feeding the alligators

When one exposes themselves to fiction that stimulates our negative qualities (like horror fiction) so that they can work through them in a healthy and harmless environment as catharsis.

Serial killers and other murderers appeal to the impulse Stephen King calls "feeding the alligators," and Carl Jung called "integration of the shadow self," but it all means the same thing: that entertaining our own dark side can be therapeutic.
-- 8-Bit Philosophy