Episode 8: Lessons from Encanto on Intergenerational Family & Inner Child Healing

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:00] NV: Sawadee ka, and welcome to the Come Back to Care podcast. I am your host, Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, a decolonized and licensed clinical psychotherapist, somatics and social justice practitioner, and founder of Come Back to Care. Adopt connector, norm agitator and lover of liberation. 

If you're on a journey to transform your daily parenting into a social justice practice that nurtures your child's development and promotes intergenerational family healing, I am so glad that you're here. On this podcast, we explore how social justice, child development science, parenting, and family systems intersect with one another. If you've been looking for ways to align your parenting with a social justice values, you're in the right place. Together, we find our way back to our true home. We come back home to our body and the goodness within. We come back to our lineage and come back to care together. So come curious, and come as you are. Let's move at the speed of care, and let's do this.

[EPISODE]

[00:01:25] NV: Welcome to the eighth episode of the Come Back to Care podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about Bruno. Yes, Bruno from the Disney animated movie Encanto. We’ll look at the Madrigal’s family dynamics across generations to unpack their intergenerational family trauma and healing. We’ll take a deep dive to understand the main characters and their superpowers and to bring compassion to the ways their past is affecting how they love and relate to one another in the present. 

Together, we'll look at the Madrigals through the lenses of attachment theory, family systems theory, neurobiology of trauma, collective trauma, collective healing, and of course, social justice, so that we can explore how they named unnamable and speak the unspeakable to heal wounds that have been passed down across generations. 

I hope that our discussion today inspires you to look at your own family systems across generations, so that you can unpack your family's gift so that you can see what's been unknowingly regifted across generations that you may be ready to unsubscribe from or leave behind. We’ll be analyzing the movie plot together. So spoilers ahead. 

Alright, first, a quick summary of the movie. Encanto is a magical village in Colombia surrounded by protective mountains. The Madrigals are one of the families living in Encanto, and every family member is blessed with a unique magical ability, everyone, except for 15-year-old Mirabel. The family is led by the matriarch Abuela Alma. The characters we're going to discuss in this episode are Luisa, who has superhuman strength; Isabela, who's perfect in every way; Camilo, who can shapeshift; Bruno, who can see the future; and Mirabel, who has no gifts like her family members, but she ends up being the key in healing her family's intergenerational wounds. 

The family's magic originated in a traumatic experience that Abuela Alma faced. Abuela Alma and the people in her village were forced to leave their homes because it was unsafe. Then during the forest migration, her husband was killed. So she encountered both a collective trauma of forced displacement and unresolved grief from the loss of her husband. 

The moment right after her husband was killed, magic burst forth from a candle that she was carrying, creating mountains that surrounded and protected Encanto from the outside threat. I think these mountains symbolize the protection that many trauma survivors create to protect themselves from experiencing the pain and danger of trauma again. 

My classical Chinese medicine teacher taught me that, in Chinese medicine, a heart that's hurting builds a wall around it for protection. This wall is the pericardium. Although the hardness of the wall protects the heart, a hardened heart makes it hard to give and receive love. So Abuela Alma is an example of a living ancestor who couldn't grieve because she was in survival mode. All she can do is survive her loss and override her pain by keep on keeping on. 

Abuela Alma copes with her pain by channeling her energy into serving her community. In this act of gratitude for the magic that she's blessed with, she exercises compassion and community building as a way to cope and move forward. But just like any other coping behaviors, say, numbing out, avoiding rage, self-harming or self-shaming, Abuela Alma’s community service is a double-edged sword when it's out of balance. She's so focused on serving her community that it keeps her from metabolizing and processing her own unresolved grief and loss when it's safe for her to do so down the line. 

Resmaa Manakem, the author of My Grandmother's Hands said, “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. And trauma in a people looks like culture.” 

So time goes on. Abuela Alma lives her life. Her family grows and expands. Her survival strategy of serving her community gets passed down from one generation to the next in the form of a family rule, which is make your family proud. Remember that scene where she says that to Mirabel? Exactly. 

So in Come Back to Care of fashion, we can say that the Madrigals’ parenting playbook as a script that says make your family proud and serve the community. This script was written by Abuela Alma’s forced displacement that result in unresolved grief and loss and the larger Colombian cultural norm of close-knit collective ties. You might have already noticed that the intergenerational family patterns within the small family, the Madrigals, intersect with the patterns in the big family Colombian cultural norms. 

