Rose Miller 
I’ve recently taken my kids to see the INSIDE OUT 2 movie. It was brilliant, I’m so happy that my kids got a new perspective on emotions and that they get to see new emotions that are more relevant to their lives since the first movie came out. I wonder how different my childhood could have been had I had an understanding or language for how I felt as a kid. It would have been different to know that emotions pass and I’ve got many parts trying to help me. Everyone should see this movie, it’s not just a kids’ movie. There’s a reason that sales skyrocketed at the box office to unbelievable numbers, people want to feel better about themselves, and understanding what is happening is the first step.
I watched Riley grow into a teenager and as much as it was interesting to watch her internal system react to what was happening around her I couldn’t help but wonder what it’s like in the mind of a child who’s not mainstream. Throughout the movie, Riley deals with normal childhood struggles like peer pressure and adjusting to normal life changes but what happens inside the mind of a child with complex trauma?
I remember the scene from the first one where Sadness was touching all the memories and ruining them and Joy tried her best to stop her and eventually all her parts come together to help Riley through it. I couldn’t help but wonder about the child who is consumed with sadness because of complex trauma and who doesn’t have a strong sense of joy to stop it, maybe this unfortunate child never had strong positive core memories and what are the effects of that and is there a way to fix that? Or does it turn into depression and they are doomed for a life of unhappiness.
I also wondered about the panic attack scene in the second movie where anxiety consumes Riley and she can barely catch her breath. I remember feeling that way as a young child about 5 years old. I used to wake up in the middle of the night unable to breathe, my mother would give me a puff of an inhaler because I was diagnosed with asthma but through therapy and years of working through my issues I now know it wasn’t asthma, it was anxiety over the death of my sister and sheer panic that my mother would die too. (Read more: https://therosemillerstory.com/2024/07/05/no-mother-should-have-to-bury-a-child/ ) I’ve had those panic attacks where I couldn’t breathe and I can say without a doubt that it was not asthma but rather a response to some pretty intense trauma. (Read more: https://therosemillerstory.com/2020/08/07/my-ticket-out/ ) Could that be what happens? Do children develop these emotions at younger stages? Do traumatized children deal with complex emotions before they’re ready and it creates intensity that mainstream people don’t feel?
What about shame? Or terror? Or abandonment? Or grief? Do mainstream children deal with intense grief? I’m not sure, death is a hard concept to grasp and if not directly experienced it’s not something they would understand. But a child who lost a loved one at a young age what kind of emotion do they experience? I know for myself that it’s not so neatly separated. It is complex, blended, and polarized; sometimes it’s all lumped into a single tear that no one sees because we are expected to be like everyone else.
Overall I loved the movie, the emotions were so cute and relatable. It was so fascinating to see all the different parts of Riley and my favorite scene was when the primary emotions were shoved into a jar and she says “We’re suppressed emotions.” We all have them, maybe they aren’t always as cute as Riley’s, but if we learn to heal them and understand them we can make them exactly as we want them because we get to control the narrative.
