About the author: Dr. Angelo Alago is a primary care psychologist in the DFM and received his PsyD from Rutgers before completing his internship here at CU-DFM. Dr. Alago is passionate about increasing access to exposure therapy for anxiety disorders and has pioneered a primary care anxiety clinic that has allowed him to offer this treatment to patients from traditionally underserved communities. Dr. Alago’s path to DEI work comes from a mixture of lived experience as a Latino, working with homeless men in Chicago during undergrad, and his training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. He attempts to practice what he preaches regarding dismantling power differentials by allowing all new patients to turn the tables and interview him at the end of their initial visits.

Spoilers Ahead for Inside Out 2

Surprise of the century: a psychologist writing about Inside Out 2 being his favorite Disney film. If you aren’t familiar, the franchise explores the inner life of a young girl named Riley in the form of humanized versions of her emotions operating the “control console” of her mind. Hijinks ensue. A lot has already been said about both films’ amazing approaches to portraying uncomfortable emotions as neither good nor bad and the value of realistic depictions of mental health challenges for youth in mainstream media, so I’ll just write “ditto” and move on to what I think the film can teach us about being more flexible in how we understand ourselves.

Something I see over and over in my work with patients is some variation of this pattern: “I must be X” followed by either “so I can’t Y” or “so I have to Z,” where X is some sort of attribute (e.g. strong, brave, nice, quiet, good), Y is a limitation, and Z is an obligation. I must be strong, so I can’t take time to break down and cry. I must be brave, so I have to keep going even though I’m scared. You get the picture. In fact, you can probably relate—I know I can. Nearly all of us operate based off a “script” of who we understand ourselves to be, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Imagine having no consistency at all for your choices; one moment you’re kind and giving, the next you’re spiteful and vindictive, the next you’re whimsical and fun-loving—what a nightmare. Having “stories” we tell ourselves about who we are can help guide our actions toward the person we want to be. What can get us in trouble, though, is when we forget that these stories are just that—stories we tell ourselves—and become inflexible by treating the rules in the scripts like they’re all we are and the only things we are capable of. 

In Inside Out 2, this idea is explored in the form of the Sense of Self, an object that appears in the main control room where the emotions live and work. Riley’s original Sense of Self is created from the belief “I’m a good person” and helps guide her choices to support that. The main conflict of the film involves one of the newest emotions to appear, Anxiety, removing Riley’s Sense of Self with a goal of creating a new Sense of Self that will help Riley achieve her most important goal, excelling at hockey. This backfires, and Anxiety unintentionally creates a Sense of Self based on the belief “I’m not good enough,” which causes Riley to go too far in her hockey game—accidentally hurting her friend and pushing herself into a panic attack. Joy, the emotion who had been in charge before Anxiety took over, restores Riley’s original Sense of Self, insisting that everything will be fixed if Riley just has the right set of rules to follow. When the panic attack doesn’t stop, Joy realizes what I explained above, and we are treated to my favorite scene:

I watched that clip half a dozen times for this article and cried each time.

Failing to allow for context and complexity in our understanding of who we are can contribute to personal suffering. When we apply this rigid understanding of personality to others (e.g. expecting them to fit into categories, limiting options for identification, etc.), we can unintentionally foster a sense of exclusion, leaving people to feel that only some of who they are is welcome. Let’s see what happens, for both ourselves and our colleagues, if we take a page from Inside Out 2 and question the limitations of our stories.