Therapist Reacts to INSIDE OUT

Well, I don't think you can get into someone's brain and plan tonight an idea that's fictitious, yeah, it's okay, everything's okay, everything's okay, we're okay in our new city, it's okay, but it's not okay, well you finally did it, you made me cry. Welcome to film therapy. I'm Jonathan Decker. I am a licensed

therapist

and I love movies. I'm Allen. You see, I'm a filmmaker and I need therapy a lot, but we're actually going to do something a little different today, Jenna. What's that? Well, you're a

therapist

, right? Yes, do you like to react to things?

It is my favorite. I wake up every morning. I hope to be able to react to something today and my children instantly give me the opportunity. Well, it awaits you. a pleasure because this will be something you can react to but you don't have to be a parent it's a Pixar movie in reverse you're going to make me cry you're going to make me cry and then you're going to make fun of it I'm going to help you get over your tears and then you I will charge for it. Excellent, so here we go, let's take a look at some scenes inside out, see your reactions and I.

I'll also try to get ideas, we'll see how it goes. I don't want to get too technical, but these are called core memories, each one comes from a super important moment in Riley's life and each core memory drives a different aspect of Riley's life. personality, so how true to life is this that our memories are formed because it seems like this feels accurate, yes, but it's a little simplified for the sake of the movie because you're not going to have a central memory, but power is a whole? that is previous, yes, yes, but what you are going to have are overlapping memories forming a tapestry, of course, and the general color, so let's say I have a tapestry of many different colors, but in general it forms red, then it will look red, so yes I have a tapestry of core memories that suggest that I am worthy or that I am beautiful or that I am loved.

There will be some threads in there saying that dad once yelled at me or that the kids once made fun of me, but if the overall color is a positive thing that's what it will look like, so it's a little simplified, but yeah, it's basically true . I know you're not a psychologist, this is more. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology, you have a master's degree in psychology or a doctor, yes, no, I have my bachelor's degree in psychology, my master's degree was family therapy, so I am a family therapist, but I don't know psychology, let's do this and some neuroscience, There is some cheekiness, yes.

I know a little about neuroscience if I went to a neuroscience restaurant like I felt comfortable ordering great food. I couldn't ask where the bathroom was in neuroscience. Go to Pixar. Wow, the visualizations in this movie and the animation of each of the different characters, like the animations of sadness, disgust, joy and the way the characters move is so brilliant, yeah, like some of them are flexible, squishy and noodle-like figures and then the anger is just this block of Radel's wall that constantly stops every time he takes a step, you stop, yeah, so Riley has a pretty good childhood, this is very touching stuff because I see a lot of families that are and a lot of kids that have had negative experiences, they have loving parents but the parents are inconsistent, you know, maybe the parent has a very strong temperament problem or there are abandonment issues where the parents love the child. child but they're not very much and some of that is just part of growing up like your parents aren't always there, yes, but you can be in a secure and ambivalent attachment in a secure and anxious attachment or you can be in a secure attachment and Riley, her parents are there for her, they love her, they reinforce her, they reassure her and you know, of course, this is a narrative, right, you set up that everything is happy and then things are not happy and we have to find a way to be happy again, sure, but what we'll see from the inside out that's really cool is that we believe that happiness is the goal, in fact, this is the setup of a classic story structure where they start out happy and then they end up happy.

Things go somewhere else. Heck and then they find their way to happiness again, but the key to this movie is that happiness isn't the key, right? And that's the most powerful thing about it, but we'll come back to that, you see, there's some anger there and there's some sadness, there's a couple other things that a couple works their way through, but like I said, she's a girl. happy she has a stable home and right now the movies pay this really idealistic version of childhood that everything should be love she's great and we think you know I think it should be love and positivity that childhood should be but This actually makes me think of Finding Nemo, the other Pixar movie, where he says I promised him I wouldn't let anything happen to him by talking about his son, but nothing will ever happen.

For you, yes, but nothing will ever happen to her. That part of childhood is that you have to deal with pain and disappointment. It's part of how we become adults and if everything is happiness, there is no growth. That's the hardest thing for me as a parent. trying to let my kids experience the bad things in life in a way where they still feel loved and nurtured, but like they're also learning and growing, it's almost impossible to toe that line, yeah, yeah, you want it, you want it save them. Yes, but you can't just deal with it.

