At first glance, Stranger Things Season 5 looks like a story about monsters, survival, and saving the world. But underneath the supernatural plot, the show keeps returning to something much more human.
Spoiler alert: this article contains information and plotlines from the final season of Stranger Things!
What happens after something terrifying.
Again and again, Stranger Things shows characters struggling not just with danger, but with guilt, fear, and beliefs about themselves that formed in moments of helplessness. Without ever naming it directly, the show ends up illustrating many of the core principles of trauma therapy and trauma processing.
One thing the series does especially well is underscore the importance of social support. Connection is one of the strongest protective factors against PTSD, and Stranger Things consistently shows how healing rarely happens in isolation.
Holly and Max: When a Stuck Point Keeps Someone Trapped
In Season 5, Episode 6, Holly says something that sounds painfully familiar to many trauma survivors. She tells Max that she is not heroic at all. She describes herself as a coward.
She explains that she did not fight for her mom. She did not fight for Max. To Holly, those moments define who she is.
This is what we call a stuck point in trauma therapies like Cognitive Processing Therapy. A stuck point is a painful belief that may or may not be true, but that keeps someone emotionally unable to move forward from the traumatic event.
Max responds in a way that mirrors a real skill taught in Cognitive Processing Therapy. She does not dismiss Holly’s feelings or argue with her. Instead, she helps Holly look for evidence against the belief.
She reminds her of the many times she has acted bravely. The times she showed courage, loyalty, and care. The parts of the story that contradict the idea that Holly is a coward.
This matters because trauma often narrows our perspective. Trauma therapies like CPT help widen the lens.
As Holly’s belief begins to shift, something changes. A way out of Henry’s mind opens. The moment shows, quite literally, how changing a belief can change what feels possible.
Will and His Mom: When Guilt Feels Like Proof
In Season 5, Episode 7, Will tells his mom something devastating.
“People died because of me.”
Underneath that statement is a stuck point that many trauma survivors carry: What another person did is my fault.
Will’s mom responds with reassurance. Joyce tells him it is not his fault. She tries to comfort him. But Will repeats the belief again and again:“It is my fault.”
This scene captures two common trauma-related thinking patterns.
The first is emotional reasoning. Because Will feels guilty, his mind concludes that he must be at fault. In trauma therapy, we teach people that feelings are real, but they are not the same thing as evidence.
The second is confusing participation with responsibility. Will was involved, targeted, and harmed. But fault only exists when someone intends an outcome and intends to cause harm. This is why we teach survivors about what truly defines being responsible or at fault in trauma therapy. This is known as “levels of responsibility" in CPT.
Will did not choose Vecna’s actions. He did not intend for anyone to be harmed. Yet his emotions collapse all of that into self-blame.
Another important detail in this scene is that Joyce’s words do not move the needle. This shows how deeply ingrained a stuck point can be. For many survivors, reassurance from others does not land. Trauma processing teaches people how to come to conclusions on their own so those conclusions feel real in their body, not just logical.
Will Coming Out: Examining a Core Belief And Opening Oneself to a Corrective Experience
In another powerful moment in Season 5, Episode 6, Will shares what Vecna knows he fears most. Coming out to his friends and being rejected.
This fear points to a core belief. A stuck point so deep that it shapes how someone behaves and protects themselves. For Will, the belief sounds something like this: “If I come out, the people I love will soon reject me.”
Vecna uses this belief against him. But Vecna does not create it: Instead, he weaponizes the fear of it.
In Cognitive Processing Therapy, survivors are taught to examine where a belief came from and whether the source of that belief is dependable. Many stuck points are formed in childhood or during moments of vulnerability, then carried forward as unquestioned truths.
Will begins to question the source when Max reminds him that Vecna is not infallible. Vecna is human. He is afraid and shaped by his own pain.
If the source is flawed, then the belief may be flawed too.
Will then does something incredibly important. He shares the belief instead of hiding it. He gives others the opportunity to disprove it through their response. This is a powerful trauma recovery moment. Healing often requires allowing new experiences to challenge old conclusions.
Joyce and Hopper: Expanding the Story Around Guilt
Later in Season 5, Episode 6, Joyce tells Hopper that she feels responsible for encouraging Will to go back into the hivemind.
Her stuck point is clear: “Every choice that I make is wrong.”
Hopper does not argue with her or tell her to stop feeling guilty. Instead, he helps her expand the frame.
He points out that no matter what choice she made, she would have found holes in it. Every option carried risk. Every path involved tradeoffs.
This reflects another trauma recovery skill taught in CPT:Asking how a belief is leaving out important information.
After trauma, people often focus entirely on the choice they made and ignore the context. The lack of perfect options. The urgency. The limited information. Trauma can make any outcome feel like proof of personal failure.
Recognizing tradeoffs helps loosen self-blame and replaces punishment with accuracy. It helps zoom out to understand the full context of the situation at hand - and reminds people that they did the best they could with the circumstances at that point in time.
What Stranger Things Gets Right
Across these scenes, Stranger Things gets something very right about trauma recovery.
Healing is relational. Social support matters. Beliefs formed in trauma often cannot be shifted alone. They change through connection, perspective, and shared meaning.
The show also gets right that healing is not about being told what to believe. It is about examining beliefs, questioning their origins, and allowing yourself to see the full story.
Where the show simplifies things is in time. In real life, these shifts usually take more than a single conversation. Trauma therapy provides the structure and support to practice these skills intentionally and safely.
Why This Matters
Many people carry beliefs like the ones shown in these scenes. “I am a coward. It was my fault. I will be rejected. Every choice I make is wrong.”
These beliefs are not character flaws. They are trauma responses.
At Nema Health, trauma-focused therapy helps people identify stuck points and core beliefs, understand where they came from, and learn skills to evaluate them more accurately. The goal is not to erase pain or rewrite the past. It is to stop trauma-shaped beliefs from quietly running the present.
Stranger Things may be a story about monsters. But what it accidentally teaches is something just as important.
Healing happens when we do not face those beliefs alone.
