Inside Out 2: A Therapist’s Perspective
Written by Becki, CBT Therapist
I recently had the pleasure of going to see Inside Out 2 in cinema – I thoroughly enjoyed the first one and its fun for all ages depiction of how emotions work in the brain. I had high hopes and expectations going into this, especially given what I had heard about how it delves into core beliefs specifically. I can say now that it didn’t disappoint. I’ve never seen a movie tackle mental health in this way, with what I can only imagine has been a lot of research from the Pixar team. I think that this is an important movie for anyone to watch; they know their stuff!
As a therapist, I wanted to give my perspective on the movie’s portrayal of some very important things. So here’s my observations of some themes and ideas in the movie in comparison to reality. Whilst we unfortunately don’t have a cute little gang residing in a ‘headquarters’ in our brain and controlling our every move from a control panel, it does get a lot of things right.
For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the movie, there may be some minor spoilers ahead. If you want to go into the movie not knowing anything about it, then stop reading here!
Theme 1: Core beliefs are created in childhood/adolescence.
One of the main things we see in the movie is the importance of core memories in shaping who Riley is. As core memories are processed, her sense of self grows, as we see in Joy’s care and preening for this ‘Sense of Self’ tree. Before Anxiety comes in to shake things up, Riley is strengthening the belief that she’s a good person. However, this particular tree is created by Joy who (cleverly or not so cleverly) discards of any negative memories that may taint it (which I’ll come onto below), sending them to the back of the mind to be forgotten about.
The message I take from this, that I emphasise a lot as a therapist, is that small memories matter. Whilst having a range of positive and negative (some memories may be both) is normal, if a small negative experience reoccurs a lot throughout childhood, these memories can gather strength and cause someone to ultimately not feel good enough. This could include small things like being teased by friends or family, not meeting parent/teachers standards at school or constantly receiving small bits of criticism about themselves. It can also include bigger things like abuse, neglect or trauma in childhood. However, you don’t have to have had an obviously traumatic childhood to develop a negative sense of self. Children often internalise these memories to mean something about them, as they are trying to understand the world. A child may not be able to reason that ‘my parents are stressed after a tough week at work’ like an adult might. They may instead believe ‘I’ve done something wrong’ ‘this is my fault’ ‘I’m a bad person’. In adulthood, the sense of self these memories have created will shape how they behave and interact with the world and can be an underlying factor in depression or anxiety. For example, we see Riley going to great and unhelpful lengths trying to prove she’s good enough, which ends up making things even worse.
Theme 2: Anxiety can completely take over your mind if intense enough.
Inside out 2’s depiction of a panic attack really hit the nail on the head. We see Riley sent off from her hockey match after hurting her friend, which was the result of the immense pressure to prove herself. This ultimately leads to her struggling to breathe and it’s clear from the outside her anxiety is extremely intense. On the inside, we see that Anxiety has completely overtaken the control panel after all her efforts to try and protect Riley have failed. Anxiety doesn’t respond to anyone at this point, and it almost feels like she is just a hologram as her physical presence just turns into a blur. It’s a very emotional scene as you see the pure terror on her face. No other emotion at this time can reach the control panel to take over.
This is true to real life. We have two sides of our brain, the logical side which is able to rationalise and see things clearly, and the illogical side which involves more primitive, survival instincts designed to just keep us safe. When the latter side takes over, often during moments of high emotion such as a panic attack, there’s no accessing the logical side of your brain. All your brain power is going on in that moment is keeping you safe. That’s why it’s often the case that people say they struggle with thought challenging or applying certain techniques as they are trying to do this when emotions are too high and ‘fight or flight’ is in full swing. We all have a ‘window of tolerance’ (see image below) and once a certain level of emotion is reached, no learning can be achieved. This is where simple techniques to bring your body out of fight or flight are more helpful, such as focused breathing.
Mind my peelings blog – window of tolerance.
3. Don’t suppress emotions or thoughts.
Going back to what I mentioned earlier – Joy pushes all negative memories to the back of Riley’s mind in the hope that they won’t affect her sense of self. I could see what was going to happen with this a mile off!
I think thought suppression is a common attempt at coping with difficult things in real life. Usually, it’s the easiest and simplest way short term – pretend things never happened and move on. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious thing and our brain automatically does it for us. What I find though, is that no matter how deep you bury something, its always going to come back at some point. It may impact your behaviour in ways you’re unaware of. It may get triggered and come flooding out seemingly out of nowhere, just like the avalanche of supressed memories we see in the movie. As humans, we’re generally not good at NOT thinking about something – a common way to demonstrate this is by trying to not thinking of a pink elephant for 1 minute. How many times is that image going to come up?
What this should teach us is that ALL memories, positive and negative, do shape our sense of self and create who we are as people. Its also impossible to shield ourselves or our children from negative events day to day. That doesn’t mean negative events should define you, or positive events should define you either. In the movie, we often see Joy trying to take full control and not allow any emotion to negatively impact Riley. As does anxiety when she puts all the emotions in jail so they aren’t able to intervene in her plan to protect Riley (we also shouldn’t suppress our emotions).
Toxic positivity is the other end of the spectrum and is also not helpful. You can’t ignore bad memories, you have to take into account the full picture. The beauty of being human is the vast range of experiences and emotions that combine to make up an individual, complex and unique person. At the end of the film, once all the negative core memories have planted in Riley’s mind, she has a more mature and realistic sense of self. She recognises that she is a good person, but she can also be selfish or cruel at times. This is a message to accept yourself as you are.
And just a few extra things to note that I took away from the movie that are true to real life:
- Puberty really does mess everything up. Everything seems to be well organised at Headquarters until puberty hits and chaos ensues. No emotion can slightly touch the control panel without accidentally setting off an extreme reaction. We’ve all been there and we all know what its like, many of us know what its like for our children.
- One part of the movie towards the end is when we see Riley actually want to feel Joy, as Joy is called to the control centre. This sweet moment emphasises the idea that you do have control over your emotions, it doesn’t always have to be the other way round. If you want to feel some joy, even within sadness or anxiety, you can. Which leads onto the below point…
- Emotions are very complex; I like that in the movie, Joy could experience sadness too and at times Anger showed compassion, which were the specific examples that stood out to me at the time. This to me shows there’s a lot of different elements to emotions and they can definitely overlap. The director of the movie, Kelsey Mann, also revealed there were supposed to be nine new emotions in the movie to create a sense of overwhelm. Although they were cut for story simplicity, it does back up that emotions are definitely complex and overwhelming!!
It would be interesting to see where they go with the next film. I would like to see the impact of trauma on the emotions, but this may be too dark for a Pixar film. I am also intrigued about Riley’s ‘dark secret’ and my guess is something to do with her sexuality, which would be really good to delve into in the next film. I would also love to see how neurodivergence would affect headquarters. From my experience of having ADHD, I feel like everything would be even more chaotic and Ennui would have a lot more control than necessary!
Overall, I think watching this movie as either a kid or an adult can lead to some positive reflection or learning about yourself. I would therefore recommend people to go see it ASAP (if you haven’t already)!
Low self-esteem is highly linked to some of the themes in Inside Out 2. If you found yourself relating, we can support you here at F&B Digital Therapy, where we offer CBT to understand and overcome self-etseem issues.
If you would like to get started with F&B Digital Therapy, book an appointment now!