Holy Terror!

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the five stages of grief. Every huckster, two-bit pop psychologist on the tube is bound to break them out when “diagnosing” some bored, fat haus-frau’s malaise on any number of woo-spewing day time talk shows of the Oprah ilk. But friends, were you aware that there are six stages of grindcore terror? Probably not. But if I’m ever going to make Deepak Chopra-style cash peddling absolute bullshit, I need to get this concept out in the public consciousness. So all of you grab a box of tissues and your teddy bear because we’re going to talk about your feelings.

The first step toward curing your terror-related problem, naturally, is to admit you have a problem. You must admit to your Terrorism, as it were, before you can put yourself back on the path of healing and emotional well being. Terrorism has been known to cause manic behavior such as circlepitting your living room, grasping at citrus no one else can see and breaking out in wordless, animalistic roars that scare pets and small children. All of this is perfectly natural, of course, but you must admit that your Terrorism exists and that it is a problem for any sort of treatment to be successful.

Having admitted to your Terrorism, the second stage of therapy will seek to identify the locus of your terror, the agent acting upon you or Terrorizer. Common fears include heights, kissing grandma, spiders, Tim Curry in It or, often, three Hispanic dudes from Los Angeles and their affirmative action gringo friend grinding your fucking face to a bloody milkshake with one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Who knows what yours might be. These things tend to vary. Pick yours and I’ll proceed to beat it out of you.

The most difficult fears to diagnose are those that lack grounding in concrete reality – an Unseen Terror in professional parlance – because they are often a result of a shock to the psychological system. Like the day you found out that fat, balding guy from Napalm Death used to be a fucking great drummer or further realizing that somebody actually went to the trouble of writing grind songs about Garfield. However, don’t make the Human Error of thinking just because your fear can’t be seen that it can’t be treated.

Now that we’ve identified the source of your terror, we must evaluate its impact on your life to devise an appropriate treatment program. A mild Phobia can generally be effectively managed with a regimen of waterboarding and electric shocks to the genitalia from a car battery. But if you suffer from a more Excruciating Terror we may have to get more … creative … in our therapy choices. Say, a melon baller, the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged and a tube of tennis balls. I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

Should more conventional methods of addressing your terror prove ineffective, we can of course step you up to the Extreme Noise Terror protocol. The protocol often involves gathering a couple hundred unsmiling young white men in black shirts in a dank, stinky hole that pretends to be a club and subjecting them to tinnitus-inducing levels of screeching, shrieking noise you have somehow convinced them constitutes music while simultaneously gouging them on food and beer prices. Who said being a humanitarian can’t be profitable? Fun fact: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s fear of air travel was cured by a 72-hour, 300 decibel session of Britney Spears’ greatest hits at our Guantanamo Bay treatment facility. The regimen was not a total success, however. While his fear of flying had been addressed, he also developed a crippling phobia of whorish, washed up teen pop stars. Not that I blame him.

Should we be successful, the terror treatment program should leave you in a state Beyond Terror Beyond Grace. While you’ll likely have overcome your fears (possibly substituting a slew of new phobias in the process, say of sadistic therapists), you’ll also place yourself beyond your chosen deity’s grace and redemption given the treatment often results in patients screaming blasphemies and obscenities throughout (again: melon baller, Ayn Rand, tennis balls). While you’ve likely sacrificed your immortal soul in the process (should you ascribe to such a quaint notion), I guarantee the Andrew Childers treatment process will mean your original fear will be the furthest thing from your mind.