If you haven’t seen the Disney Pixar movie, Inside Out 2, I definitely recommend it! At the time of this writing, it is still in theaters, but I imagine it’ll be for rent or purchase soon as well. I was impressed with the way the movie presented or explained a lot of concepts grounded in psychology but in a user friendly way for all ages. Today I will attempt to highlight and expand upon some of the concepts in the movie, which will hopefully present an alternate way of looking at your psyche (or that of your child or teenager, if you’re a parent).
*spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet and therefore may not want to read my musings to follow yet*
Inside Out 2 picks up with the same main character, Riley, now a young adolescent. As she goes through puberty (Thanks Pixar!) four new emotions are added to the lineup of characters: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui (= boredom, indifference). As a reminder, the emotions in the first movie were Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Fear. All of this brought up a few psychological concepts for me:
1: Anxiety is often feeding us ‘worst case scenarios‘ –
Displayed in the pillow fort of the imagination system, anxiety had a whole team of workers who were brainstorming worst case scenarios. Not until Joy came along did any of the scenarios include anything positive that could happen. This seems like a helpful way to conceptualize anxiety, that it’s 1: all in the future (not present moment oriented) and 2: pretty much all negative (rarely do we worry that things will go well). As much as we can learn to quiet our minds, stay in the present moment, and label these anxious thought as ‘scary stories’ our mind is trying to tell us, the better. We can still plan for the future and think about possible outcomes without it being so imbalanced.
2: Feelings work together –
It’s very normal to have mixed feelings, and to sometimes have a difficult time knowing what our feelings are, as well as controlling our feelings, just like you see in the movie where the different characters keep taking over the dashboard. It can be liberating to allow yourself to acknowledge these mixed feelings, for example feeling both sad as well as relieved when a loved one dies of a chronic condition.
3: Feelings seem to take over our brain/ system –
Just like in the movie, it may be helpful to picture a whole dashboard of feelings in our mind, imagining that different feelings are ‘running the ship’. so to speak, often some of them simultaneously. This reminds me of a concept called, ‘conference room in my head’, wherein just as if you were in a real life staff meeting, it’s important to not let just one person (feeling) monopolize the meeting. Similarly, we all have different ‘parts’ to us, which is a concept taken from Internal Family Systems (IFS) by Richard Schwartz.
4: Feelings may get more complicated with age –
Just as Riley experienced the addition of the four new feelings in this sequel, as children go through adolescence into adulthood, a key developmental task is to recognize, articulate, and cope with more complex emotions and mixed feelings. Anxiety indeed is often one to rush in, especially as peer group and what peers think become more and more important in the transition from child to adolescent and then adult. Along with mixed feelings, we also have internal dilemmas, and we see this with Riley that part of her wants to go with the older girls who invited her to join them, while another part of her is concerned about leaving the friends she came to camp with.
5: No feelings are bad –
There are feelings we’d rather not have to deal with, and there are some maladaptive ways to deal with difficult feelings, but no feelings in and of themselves are bad. Learning to express feelings in a constructive way – whether that be talking it out, physical exercise, journaling, delaying action, etc – and building our distress tolerance muscles are helpful.
6: We are made up of complex systems of beliefs about ourselves –
We are not one thing. We have good and bad beliefs about ourselves. Having a failure doesn’t make you a failure. If they say I’m a good person, I can find the ways that might be true; if they say I’m a selfish person, I can also find the ways that might be true. Our experiences help form us… and sometimes those systems could use some therapy, healing, and reprogramming.
7: Try to find Joy/ look for the joy –
Life can feel really heavy sometimes. Life is full of changes and loss (as well as growth and good things too, but change none the less), and it can be hard to find the good sometimes. Just as the character Joy was lost in the movie, sometimes our joy is hard to find, especially when we’re going through hard times or change. I encourage you to look for glimmers or simple pleasures when you can. Even when going through what seems impossible, we all could use a break now and then.