Oh, you remember the funny movie where the dog dies, so this is it, this is Phyllis from the office. There are local companies that rent anti-gravity machines, what exactly could they do? feel lighter, okay, we're starting to see here that Joy is a little obsessed with herself mm-hmm, you know she's the leader of the group and we're talking about group dynamics. Joy sees herself as the ultimate goal and everything else is subordinate to her and that is one of the themes of this movie as we think that we should be happy all the time and if we are not then something is wrong, we have to fix it right and part of what this movie is about is really being at peace with our other emotions.

And I see a lot of people in therapy and in life trying to act like everything is okay and they have it instead of just being real and it hurts them and damages their relationships. This fake positivity is a wonderful thing as long as it's very true, if it's not real then you're lying to yourself yeah well and you know we did an episode on gaslighting recently and these aren't Mother Gothel levels , but joy is like isolating sadness in this moment to tell it that you know. in a very positive and optimistic way, she wants to say, well, you're wrong and please be quiet and don't do anything, yeah, I don't see, and this right here is great, this is a common storytelling technique where, at beginning of a movie, Filmmakers will tell you sometimes subtly, sometimes with a shot, sometimes with a look, but often just in dialogue, here's the end of the movie, yes, we'll get there, just you wait , yes, and one of the things that is not telegraphing, is abundant. no, no, it's planting a seed and one of the things that you know that builds trust is like, oh, this is going somewhere maybe and then in the end, when it pays off, that trust is rewarded, the trust of the audience in the movie, yes.

So psychologically there is no happiness without sadness, these two characters are intertwined although they don't really realize it, the joy is trying to displace the sadness, but the fact is that if you have never felt sad then you can't appreciate what it is. the joy is exactly, there is no contrast, it's just one thing, yes, okay, so you know, I think, first of all, it's very brave to try to insert the concept of abstract or thinking in a children's movie in a yes, I'm serious, yes, a children's movie and a family movie. but it's like a movie that children will watch and not get completely lost, but it's actually illustrative when they say it's a shortcut, being able to form abstract thoughts, being able to grasp concepts without direct concrete examples to illustrate them, it's a shortcut to understanding, of course. , yeah, so when she says, let's take this path and she steps back and shows that they have a huge path, you know, in terms of children's development, when they start to be able to develop and understand abstract concepts, it's a sign of that they are no longer children, that they are in transition, yes, but we also see Riley still a child, so when we enter into her abstract thinking, it is not very well developed and all hell will break loose, it is not going well. don't miss that train bing-bong knows what he's doing it's partly dolphin they're really smart he's really smart it's a brilliant script are these the real abstract thought divided into these four yes no, it absolutely is and once again they put this in a kids movie and the funny thing is that even the kids have no idea what's going on, it's still fun, you know, even if the adults have no idea what's going on, it's still fun, but you know, those These are the four stages in which they are reassembled. horrible monsters take some work getting back to reality getting back to normal well so with my kids you know we ask them to do these meditations we have an app on our phone that asks them to do meditations and part of the reason why We have to do that because maybe they have eaten the wrong thing or had too much screen time or whatever when we need them to calm down and in our house the rule is that if you have screen time you have to do a meditation afterwards and part of that is that transition from not abstract to literal thinking, but from one reality to the other, for sure, and especially if they've been watching superhero stuff, they'll punch and kick each other, yeah, and so on.

