Pixar’s Inside Out shows us how to deal with repressed emotions and Ego death. Watch closely and notice how Riley’s emotional journey holds the key to your spiritual lessons.
Saying things like, “It takes a lot to make me angry,” and, “I never cry,” are not the flex they used to be.
Surprisingly, it is the most obvious sign that you are repressing your emotions.
It’s also why you may suffer from long-term anxiety, depression, and stress-related illnesses.
If you choose any Disney/Pixar movie and watch closely, you will realize that they’re not just for kids.
Many of them hold spiritual lessons that you can use at any age.
Pixar’s Expression of Ego Death, the Dark Night of the Soul, and Repressed Emotions
I am a fully grown adult.
And I watched this movie thinking it would be just another cute story.
The next thing I know, tears are streaming down my face, and I’m realizing that I haven’t been feeling my feelings for twenty-plus years.
On top of that, I couldn’t ignore that Pixar illustrated the spiritual themes of Death and Rebirth, the Ego, the Dark Night of the Soul, and the benefits of vulnerability, all in one ninety-minute kids movie.
I love it, though. It’s even better for you and me because the first step to healing comes through pattern recognition.
And movies are just mirrors of our everyday lives.
Riley’s Ego Forms
In my post on Eat Pray Love, I talked about the Ego.
Specifically how to quiet it.
It is a movie that was slower-paced but incredibly helpful for me at a time in my life when I needed to quiet my ego to find my inner voice.
However, unlike Eat Pray Love, the spiritual lesson in Pixar’s Inside Out appears as soon as the movie begins.
Right as Riley opens her eyes.
Riley’s dad calls her their little “bundle of joy”.
Initially, it seems innocent enough.
But that moment helps Riley create the foundation of her Ego identity.
This moment creates her first core memory and becomes one of her islands of personality.
In Riley’s case, as she grows, that becomes a large part of her “I am”.
I am a bundle of joy.
And because it is such a foundational part of her personality, while her ego is forming, she will find more experiences in her life that reinforce that identity of being a happy person.
Even after the other emotions show up, in the background, you can see that all of Riley’s Islands of Personality stem from happy core memories.
Riley’s World Gets Shaken Up
As the movie progresses, Joy feels that Riley’s life is going perfectly. Everything she’s built her identity on runs smoothly.
But one day, Riley and her parents pick up and move.
I moved a few times while growing up, and it’s a BIG shake-up.
Especially as a kid, that’s a traumatic event.
As a child, no one taught me how to handle certain emotions. For the most part, I learned that I shouldn’t have them.
Considering that, what happens next in the movie hits almost too close to home.
Riley and her family make it to San Francisco, and she’s feeling emotional. Their moving van is late, there’s a dead mouse on the floor, and her dad has to leave and go to work.
As a result, her emotions are all over the place.
At this point in the movie, something very subtle yet super important happens.
Joy blocks sadness from touching the control panel and then takes control.
And behind them, we notice Riley’s memories of the day. She has so many experiences, and not one is blue.
This small detail reveals that Riley has started to repress her emotions.
What are Repressed Emotions?
When you repress an emotion, you unconsciously push it out of your awareness.
It’s different from suppressing your emotions, where you are conscious of how you feel but push it away anyway.
For example, when suppressing your emotions, if someone crosses your boundaries, you’ll be angry, recognize that, and then take a walk to cool off instead of yelling, screaming, etc.
Emotional repression happens when you’re not conscious that you’re angry.
In this case, someone crosses your boundaries, but you are unsure how you feel.
So you might let it slide and make a joke about it. But then later, you act passive-aggressive.
When you repress emotions, you substitute one emotion for the one you need to feel.
And you will also experience the repressed emotions you need to feel start to sneak out .
Like when sadness starts acting out, messing with core memories and turning once happy memories sad.
Life Circumstances Reinforce Riley’s Ego
What would have been healthiest for Riley would have been for her to express her sadness when her mom came into her room that night.
And she almost did.
But Riley’s Mom says something that seems well-meaning but is also a little manipulative.
She thanks Riley for staying “their happy girl” throughout the move. Riley’s Mom also mentions that if they can keep smiling, it would help her dad.
This moment reinforces Riley’s ego identity.
And Riley doesn’t question it.
Even her emotions agree that they can’t argue with Mom.
And Riley might as well be happy no matter what.
And that’s what triggers Joy to go into overdrive.
Ego Death And Cognitive Dissonance
During Riley’s first day at her new school, Joy makes Sadness stand in a circle and study books instead of working the control panel.
Because sadness becomes the repressed emotion again, this time, she acts out, causing Riley to cry in class.
A moment that’s mortifying for anyone, especially when they are eleven years old.
But for Riley, this causes her to have more than just a bad day.
It creates her very first sad core memory.
Because Riley has attached being a “happy girl” to her identity, having a sad core memory makes her experience cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is the word for that feeling you get when you’re aware that your beliefs and your actions don’t line up.