Let's look at how the family members learn to play by the family playbook. Children are so sensitive to their caregivers’ approval. Young children observe what we say and what we do to learn what behaviors are acceptable and desirable and what behaviors would upset their caregivers. This is because their survival depends on the ability to keep their caregivers close by and available to care for them. Abandonment, rejection, pain and physical harm are a matter of life or death to a young child. 

If we think of the three sisters, Maribel, Luisa and Isabela, when they were little, they saw day-in and day-out how their parents aunts, and uncles, and family members with superpowers diligently using their gifts to serve the community and keep the family unit in harmony. So they know that having a gift and using it for the collective care are very important. 

A more concrete way Maribel, Louisa and Isabela learn their family rule is when the grownups explicitly say, “We don't talk about Bruno.” They also observe their discomfort around Bruno and then learn that this is their family's tabooed topic. Bruno's exile in erasure is a real lesson for the three girls that you get punished and erased from the family when you threaten the family's status quo. 

Over time, the context and content of Abuela Alma’s almost trauma is lost. And using the gifts to serve the community and make the family proud is just the way the Madrigals are. But the unresolved pain from the past continues to linger in the background. 

Linda Thai, an incredible therapist and teacher, said it so beautifully, that there's a tenderness that's forged on your soul becomes tempered by the tears of your ancestors, the tears that they weren't able to whimper.” Even though the past pain is in the background, it's still there, unknowingly shaping the family's trajectory. 

When I teach the in, out and through program, I often refer to what children do to adapt to their caregivers to survive as superpowers. I love how Encanto takes this idea and makes it literal with the Madrigals family's unique gifts and superpowers. I'd like to invite you to look at each superpower along on a spectrum of when it's adaptive and when it's not, rather than a binary of good or bad. Because you’ll hear in a second that the superpowers are attachment adaptations that most of us use to unconsciously maximize our caregivers’ love and care and to minimize their criticism, harm, rejection and abandonment. It's what we had to do as a child to protect ourselves and survive. 

Let's start with Luisa, who has superhuman strength. Luisa is my person, as I am her fellow adultified child. Luisa has learned that she's worthy and lovable when she's serving others, executing and carrying all the family's burdens. There's no room for joy and relaxation. When you adopt this strategy as a child, on one hand, you know you have to carry it all. Otherwise, things will actually fall apart. On the other hand, you know deep down that you'll never be good enough to carry at all. You're not supposed to. You're a child. This internal struggle is so real. Yet, you can't stop and rest, because you keep wondering, “Will people still love me if I stopped taking care of them? Do I have the right to exist if I don't serve others?” 

When I think of Luisa, I see so much of myself in her, as a transwoman, as a first born, as a therapist. If you feel an activation in your nervous system, too, perhaps look around the room and locate the exits, if you'd like, or whatever you need to do to recenter yourself.

Next is Isabela, the perfect and pretty child. But her perfection comes at the cost of contorting herself into a pretzel to conform and perform to gender roles and beauty expectations. The more she keeps up with those norms, the further she travels away from her true home and her authentic self, who wants to be wild, expressive and free. The pressure to keep it together, appearance-wise or behavior-wise, can be as crushing as the pressure to carry is all that Luisa is feeling. A lot of times, perfectionism gets lumped into a type A personality who strives for success. While that is true, the other side of perfectionism is invisibility. I wonder how much Isabela has to erase her authenticity in order to blend in and be a good girl so that she can hide behind her perfection and keep peace within the family. Because if she's less than perfect, or strays off the line, she might be too much of something or not enough of another, either of which would disrupt the family’s harmony. And for many adult children of alcoholics, not staying in line or not being invisible and fading into the background could mean real danger. 

I'm going to take a moment here to place a blanket on my lap and let its weight ground me a little bit to help recenter my nervous system. If you identified with Luisa earlier, I wonder if there's another part within you that resonates with Isabela too. 

Now let's shift to talk about the shapeshifter, Camilo. He's literally changing how he presents himself to fit in a situation. Sometimes this adaptation is functional, because people-pleasing in code-switching can create brief moments of belonging and safety. When you can people please and be whoever your caregivers need you to be, you're not pushing their buttons too much, and you remain safe. 

