Re-learning how to feel
Or, what Disney’s Inside Out helped me understand about falling into and climbing out of depression
Spoiler warning: This article makes reference to the plot of the Pixar film ‘Inside Out’.
I’m a big fan of Pixar films. As a studio, they really seem to have found the secret sauce for producing great films: interesting stories, well rounded characters and really fantastic animation. More than all of these things though, the main reason I really like Pixar films is that, almost without exception (Cars 3, I’m looking at you), watching them creates a real and deep emotional response. Toy Story, for example, can generally be relied upon to bring on a strong bout of the warm and fuzzies and there’s usually always a scene which brings a tear to the eye (see the first 15 minutes of Up in particular). Perhaps my favourite Pixar film though is Inside Out, the story of a young girl Riley coming to terms with a major life event.
For those who haven’t seen Inside Out (and if you haven’t, you really should), the basic conceit of the story is that inside Riley’s head reside personifications of her emotions (Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness) who work to guide Riley through her life, creating memories (represented as little objects like marbles coloured according to the memory’s dominant emotion) along the way. Amongst these memories are Riley’s “core” memories, particularly important memories which power Riley’s “Islands of Personality” (such as a love of ice hockey, being with family or being goofy). At the beginning of the film, Riley is a vivacious and joyful child; all her core memories are yellow, showing that they were created by Joy. Joy, it quickly becomes clear, is Riley’s oldest emotion and is highly protective of Riley, doing everything to make sure that Riley is happy as much of the time as possible.
The story reaches its inciting incident when Riley’s father moves his family across the country to San Francisco for work. Suddenly, Riley is in a strange city, hundreds of miles from her friends and hockey team, in a creaky old house that smells and where the local pizzeria only serves pizza with broccoli on top. Despite Joy’s best efforts, the emotional upheaval causes Riley to be overwhelmed by feelings of loss on her first day at school, resulting in a new core memory being created. This time, however, the core memory is blue, the colour of Sadness. Joy panics, frantically trying to prevent the new core memory from settling into the central memory bank and creating a new island of personality, but in the process dislodges all of the other core memories, which roll away into Riley’s long-term memory, causing her Islands of Personality to become inactive. Riley becomes numb and withdrawn and slowly starts to slide into what can be described as a depression, as Joy and Sadness (who fell into long-term memory along with the core memories) work together to recover the core memories and return them before all of Riley’s personality falls away.
I’ve been thinking about Inside Out more recently as I have, slowly and often painfully, been trying to find a new way to relate to my own emotions through attending therapy to try and get to the root of my 18 or so year struggle with depression and anxiety. In many ways, it is one of the best depictions of many of the aspects of depression that I have come across. Here’s why I think that.
1Depression is not really about feeling sad, it’s a result of not wanting to feel at all.
When you ask someone what they think it’s like to be depressed, it’s highly likely the response you will get will refer to feeling very sad. This is not completely wrong; experiencing depression has a lot of outward similarities with sadness, but once you scratch the surface you realise there’s actually something quite different going on. Sadness is a natural emotional response to situations in the world we find upsetting. It is emotion that has a long evolutionary purpose; expressions of sadness, such as crying, helped our early ancestors on the savannahs of Africa to form deeper interpersonal bonds, strengthening the tribe and, in turn, improving an individual’s chance of surviving and reproducing. There is a reason that, in response to emotionally difficult events, having a good cry can feel cathartic; it gives expression and an outlet to inner feelings of confusion or pain and usually leads to others giving comfort to you.
Depression (in my view at least), is different to this. It is not adaptive, but maladaptive. It arises when, for some reason, you do not allow yourself to feel in response to an emotionally stressful situation, whether that be in the form of sadness, or fear or anger, but suppress those feelings instead. It is the inability or refusal to feel and experience often painful emotions that sets you on a downward spiral. In Inside Out, Riley’s crisis point is reached when her emotional console shuts down and prevents her remaining emotions from being able to do anything to guide her.
In my experience, depression is like going through waves of complete emotional anaesthesia, a feeling of complete numbness where nothing works and you have the sensation of being completely adrift and out of control. Everything retreats and the world shrinks; you can’t think beyond the next week, the next day or even the next hour, listlessly drifting through each waking moment until you can once again embrace the oblivion of sleep. It is the inability or refusal to have normal emotional responses that creates the feelings of despair and hopelessness and which ultimately drives you to wishing that it would all just stop permanently.
2 Depression can be a result of our internal defence mechanisms going into overdrive
In Inside Out, Joy does everything she can to keep Riley happy; she cannot understand why or accept that Riley should feel sad, and does everything she can to prevent it, even telling Sadness to stand within a chalk circle and not to leave it while Riley is in school. However, it is Joy’s attempts at trying to prevent the new sad core memory from establishing itself in Riley’s sub-conscious that results in everything beginning to fall apart for Riley. This has been a core part of my experience with depression. For so many years, since quite an early age, I became adept at responding to emotions that felt too overwhelming or difficult to process by pushing them down. It was the response of my psyche going into full survival mode against what often seemed like overwhelming tide of difficult emotional experiences, whether fear or sadness at a parent’s anger or stress or anger a school bully’s attacks.
This was, at the time, was just my mind trying to protect me; choosing not to feel felt safer than facing the enormity of the negative emotions. The problem though, is that those emotions don’t go away, they just sit and ferment, roiling under the surface, increasing in strength until, one day, something cracks and it all comes spilling out, only for the brain to, once again, apply even more pressure to force everything back down again. It is this tug of war in the mind caused by a sub-conscious unwillingness to feel as a means of self-defence gone too far that is utterly exhausting, sapping every ounce of energy that you have and leaving you wishing for it all just to stop.
3 To embark on a journey towards recovery is to re-learn how to feel fully again
The hero who saves the day in Inside Out is not Joy, but Sadness. It is when Riley is able to express all her feelings of loss and sadness to her parents, reconnecting with them and with her full range of emotions (not just Joy), that she is able to once again return to living full and whole emotional life. When I first started my most recent period of therapy, it initially felt that I was going backwards. I just wanted to be happy, and yet every week I just ended up crying uncontrollably to my therapist. I now realise that feeling sad, angry, afraid, confused and all the other parts of the roiling cauldron of emotions that I have explored was exactly what I needed to feel in order to begin to find the way towards inner peace. It was when I reached out to the ten year old inside me and experienced the pain and grief and fear that he was never able to process, lifting the burden from his shoulders and replacing it with love, that I once again began to smile at the warmth of the sun, laugh with close friends and look forward to the future.