If she’s a happy girl, then why is she crying in class?
Happy girls don’t cry in class.
Your ego not only creates this idea of who you are, but it also protects it.
And repressed emotions can be the result of that protection.
But once you experience something that goes against your ego’s beliefs before you learn how to quiet your ego, boy, are you in for it.
It’s chaos.
You might start acting out of fear, anger, and even disgust.
As you become more self-aware, you won’t always be able to avoid information that challenges your ego.
Sometimes, you will have to confront it.
For example, if you’ve attached being independent to your self-identity, you can’t always outrun situations where you need to ask for help.
And being confronted with situations like that can result in an Ego Death because your mind does not know how to process what you’re experiencing.
Riley’s Repressed Emotions Lead to Ego Death
The idea of ego death can be controversial.
When my spiritual awakening started, I thought ego death only happened when you took drugs or did ayahuasca.
I assumed it was an over-the-top sensory experience.
But as I worked through my own repressed emotions, traumas, and identities. I realized that ego death is a universal experience.
Which I don’t think most people realize.
As a result, like everything else in the universe, it will inevitably go through the cycle of death and rebirth.
As Joy and Sadness attempt to make sense of the core memories, Riley loses touch with them.
And because her identity relies on joy, all of her islands of personality shut down.
Anyone conscious of their spiritual development considers this a ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’
Riley’s Dark Night of the Soul
One by one, Riley’s Islands of Personality fall because now she can’t connect with their foundation.
It’s these profound emotional changes that usually trigger your ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’
It can be one of the most painful and disorienting times in your life.
It’s a spiritual depression that can make you feel like you’ve hit rock bottom. You lose faith in everything you once knew.
There’s an article about the stages of the Dark Night of the Soul. You can find it here.
It helped me identify what I was experiencing during my own Dark Night of the Soul.
But if you find yourself in it, you can’t only “positively think” your way out of it.
It teaches you what you have been repressing, what you need to release, and where you have attachments that are not in line with your authentic self.
It teaches you how to balance your darkness and your light.
Repressed Emotions Cause Repressed Memories
While Joy and Sadness try to return to headquarters, Joy attempts to leave Sadness behind.
Joy wants the old Riley back, but what she doesn’t realize is that the old Riley isn’t coming back.
What she doesn’t understand is that Riley doesn’t need to be happy.
Riley needs to be human.
At the same time, up in Headquarters, something else happens that we should NOT ignore!
Anger suggests the idea of running away. But there’s one thing we need to keep in mind.
Riley still had to choose.
Pixar’s Inside Out illustrates how you are the observer of your thoughts and ideas.
Even though Anger presents an idea, RILEY decides if she takes it or tosses it.
And even more importantly, Inside Out shows how limited thoughts and ideas can be when you can’t access all of your feelings.
But how do we access all of our feelings?
Especially the most common repressed emotions like sadness and anger.
Well, Pixar’s Inside Out shows us that too.
What to Do When Repressed Emotions Cause Ego Death
When Joy and Bing Bong fall into the memory dump, Joy sits with the sad core memory that she repressed.
Joy realizes that before the core memories occurred, the experiences right before were sad.
Specifically, in Riley’s memory of the hockey team celebrating her, Sadness opened the door for other people to help.
And after that humbling revelation, we are hit with arguably the most heart-wrenching scene in Pixar history.
Bing Bong sacrifices himself by jumping off the rocket so that Riley can experience Joy.
For extra content on what spiritual lessons you can learn from Bing Bong, you can find that in the extended version on Patreon.
Achieving Emotional Regulation after Ego Death.
After Joy and Sadness’s journey, exploring the deepest parts of Riley, they finally make it back to HQ.
And to their surprise, Sadness saves the day.
Sadness removes the idea of running away, and Riley hops off the bus.
The key to emotional regulation is to realize how each emotion serves you.
What’s its job?
In Riley’s case, expressing her sadness allowed her to be vulnerable. And that vulnerability opened the door for a deeper connection with her parents.
You aren’t born afraid of vulnerability, but over time, the ego works extremely hard to protect you from feeling that way.
It’s why spiritual people preach to get rid of the ego.
Because in our vulnerability, we create deeper intimacy with others and ourselves.
But removing the ego is not exactly realistic. Is it?
Nope!
What you need to do is embrace the cycle of the ego.
Embrace the idea that identity constantly evolves, and you will experience ego death.
You have to let the old parts of your identity fall away.
Let them evolve.
Let them grow more dimension, more substance, more layers.
As a result, life gets better. You’ll feel more, show up for yourself more, and grow deeper relationships.
By the end of Inside Out, Riley’s emotional work has brought her whole family closer together.
Similar to how Mirabel did in the movie Encanto, where she helped to heal her family’s generational trauma.
I recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet.
As always, I’m sending Love and Healing your way. Bye!
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