January 21, 2025 |
danielle
Have you watched Inside Out 2 yet?
Kids movies are great, especially for adults! Because they are so rich in emotional intelligence and lessons for personal growth.
In the film, we are reintroduced to Riley’s emotional world, but this time, it expands even further. As she navigates adolescence, new emotions and more complex inner landscapes emerge, offering us valuable insights into our own mental and emotional experiences.
Here are a few lessons that stood out to me:
Inside Out 2 beautifully shows how emotions like Anxiety and Shame make their appearance during the teenage years. These “new” emotions help us understand that feeling more than one emotion at a time is normal and healthy. Our emotional experiences are often layered and messy, and acknowledging this complexity can be freeing.
One of the key messages of the movie is the importance of paying attention to our emotions without pushing them away. Whether it’s Joy, Sadness, Anger, or Fear, all emotions play a role in helping us process experiences and grow. By developing a compassionate awareness of these feelings, we can better understand ourselves and navigate challenging situations.
As Riley grows, so do her emotions and inner world. The movie illustrates how change—whether it’s growing up, facing new challenges, or processing life events—can be uncomfortable but also a source of profound personal growth. This is a beautiful reminder that embracing change, rather than resisting it, helps us move forward, promoting growth and adaptability.
The movie also emphasizes the importance of connection, both with others and ourselves. When we give ourselves permission to feel and acknowledge our emotions, we practice self-compassion. This is such an essential part of healing and integrating our experiences.
The way you speak to yourself eventually becomes the voice that tells you who you are and who you can become. The words we repeatedly tell ourselves hold power to the way we interact with others.
You don’t have to pretend when you’re with the right people. You can have the weirdest preference in music and you will still be loved and accepted by people who truly care about you. There’s no need to lie and make up stories to fit in.
This the one thing that really struck me in this movie – at the beginning, we witness Joy loading Riley’s “bad” memories into a chute that sends them to the back of her brain in an effort to protect her. As a trauma therapist, this is one of the most common coping strategies I see, particularly in adults who’ve had difficult childhoods – the attempt to put those memories into a vault somewhere and so we can continue, and act as if nothing happened. It’s a remarkable coping strategy when our survival as a child requires us to bond with an unsafe parent. However, it can, and often does, come back to haunt later in life when we finally feel safe enough within ourselves.
So, my loves, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on how these themes show up in your life. How do you navigate emotional complexity? How can you further develop your emotional intelligence? What personal growth lessons can you take from this? How can you be more compassionate toward yourself as you experience change?
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I highly recommend it—whether for personal growth or just a bit of joy and laughter!
In the meantime, remember that all parts of you are worthy of love and understanding.