around Will, everything else falls into place: each person has a part to play, and an intuitive understanding of how to play it.

When processing mental health is the role of the community, rather than the individual, we are infinitely better positioned to face our own Demogorgons. It’s facing them alone that’s truly intolerable. Like Will, we can only hold out so long before our defenses fail and trauma becomes an indelible part of us. Like Eleven, trauma may cause us to birth our own monsters and do untold damage to ourselves. Stranger Things’ core argument is that it takes a village to face the darkness, underscoring the painful fact that most people don’t get that village, simply because that kind of community isn’t naturally built into our social fabric.

My hope is that, with people enjoying the show as much as they have, they also think about the Upside-Down of their own life. And from there, realize that everyone has an Upside-Down inside them. That kind of empathy for each others’ experiences isn’t a luxury or a privilege, but a human necessity. I wish more popular stories understood that necessity as clearly as Stranger Things.

With thanks to my friend H., a comrade-in-arms in battles of the mind, who helped me edit and clarify this piece.