Healin’ & Helpin’: Generational Trauma
I must have watched this movie 10 times by now (I have a 5 year old son), and when I am actually watching it a.k.a. paying attention to the characters, the plot, and everything, I have cried harder at one particular part in the movie. Guess, you need to know what movie I am referring to huh. Disney’s Encanto. IMHO, it was a beautiful depiction of how everyone in the family matters, and plays a role in that family, no matter how big or how small. There is so much more to this movie though. So much more “under the surface,” if your willing to truly lean into your feelings about it. In my case, I had to lean into my tears. I needed to understand why I would cry at certain parts. Why did some parts “touch” me more than others. On the surface, it was because I could relate to those parts of the movie. Spoiler Alert, if you haven’t seen it, you may want to back out of this blog post and come back to it later. All Disney movies are made for you to relate to a character, and normally, it seems as though they want you to relate to the main character. Think about it, in the Lion King, they want you to relate to Simba, because he lost his father and had to find his way; in the Aladdin, they want you to relate to Aladdin because he came from nothin’ to somethin’; in Bambi, they want you to relate to Bambi because he lost his parents and had to find family in other forest life. The list can go on and on. The one thing that I noticed about Encanto, is that I didn’t relate to the main character, “Maribel,” but to her stronger sister, “Luisa.” I’ll get more in depth about that in a different blog post.
When we relate to characters within a movie, it normally just stops at that. We say we can relate to them based on what the character went through in the movie, and then we go about our day. Let’s lean in a little deeper than that though. Can you notice the trauma that a character is holding and even projecting onto others in the movie? While Disney movies aren’t meant to have us thinking about trauma, when we relate to these characters, we may be relating more to the trauma that they went through within the movie instead. Let me break it down by character, and their specific trauma (as I noticed it): Let’s focus on Abuela right now. The matriarch of the family. Her anchor trauma (from what we saw in the movie) was when she first witnessed the loss of her husband. She didn’t have time to grieve. She had three children, a new house, and a new community to all take care of at once. And I am not even mentioning the “magic” that she had to manage as a “perk.” If anything, the magic was just another layer that compounded the existing trauma. She felt abandoned so intensely that she was in a fawn response. She had to help her community in order to no longer feel the threat of someone ever again. She carried this trauma and projected it to her children. How did she project this trauma to her children? By not resolving the pain within her in the first place. She was raising one boy, and two girls, who all had “gifts” provided by the “magic” of the house. She wouldn’t let Bruno be because he wasn’t being helpful enough to his community; she forced her daughter to heal the community whenever they were sick; and the other daughter was so emotionally all over the place, she couldn’t control it, and her power ended up being weather-projected emotions. Abuela even admits that she had never returned to the site of her husband’s death. And unfortunately it just got worse from there, when it comes to the trauma cycling through the rest of the family. Maribel was the one person in the family who was able to “break” the cycle of trauma. There is so much more that can be said, but I don’t want this to be too long of a post.
The scene that made me cry so hard was the scene where Maribel and Abuela were at the lake and Maribel is able to see all of what Abuela went through (the traumatizing anchor event). Being able to see where we come from in our experiences is what makes us better. It is easy to blame Abuela for all the drama that occurred from each child and each gift; however, it is harder to understand the point of view of someone else. With all of the generational trauma that is out here in the world, the real lesson in this movie is more about having compassion for your family, and working together to heal those generational traumas one by one. While Maribel attempted to heal those trauma’s in her siblings one on one, that was only part of the generational trauma battle. While people can easily say, “just change how you feel about it,” trauma feelings/emotions/thoughts don’t work that way. Trauma stays with you physiologically. While it is possible to suppress your feelings/emotions/thoughts, suppression doesn’t mean that the trauma is gone, and will eventually show itself.
If your interested in learning more about how trauma maybe impacting your life “unknowingly” reach out to me for one on one trauma recovery coaching. There are so many aspects to trauma. Sometimes it is the small things that bring it out of you, even movie characters.
