As a therapist, I often feel like a tour guide for my patients. Using various “maps” and my knowledge from years of traversing the emotional terrain, I help them navigate the territory of the mind and make sense of what they discover. Pixar’s “Inside Out” took that journey one step further, introducing the indigenous people of these lands: the animated, personified emotions Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear.
If you haven’t seen this cinematic gem, it’s about what happens inside the mind of a little girl named Riley who loses her joy — literally — when her family moves across the country. Of the five characters, which represent the five basic emotions, Joy is dominant. But the move causes chaos that strands Joy and Sadness in the recesses of Riley’s mind, leaving Anger, Disgust and Fear in charge.
Aside from the film’s usual entertainment value (it has all the intelligence and humor that make a Pixar movie appealing to adults, too), I found it to be a much welcome frame of reference for visualizing how the seemingly mercurial world of emotions works and, particularly, how unexpressed grief can lead to depression. To read more, click on the following link...
Thanks for this article. I especially like what you said about how unexpressed grief can lead to depression. When I was growing up, and I tried to talk to my mom about things that were making me sad, or angry, she would always say, “Just let it go,” as if getting rid of my negative emotions were just as simple as taking a rock out of my pocket, dropping it, and walking away. Of course, anyone with any understanding of human nature and emotions would know that it’s never quite that simple or easy, so it was clear to me that what she really meant was, “I don’t want to hear about it.” So I just stuffed all those negative emotions inside, because it wasn’t okay for me to express them around my family or anyone else I knew. Later, when I was a teenager, I became very depressed, and no one understood why. They tried to make it go away with medication, which sort of numbed me emotionally but didn’t really make me any happier. It wasn’t until many years later, after I turned 40, that I finally found a really good therapist who helped me get some of that stuff out that had been poisoning me all those years. I’m sure that I still have a lot of stuff buried deep inside that I’ve been carrying around with me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it all out or be healed completely, but at least I’m better off now than I was. Can I ever be healed completely? Or is it too late for me? I wonder.
I hope that this movie helps people understand that every emotion does have a purpose, and that expressing all of these emotions, in the appropriate place, at the appropriate time, in an appropriate way, is necessary for a person’s well-being. I like to think that if I’m ever fortunate to have children of my own, I won’t force them to repress their emotions, as my parents forced me to do. Thanks again for this article.