A film “for children”, where the main character, Riley is an 11 -year -old girl, with a happy childhood, who is facing the unknown and the challenges of the transfer to another city.
But it is also, and perhaps above all, a film where adults see what happens in the mind, the complexity of the emotional changes that color and accompany the growth of the small protagonist are represented in the cartoon.
The real protagonists of the film are in fact the emotions of Riley, who guide her from the headquarters in her mind. Joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust They orient it in everyday decisions and expeiriences and therefore also in relationships with others.
In particular joy (absolute protagonist of the childhood of Riley) and sadness (which now wants to make room in the emotional life of the little one) guide us inside the space of the mind, which is represented in a simplified but faithful way to what are the discoveries of the cognitive studies on the basic elements of the brain structure.
The headquarters that could be identified with the working memory and short -term memory; the train of thoughts, which with all its vagons loaded with content rapidly crosses the mind throughout the day; Immagilandia: the world where fantasies remain; The world of abstract thought, where, the more you go into it, the more everything can lose shape and identity; The subconscious: a dark and isolated place where the “fears and plants” are located; The dreams, during the “REM shift” that starts at the sliding of the child’s sleep, who are shot as real films with a lot of script, where what was experienced during the day is taken up and reworked; Long -term memory, a shelf full of memories, where some renders and others vanish resounded with a vacuum cleaner that selects what you still need and must remain and what must instead make room for the new.
The mind is represented as a factory, where from the headquarters it is decided how to guide the protagonist just through emotions.
Experiences pass and are stored as spheres in the various stages of memory with the colors of the emotions that characterize them. Some, precious, become the “basic memories”, those primary experiences that build and feed the “islands”, which represent the most important affections for the protagonist and his personality traits.
They could be those that in the Therapy scheme are defined as patterns: internal nuclei made of memories, verbal and sensory, emotions, thoughts, born from the interaction with the world and important people, who then organize and define our personality and what we think and expect from the world and from the others, and therefore our way of interacting with what surrounds us.
Basic memories that could also be “Traumatic” memorieslike those that the EMDR approach tries to trace in memory and then reworked them, precisely through those eye movements that also characterize the REM phase of sleep.
When sadness touches Riley’s experiences, and memories tinge blue, something changes. Gioia tries to protect the imperturbable serenity of the child’s childhood, but life can no longer be so simple. While joy and sadness are lost in the meanders of the mind, Riley, who remains without it, loses his personality and his ability to express himself. Everything becomes gray and no longer understandable; In this attempt at defense it can no longer try anything and everything becomes uncontrollable.
In the end it is the touch of Sadness That rekindles Riley’s emotion, that sadness that only through listening manages to make the imaginary friend feel better. Through sadness the protagonist manages to let off steam and show his emotions and therefore receive help.
Inside Out reminds us then that life cannot be happiness at all costsone of the “myths” of our time, where we try to avoid sadness and the most difficult emotions, which become increasingly intolerable and source of fear and concern.
In the message of the film, fragility are not defects, Negative emotions are not to be avoidedand in the current Cognitive behavioral psychotherapeutic orientations We try to find a good relationship with your emotional world as a whole and in its complexity.
Through the development of the ability to reflect on one’s mind (metacognition) in the third wave of cognitive psychology, through the observation and awareness of the Mindfulnessthrough the acceptance and commitment of Act.
And so the journey into the mind (and sometimes of psychotherapy) also teaches to pass overall and in the unknown, giving the opportunity to create spheres of experiences characterized by different colors, and find balance and happiness.
