Inside Out, Pixar’s latest animated film offering premiered June 19 and is causing not a little excitement. For one thing, it’s darned good entertainment. For another, it’s clean. It’s a movie the entire family can see and enjoy. Last but not least, the layman gets a bird’s eye view of what goes on inside the brain and how real people deal with memories, emotions, the imagination, and abstract thinking; and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s actually amazing how this one little cartoon film, Inside Out, so broadly appealing to adults and children alike, tells us so much about psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Maybe that’s because the story line of Inside Out is based on the Internal Family Systems Model (IFS), developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. In IFS, the personality is thought to be made up of valuable parts that each have healthy roles. But sometimes life gets in the way and the parts are forced to reorganize in unhealthy ways.
Think of the child of alcoholic parents—she’d like to go to medical school and become a doctor, but instead is forced to put her career on hold and take care of her parents. This is something you’ll see in most alcoholic families: a child putting her life on hold out of duty to her messed-up family. But while you see this in most alcoholic families, every single one of the children who end up serving as caretakers for their parents is a unique individual. They each have talents and interests having nothing to do with their families or alcoholism. And yet none of these children will get to realize their dreams or use their talents.
Duty has taken over the part that hopes and dreams, making self-fulfillment impossible.
IFS therapy would aim to help someone in this situation work at freeing the part of the person that is stuck and unable to get out there and pursue a dream. It would be about rebalancing these different parts of the personality, about having a conversation with the self, about becoming whole and happy. About becoming the person you have the potential to be.
originally posted by Varda Epstein