In fact , have them do these meditations to transition because there's a period from one to the other, otherwise they get stuck in the middle, like when these characters come out and here's one reality and they're still back in the other. I never realized. that I needed to do that. I'm having a real problem when I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto. I'll get in a car and, just like I hate sitting in traffic, I'll just drive to the side. Obviously I never have but there's an urge, there's an urge to just run over pedestrians and drive down the sidewalk and be Grand Theft Auto, yeah, sorry, yeah, okay, so let's talk about this for a second, the subconscious mind makes sense. let this whole area be very active right now mm-hmm because when we are asleep when we dream the whole purpose of that or one of the purposes of that is that there are things that we don't want to face when we are awake we don't want to think about ourselves, so the The reason we have nightmares is because we do not overcome them when we are awake and one of the ways to not have nightmares or at least not to have constant nightmares is to bring the subconscious to the conscious and face head on what you think you are afraid of and sometimes you can knowing what's there, sometimes that's not why it's called the subconscious, that's where an expert therapist psychologist can help you with that, but I think it's fascinating because some dreams really are. random but somatically and emotionally there's something there that you're not dealing with interesting my wife dreams that I'm a terribly bad man and she says and tells me no you're a terrible man I say, yeah, dream about me it's incredibly horrible like I'm a womanizing alcoholic abusive player just like what she told me is that we had a good time and I think on some level I'm afraid that it's too good to be true when something is going to happen but she doesn't want to face that in reality so she comes out well in dreams and many times, when we face things in reality, we no longer have nightmares because they have graduated from the subconscious to the conscious. he cries as a child she is crying candidate I love that oh god what's up with this?

I'm just afraid of clay all the time. Am I afraid of clowns? No, no, but um, I'm afraid of this clown. afraid of scary movie clowns, yeah, did you say I love that he's not especially evil or malicious, he just acts like a clown and that's scary, he really wants to go to the birthday party and that's the scary thing, he's cute? good interpretation of a nightmare interrupting a dream your dream about something and then something else jumps in the middle of it and I like to talk about an interception it just seems strange once you wake up right when you're dreaming it's like and now here's the clown, now We have a deal, fly her to the moon, damn, okay, so a couple of things, a sadness doesn't even exist, but this is where joy feels sadness for the first time, yeah, and it reminds me of something which is that sadness is the price we pay. love pain is the price we pay for love that the only way to not feel pain is to never feel love and that is not a life worth living so Joy of course loves Riley but she has come to worry about being impressed, she loves. him and now he sacrificed himself and joy for the first time is experiencing what the entire film is building: before you talked about planting seeds, what is the importance of pain or sadness, which is not the same as despair, but sadness at have an emotionally full life.

In life and to truly experience joy, there are some things we have to leave behind in order to grow. If we try to hold on tothem, we will stay stuck even if it is difficult, yes, and it should not have been that way. Bing bong should know. left BingBong, I'll try bing-bong, I promise, well he got really dusty here. I completely underestimated him, so one of the things I wanted to talk about is a person who, you know, experiences depression, not that they're not medicated for it or anything like that. but you know, sometimes I experienced it quite strongly, yeah, that's what depression feels like for me, yeah, I just completely lose it, like the control panel turns gray, nothing works, yeah, right, there's no more levers I can pull to regulate my emotions and yours.

Trying, they're trying like, inside my head when I'm depressed. I know I'm depressed and this is not something that should be happening. You should be able to feel something. Yeah, you know, and a lot of times it's me. Either I only feel one thing or I literally feel nothing, yeah, and it's just completely annihilating me. I have a lot of people whose family members like anyone who isn't actually feeling it because there is a difference between feeling depressed and being clinically depressed. or really anxious and dealing with clinical anxiety and the biggest difference is how much it shuts down your daily life or impedes your daily life and then people who mean well just say well you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and it's a question I'll agree with. party, it's not yeah, when you, when your control panel, yeah, it's completely broken, you know, that's if you're getting up using that metaphor that you've broken, they came out, yeah, there's nothing left at all and that's What People don't understand when they say you just have to try harder, try, isn't that the problem?

That's not the problem? You can't make Riley feel anything. What have we done? He's a bit like the Dementors in Harry Potter, right? As the cold and darkness spreads everywhere, the Dementors were also representative of depression. I felt like I would never be happy again. This is how JK Rowling wrote it. Oh joy, you have to go up there. Sadness, it depends on you. I can. t joy, yes, you can, Riley needs you to wait, hello, this is that they have never trusted sadness with anything before, and now they are giving it like the whole panel, yes, because sadness must be felt and here, instead of joy, trying to fix it. or anyone else or anger or fear, sadness is what brings Riley back because she realizes that I need my family because I'm hurting instead of just shutting down and enjoying coming full circle and realizing that you know what he said at the beginning of the movie, yes, no.