Now substitute caregivers with other people with power and authority, say, teachers, police officers, immigration officers. When interacting with these people, prioritizing your own safety can be adaptive. When it's not adaptive anymore, people-pleasing comes with a great cost. When your caregivers fail to affirm your experiences to see you for who you are, and love and understand you for that for whatever reasons, you don't have a template in your mind of what it feels like for you to trust yourself and stand in your power. So what happens then?  You anxiously seek external validation to certify your experience and existence. When you're a parent, this might look like reading another parenting blog, finding another parenting guru without giving credit to your own intuition and expertise too. 

Next, shall we talk about Bruno? Bruno stands for the misfits, the weirdos in the family, the ones who are too much, too different, too quirky, a.k.a. “my people”. Bruno's here to represent us. Bruno's ability to see the future disrupts the harmony of the family system. And it's too much for the system and the family to handle. So he was ostracized, cast out and eventually banished. Essentially, he's an exile. 

According to internal family systems, and evidence-based model of psychotherapy, we all have parts of ourselves that we send into exile in order to conform to the social norms or family rules to receive love. We all have an inner Bruno that we exiled. An inner Bruno who we do what we can to keep quiet and controlled. We often do so by creating an inner critic whose job is to shame the inner Bruno and silence them. The cost of shaming and leaving parts of who you are behind, it's quite obvious and heartbreaking, isn't it? How can we fully, with fullest vitality, and all the joyful sorrows and sorrowful joys? As Jack Kornfield said, “If we believe we have to shame parts of ourselves away in order to be loved by our caregivers, how can we raise our children to be all of who they are when we're so occupied with keeping our inner Bruno in exile?” The thing is, the exile or inner Bruno yearns to be loved, seen and heard too. Just like any suppressed emotion, it wants to come out of hiding one way or another. 

The scene in the movie that best illustrates this point is when Bruno was patching the cracks of the house in secret. He was in exile, yet he wanted to be loved. In the climax of that scene, Mirabel finds a crack in Bruno's hiding place that looks out to the dining area in the home, and he sets a dinner plate next to the crack so that he can be a part of the family dinner still. Feeling so deep in my bones how much this exile or inner Bruno wants to be seen and loved had me sobbing for the 300th time in this movie. 

The reason I've devoted my heart and soul to this intergenerational family healing, an inner child, inner Bruneau healing work is that this process of exile starts very early. When children contort, conform and perform to be loved and understood with their limited understanding, right? They're so quick to internalize the exile as their identity. So “no one cares for me” can quickly become “I'm not lovable, or worthy enough.”

I know you can't see me right now. I am placing one hand on my heart. And I'm pushing onto the blanket on my lap with the other hand to tell me nervous system that I'm safe now. And I can be with my feelings right here right now, without getting overwhelmed by them. Whatever your nervous system needs, I invite you to take a moment if you need to.

Finally, Mirabel. Mirabel is the only one in the family who doesn't have a superpower. Yet, the intergenerational family patterns or Abuela’s unresolved grief affect Mirabel just as much, if not the most. Throughout the movie, it's quite clear that Mirabel is negotiating where she fits in the family, since she's the only one without a gift. And she's trying to make sense of her identity. 

Even without a gift, Mirabel tries really hard to live up to Abuela’s family rule, which is make the family proud and serve the community. One might even say Mirabel tries so hard that she ends up compensating for the lack of superpower. I think at some point, Isabela even said to Mirabel to stop trying so hard. 

If we look at Mirabel’s behavior, we can see that she's trying really hard, but not so that she might earn her superpower. She's trying so hard, because she wants to find her place in the family to feel like she belongs, to fit in and to be worthy and loved. 

When we look at Maribel through the lens of intergenerational family healing, we can see that in a family lineage, a family pattern of, “Oh, this is just how we are,” gets regifted and passed down from one generation to the next, and it becomes a family cycle. Then at some point, someone in the lineage decides to stop and break the cycle. For the Madrigals, that person is Mirabel. She's the catalyst for the whole family, all three generations, to do the grief work that Abuela Alma could not do, to name the unnamable, which was the unresolved grief and loss, and to begin the healing process. 

As you're listening to this, you might find yourself trying to identify who's your family's Luisa or Abuela. The perspective that I want to offer is that we all have a little bit of every character inside us. We all have a part that wants to people please, our inner Camilo, a part that wants to be perfect like Isabela, a part that wants to serve and carry it all on our shoulders like Luisa, and so on. But all the parts that make up your whole self, your true home, they all want to be loved, seen, heard and understood.

