Why to go see “Inside Out 2” with your teen or tween

If you haven’t yet seen Inside Out 2 with your teen or tween, I highly recommend it. If the first Inside Out taught us that one cannot experience joy without the emotions of sadness, fear, anger, and disgust, Inside Out 2 takes on puberty and impending adolescence by adding embarrassment, shame, envy, ennui, and most importantly anxiety. The movie names the emotions and gives them literal shape and personalities, which can be critical for teenagers trying to identify, name, and understand what they’re feeling when their emotions can feel big and overwhelming.

Last Friday morning at breakfast, my teenage son asked me if I wanted to see Inside Out 2 that evening. Looking past my busy day, at the end of a long week, and trying not to seem too eager, I said yes before he finished asking the question. Much to my chagrin, he bought tickets to the 4-D version of the movie. After I secured my purse and computer bag so they wouldn’t be thrown from my chair as I was jerked around and even had water sprayed on me, we settled in for a movie that was fun and wound up helping us talk about something we’d never found the language to meaningfully talk about before.

If you’ve read anything about the movie, you may have heard about the character Anxiety. With a broad orange mouth, forced into a grin, bugged out eyes, eyebrows emoting worry, and an orange sprout of something between hair or feathers on the top of her head, you can tell that Anxiety is barely holding it together. She desperately wants to do the right thing and has an idea of what she wants, but no idea how to get there, and is bound to take the protagonist Riley in the wrong direction. It’s clear that she loves Riley, but her fears and “plans” to save Riley backfire. As psychologist Lisa Damour, PhD, one of the consultants to the films, explains that anxiety isn’t all bad: “it alerts us to threats both external – such as a driver swerving in a nearby lane — and internal — such as when we’ve procrastinated too long and it’s time to get started on our work.”

At the climax of Inside Out 2, Anxiety takes control of Riley’s control console. As Riley pursues her dreams of making the varsity hockey team and gaining new friends, we watch Riley make a series of bad decisions, engage in negative self-talk, slowly lose control and begin to have a panic attack. At the control panel, while all of the other emotions are distracted, Anxiety races back and forth until she is just a blur. Riley is in near tears, her heart quickening, her breathing shallow, her stomach tightening, and her vision narrowing. The state of anxiety is made real.

The evening after we saw the movie, in casual conversation after dinner, I asked my son what he thought about it. He mentioned two high stakes events this past semester—once in the classroom and once in an athletic competition—when he was disappointed in his performance. In the aftermath of the two events, we had tried to talk about what had happened, but had a hard time getting beyond the surface. Now he used the example of Anxiety from the film to explain what he experienced. It began with self-doubt, then negative self-talk, to finally overwhelming himself to the point where he could no longer think or perform clearly. Once my son named the emotion, we could talk about what got him to that point and ways to keep Anxiety off the control console in the future.

As Inside Out 2 illustrates, at the onset of puberty, the primal emotions get bigger and more reactive. Tweens and teenagers can feel as surprised by the intensity of their emotions as their parents. Naming and understanding what one is feeling can be a way of gaining control. Inside Out 2 offers some concrete imagery to use to describe what one is feeling. Common language and reference points-–especially those with a little comic relief-–can offer an accessible first step for teenagers and parents to better understand themselves and communicate with one another. 

Sources:

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/08/stress-anxiety

https://www.disneystudios.com/newsdetail/trailer-poster-and-images-for-inside-out-2