Don't touch them because they are in the hallway, but that's what has to happen. All these happy memories from the past are now sad memories because they are gone, because that time has passed and Riley needs to grieve that and his family needs to grieve that and them. I've been following Joy's path all along but I say no, everything's great, everything's fine, we're fine in our new town, it's fine, but it's not fine, but it's fine, yeah, well, you finally made it, you made me cry for me. my mom is gone my mom is dead every happy memory i have of her is colored blue like everyone is sad too but that's what makes them beautiful and we're crying but our team is like doing the ugly crying there, if it's real. bad, yeah, so what's really shocking to me about this, oh god, I love this, is that there's all this crap and now they're going to turn yellow, not just yellow, oh yeah, what's up, yeah, like that It is, a new bittersweet memory, it is both, there is a type of love that is only experienced through sadness, there is a type of joy that is only experienced in pain and in many ways it is the most beautiful of all because when we We console, we show compassion, we show empathy, that is the most beautiful form of love.

There's no hey, I like you or I appreciate your company or I think you're funny or any of those affirmative things that make you feel good, but you're hurting and I'm not going to leave you, yeah, you know you're struggling and I. I'm here with you and I love you and you're not alone and that's a deeper, deeper, more lasting love, so I think about families and I think about friendships, I think about marriages that go to the end, they don't go to the end. distance because things were not difficult, you know, they went to the end because things were very good and they found themselves through that as a therapist, this is one of my favorite movies because it teaches us to accept sadness as a means to be close and develop ourselves. compassion and empathy and how that builds relationships in a way that nothing else can.

Yes, one is a father. This is one of my favorite movies because it's a simple visual way of explaining these incredibly complex things that you studied for years in college and in your master's program and all that stuff, and we can watch a movie and then have a conversation about it and say that it's okay to feel these things, yeah, so we experienced it as a family, we moved from Utah to Los Angeles and then to Kovan 19. it happened and we moved back, yeah, and it was this, you know, a jarring move for my kids, they were very excited about the adventure and everything, they are very, you know, adventurous kids and yeah, they were excited to move and we were moved. and they were just settling in and making new friends and then we had to pick up and move again and they couldn't even go back to their friends, they had to go back into isolation and it was very difficult for them, but watching this movie really helped us as parents They explained and it really helped them, you know, me and just my sweet four year old daughter, you know, telling us that a lot of her memories of California are yellow and blue, now she gets it, yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing and I mean that's why you and I started these movies, our entertainment, but they also illustrate the truth and we talk about abstract thinking and how they try to get into that abstract thinking room and movies help us take the abstract. and make it concrete, yes, and because of inside out and because you were a student of a father and his wife and a student, a father to look for an opportunity to teach his children he can work on things now and there will be a lot in his life where they think it's okay for this to be bittersweet, or it's okay to feel sad and because there will be people and I appreciate that you're horrible today because there's a lesson here, look at you, you're a big, handsome man and you're you know you don't lack masculinity and what's your M in what you're demonstrating is okay just like it's okay to feel like things don't take away from you as a man they don't take away from you as a person you model that for your Boys you are modeling that for everyone watching now you're welcome .

Yes, with that in mind, we hope you enjoyed this presentation inside out. This will be the first in a long series in which we will watch Pixar movies and I will cry. like a baby it's not planned and it's not a performance what he is he knows himself and this is what Pixar does this me my wife makes fun of me constantly my magician my wife your wife makes fun of me no no yes someone is going to cry in a movie it's going to be me oh yeah unless you're pregnant then all bets are off but that's not your fault anyway if you want to buy it upside down or rent it to help support this program, you can do it.

There is a link in the comments for that as well as scheduling a fifteen minute consultation with me if you would like therapeutic help or online relationship courses. Yes, as always, please, if you like this video, share it with your friends, family, enemies, we don't care who they are, just share it. with someone follow us on Instagram Facebook Twitter is in therapy highlight cinema and subscribe like it, ring the bell until next time connect with your family connect with your loved ones cry your eyes out and watch movies