When last we heard from Pixar’s latest sequel, Inside Out 2, the director confirmed that Riley is heading toward puberty. Coming on the heels of such excellent coming-of-age stories for girls lately (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Turning Red), I couldn’t wait to meet the new emotions. I was not, however, quite ready to meet Anxiety head (or brain) on!

Where Did Anxiety Come From?

Along with the Fraggle-looking Anxiety, Riley also has new emotions Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment to contend with! But where did they come from?

“We’re not born with anxiety,” Mental Health Therapist Lauren Mazzarese, LPC, told Out Think over a Zoom interview. “We learn anxiety…One of the biggest predictors of whether or not someone will experience an event as traumatic is [related to] the level of love, safety, and security they had growing up.”

We don’t yet know if there is a specific moment of trauma for Riley in Inside Out 2, but Mazzarese believes that simply attending middle school can be traumatic for some kids, with all the changes to their hormones, bodies, and emotions. Besides standing back and watching our child experience pain, what can parents do?

It’s time to remind or teach your child the emotional language around their feelings. “The more we can help kids stay connected to themselves,” Mazzarese continues, “through pain, discomfort, anxiety, fear, loss, all those things, the better off they will be in the future and the more equipped they will be to handle future trauma more effectively.”

The key is to help your child stay connected to their emotions and themselves. Trauma makes us want to disconnect our mind from our body, but helping your child through their experiences helps them understand how it is not the experience itself that creates trauma but our response to the experience.

Is Joy Right to Toss Old Memories “They Don’t Need” Anymore?

In one recently released clip, Joy and the OG Emotions throw cringey memories as far back into Riley’s brain as possible. “The science behind that is so accurate,” Mazzarese confirms. “There’s healthy removal of memories I don’t need in my life, and then there’s unhealthy removal of memories I don’t need. Memories like that stick to us like sticky balls, and so it becomes a question of how much time, how much of my energy, my feelings, my brain, my headspace, my heart space – how much does this thing deserve?

Dialogues: Helping a Child Manage Anxiety

It’s important to help your child handle their emotions around a trauma that leads to anxiety. Suppose you try to “mute” your feelings. In that case, it creates a disconnect between your mind and your body, resulting in neuroception, Mazzarese says, or “the inability to accurately assess an environment for a realistic level of safety or risk….They can’t tell what is unsafe or safe. The brain gets scrambled.”

Even without serious trauma, she explains, children can create a disconnect just because they don’t like a feeling, and so do different things not to feel that feeling. So how can a parent help?

Raise Your Child in a Supportive, Secure Environment.

Human babies are the only creatures 100% dependent on a caretaker for a very long time. The way a caretaker takes care is vital in terms of what that child will learn and how they will perceive the world, Mazzarese says, and “it’s not just about clothes on your back and food in your belly. It’s about: if I fall, will someone be there to help me up and hold me – that kind of lesson.”

When we are four or five years-old, we are the center of the universe. The more we become aware of ourselves as part of a large population, we gain that insight and awareness. And then we want to fit in. Wanting to fit in is an ancient feeling; it’s how populations survived for centuries. Be there to support your child through not just pains and scrapes, but their feelings about it.

Validate Your Child’s Feelings

It’s important to remember how emotions evolve. When discussing puberty (read the Dialogues around puberty here), sometimes I explain it like losing baby teeth: everything that was you is still you, but you have more grown-up teeth/emotions now that need excellent care and nurturing to take care of them.

“It’s not like you wake up one day and think, ‘Oh, I’ve grown anxiety, like I’ve grown facial hair.’ It’s a growing awareness that there are other feelings inside,” Mazzarese continues. The younger a child has such feelings, the harder to name them. As parents, we can help our children identify and validate your child’s feelings. Don’t toss them aside to make them feel better. It’s okay to feel emotions. Go back to watch Inside Out if you need that lesson again!

Understand the child’s context.

What if they’re freaking out over nothing?

