system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is it therapeutic/cathartic to indulge dark emotions (watching dark movies, listening to sad music etc) rather than trying to cheer yourself up?
gpt
Your brain is like a village. When something bad happens to it, the villagers who are the most hurt become scary to the rest of the village who just want to pretend that the bad thing never happened. And so, the village tries to kick the hurt villagers out. But those villagers have no where else to go. The hurt villagers have no choice but to get the rest of the village to be less afraid of them so they can be let back in the village. They come up with all sorts of creative ways to get the village to drop their defenses and accept them back. One such way is get the village to re-experience what they went through, or get them close enough to where the rest of the villagers can be slowly exposed to the thing they’re so afraid of. Once it becomes more familiar to the rest of the village, the hurt villagers don’t seem as scary and are let back in.