Accept all your sides

Humans are complicated creatures… and that’s just fine.

“People have all kinds of sides to them. And some sides are messy. The point isn’t to push the bad stuff away. It’s to make room for it, live with it”- Jin (Turning Red).

Yes my inspiration is the recent Disney Pixar movie, ‘Turning Red’.

This amazing film is about those tricky, transformative yet crucial changes that come with adolescence. It also alludes to the friction that such changes can cause in the family.

Highlighting the power of friendship and the importance of accepting ourselves.

However please don’t feel alienated if you don’t have children. Some of the themes about self acceptance completely align with all of the books and podcasts by neuroscientists and doctors I have been listening to recently.

Dr Richard Schwartz, family therapist and author of ‘No Bad Parts’ advocates looking at the mind as having different parts; which mirror our inner world of different feelings. He encourages us to rather than ‘get rid’ of our feelings we need to look at them and think about where they potentially have come from; e.g past experiences.

Children can sometimes find it hard to articulate or name their feelings, so a good exercise could be for them to locate where in the body the feeling is. Then they could maybe draw it and think about what colour and shape it is.

Once it is identified they should be encouraged to make room for it, accepting it, eventually breathing some love and compassion into it.

Schwartz believes that when we’re angry/scared/frustrated…the important thing is to realise it does not define who we are. It is merely ‘a part’ of us.

As Meilin in ‘Turning Red’ says,

“We’ve all got our inner beast. We’ve all got a messy, loud, weird part of ourselves hidden away. And a lot of us never let it out.”

Hopefully we can encourage our children and ourselves to accept the mess and allow it to co-exist with joy and expression of life.

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