It isn’t nothing to them. Say that your child drops the peanut butter sandwich.

“They can only perceive things the way a child’s brain can. That is not skewed or accurate to reality. The problem is that if the parent looks at it realistically, they’re missing it.” She offers specific ways to help:

• Take a step back and see it how the child sees it. Sure, you can just make another sandwich, but the kid isn’t thinking about that. They’re thinking, Oh, I screwed up. I dropped my sandwich, I really wanted that. And now I can’t. It startled me. I might get in trouble.
• Once you can understand why they’re reacting that way, it’s easier to figure out how to help them. Sometimes it’s just a hug that they need. Sometimes they just need their moment to feel that sadness. Maybe they feel proud that they made their own sandwich and now, it’s ruined. If you can’t suss out how to help them yourself, just be there to listen.
• You can validate their feelings even if they can’t articulate them. “All you really need to do,” Mazzarese states, “is recognize that they’re scared. They’re upset. They’re sad. They’re angry. And validate those feelings. I can see that you’re feeling angry. I can see that you’re feeling sad.
• Don’t ask how to help – yet. That’s the next thing I usually do, yet Mazzarese makes a strong point: “in that moment because anybody who’s in a trauma response state, they do not have access to their thinking brain, which is where all the thoughts lie.
  So don’t ask them what can I do or how can I help? Because nobody can answer that. I always describe it like this:  you go to school, they say “Time for a pop quiz, but don’t worry. It’s open book.” And you think, well, I left my book at home. You have all the answers, you just don’t have access to them.
  And that’s what having a trauma response or an episode is like, they are not connected to their prefrontal cortex.”

What comes next? Primer to help your child with anxiety

• Get them to blow bubbles. A child cannot always understand breathing exercises, especially in the midst of an attack or big emotion. The key is to focus on extended exhales. Extended exhales help activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is what helps us slow and stop. The sympathetic nervous system, it gets us going. The parasympathetic nervous system slows us down, and that extended exhale activates the slowing down. Ask your child to blow as many bubbles as they can, then stop and watch until every single bubble pops – adding mindfulness into the equation – and then blow more bubbles.

• Anchor them in the present using their senses. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you touch? What do you smell? What do you taste? If you have a peppermint, ask them to pop it into their mouth and ask them to describe the taste.
• Use the rainbow exercise. Look for something red, something orange, and so on. It brings you back to what’s happening in the moment.

“Language involves the prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain, whereas during an anxiety attack, their amygdala is firing off the back of the brain and screaming. You want to get that thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex brain, back online. One of the ways you do that is by using language. “

Lauren Mazzarese

• Ask them to list a long list of things they know. Using neutral language is key to naming things too. Mazzarese cautions against asking a child to name the things they see if you’re at a car accident. But they can list their favorite cartoons, their favorite foods, favorite video games, favorite people….
• Give them a bear hug – but ask first. Maybe your child doesn’t want to be hugged. Maybe that’s the only thing to help them calm down. One of the most important discoveries I made as a parent is when my children want the bear hug, but pull away and run off. I’ve learned they will probably return in under five minutes, calmer, or knowing what they need. What felt to me like they were pulling away was actually my child taking what they need from me, handling it alone, then returning when they’re ready for the next step, whatever that may be.

Are There More Emotions on the Horizon?

Mazzarese doesn’t hesitate. “There are tons of emotions on the horizon! There’s also the opportunity for reasoning to be on the horizon. Remember, we’re getting older, our brains are developing, and we are developing a higher level of thinking and the ability to empathize.

But perhaps empathy arrives at the end of the sequel Inside Out 2, and perhaps they save it for the third movie. Whichever way we discover Riley’s emotions with her, it’s sure to make for some tender and frustrating moments in the movie!

Read more: Pixar, Periods, and Puberty: Inside Out 2

Also read: John Green, OCD, and the Turtles All the Way Down Trailer

Photo/Image Credit: Cindy Marie Jenkins, Canva, Pixar, Vectorstock Media

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