Originally posted on 6/30/2015
I am in the business of feelings. When I’m working as a therapist, that is a big part of what I do - try to understand how and why and what people feel, all in service of helping them to feel better.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard all the therapist jokes in one form or another. After all, therapists manage to be both incredibly in demand and also widely mocked. Never more so than in pop culture, where therapists stand in as convenient narrative devices on TV shows and in movies: But how do you feel about that? How does that make you feel? Pop culture representations of therapists are overwhelmingly terrible, inaccurate and insulting, both to therapists and to the people who seek them out, but they are also ubiquitous enough to highlight the strange fascination we have with those who do this for a living.
This summer has brought two wildly different - and yet strangely similar - pop culture products of our fear of and fascination with feelings. Sense8, available via Netflix streaming, is a lush, confusing and breath-taking show about eight people from all over the globe who have the ability to feel each other’s feelings and share thoughts. It is maybe the most ambitious TV show ever made. Inside Out, perhaps Pixar’s most perfect movie, takes the viewer inside the mind of an 11-year-old, where her core emotions are visually represented by adorable avatars: sadness, joy, anger, fear and disgust. Both of these intra-psychic fantasies invite the viewer to do the work of a therapist: to try to understand the way people relate to each other while also trying to understand what it’s like to live inside someone else’s head.
Though Sense8 is undoubtedly the more adult of the two - how about that orgy scene?? - Inside Out demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of the way the brain actually works. Admittedly the “science” of Sense8, whenever they bother to try to explain it, is more fantastical than reality-based, but even so, Inside Out is superior in the way it imagines emotional cause-and-effect. While the sensates are often forced into feeling certain things by their clustermates and their weird soul bonds, Inside Out looks at the intricate relationship between what is inside of us and the world we inhabit, a complex interplay of triggers and instincts. This is so well-articulated in Inside Out that I left the theater wondering what my little Disgust mind-person might look like.
On the one hand, there’s a logical aspect to why we feel certain things. Does it smell weird? Is it unfamiliar? Is it dangerous? Is it unfair? Is something being taken away from us? Or is it beautiful? But sometimes, there is no logic at all - instead there is just feeling, and all the ways we learn to protect ourselves from those feelings we don’t understand.
The sensates - tethered to each other, fearful, raw, open, out-of-control - are basically all 11-year-olds in adult bodies, trying to navigate the circuitous planes of their psychic adolescence. They careen from one location to the next, learning the ways they can protect and fight for each other. The fascinating thing about Sense8, though, is that the characters rarely fight each other. They fight the attraction between them, they fight their own abilities - but they don’t try to harm each other. As invasive and terrifying as it would be to find yourself inhabiting the mind of someone else, it is also an instant way of connecting people who have little else in common. The second that the sensates understand how each other feel, they don’t want to hurt each other, because that hurt is shared and they must bear it together.
This, too, is the lesson of Inside Out, in a way – that part of the necessity of emotions is that even when circumstances differ (like, say, the way a parent and a child experience moving), they can connect over shared feelings of loss and fear and maybe eventually joy. Circumstantial differences are rendered relatively unimportant because we all feel the same things.
The last few weeks have contained an emotional roller coaster of events in this country, from the unforgivable horrors of Charleston to the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality. These events were almost iconic representations of the power of love and hate. In a time of such political polarities, maybe we all need reminders of the ways in which we are alike and the necessity of interpersonal understanding. From those of us in the feelings business, this might sound like an “I told you so.” But if I’ve taken anything away from Sense8 and Inside Out, both of which have been very popular, it’s this: Don’t be afraid of feelings, and don’t be afraid to feel them together.