Depending on your intersecting identities and social locations, your inner Luisa might be more active than mine. As a transwoman and an Asian immigrant, I have all the adaptations, people-pleasing, over-delivering an even shapeshifting, which is passing as female or passing as US-born with English as my first language, instead of an immigrant. These are my survival strategies and my work, which is a daily work in progress, is knowing that I'm not my inner Bruno, inner Luisa, inner Mirabel, or Isabela. 

Yes, they're here to protect me, but I'm also not the Nat Nadha Vikitsreth, daughter of Vilailak Vikitsreth and Attavuth Vikitsreth. The work is trying to hold these protectors in compassion, so that they don't take over how I show up in each moment as myself, Nat. The same goes with parenting. My invitation for you is to know who's in charge of your parenting decision, or who's raising your child. Is it your inner Bruno, inner Louisa, or you? This awareness allows you to show up as the parent you want to be most of the time, instead of having your inner child wound hijack the car and put you in the passenger seat. 

We're in a society where we exile so many of our qualities so that we can contort, conform and perform to colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. It's a radical act to reclaim all parts of who we are so that we can hold space for our children to embody all parts of who they are too. It's even more radical when we reimagine family building together and do this in a community. 

Okay, before I start crying again, let's recap. I love doing this work. So, so far, we've explored how wounds from the past affect how we build a family in the present, just like Abuela’s unresolved grief shaped her family playbook. We’ve unpacked each character's superpower as attachment adaptations that are for protection and survival, but come at a great cost of authenticity, and living life fully. 

Now let's look at how intergenerational family healing takes place for the Madrigals. And let's learn a thing or two from the movie and apply these gems to our own family healing. Still with me? Here we go. The heart of intergenerational family healing is that it's done in a relationship. I want to highlight the repair that Abuela and Mirabel had when they meet by the lake where Abuela’s husband was killed. When there's a rupture in a relationship within a family, it's so easy to use blame, rage and shame, or even shut down to cover the deep wound underneath it. 

I saw a headline yesterday saying something like, Was Abuela the villain all along?” Well, to be trauma-informed, not really, right? Abuela was trying to survive her trauma. At Come Back to Care, we work around that tendency to shame and blame family members by replacing it with an understanding of that family’s members context. Yep, relational context, developmental context, sociocultural political context. 

Inspired by transformative justice, we tried to understand the person's behavior in terms of the context that they're in. When Mirabel was by the lake, where her Abuela lost her husband, she got flashbacks from Abuela’s memory. These flashbacks help Mirabel understand her Abuela as a whole person with life experiences, with a dysregulated nervous system, and with a full-on survival mode switch turned on. 

Mirabel, for a second, can see her grandmother, the great matriarch as a person who was in pain and who was in love. Maribel can understand where Alma, not Abuela, was coming from, and begin to heal the relationship. But it's not just Mirabel who's doing the understanding and contextualizing. Abuela Alma herself said that she couldn't or she hadn't been back to this lake where her husband was killed. And to me, that speaks to how painful the memory must be, and how raw that would and unresolved loss and grief still is for her to this day. 

To look at our old wounds, it's so painful, so hard, and yet so important for healing. It's such a process. Abuela’s able to look at her wounds when Mirabel could see where her grandma was coming from and meet her where she's at. Abuela, too, feel seen and heard by her granddaughter whom she loves, that she's able to make sense of her past pain, and metabolize her trauma and grief. And this healing takes place when the Madrigals are so supported by the villagers in their community. We can see that towards the end of the movie, the villagers come to help the Madrigals fix the broken home. Cheers to family healing nested within community support. 

Before I sign off, I want to leave you with a few reflective questions. The first one is what's your inner Bruno? What about who you are that you had to sacrifice, hideaway and sent into exile because it was either too much or not enough for your family? How was it for you when you see your inner Bruno or this exiled trait in your child, your partner, your friend or colleague? If this inner child would is still raw, how do you tend to the wound while staying present with that person? 

If you want to reflect on the generations before you, if you feel safe enough to do so, could your caregivers be all of who they were? Or did they have their inner Bruno as well? If your ancestors were refugees or immigrants, what about their heritage that they had to sacrifice to assimilate and blend in to the new culture to survive? Although intergenerational wounds cut deep, we can heal from them when we feel safe enough and supportive enough to stop regifting this pattern or wound to the next generation. Just like Maribel did, we can begin to grieve when we name the unnamable loss and trauma our ancestors could not heal from, just like Bruno. And when we do so in a community and in a trusted relationship, it's a radical act of liberation. So let's talk about Bruno. 

As always, in solidarity and sass, until next time. Please take care.

[END]