by Antje Vorndran
Today I want to tell you a personal story about “Inside Out”, the movies and the Gefühlsmonsters.
The long-awaited second part of the Disney/Pixar animated film “Inside Out” recently hit the cinemas. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, these films show in a child-friendly way how feelings guide and direct our lives and, together with our life experiences, shape our personalities. ) What was unusual about this movie release was that the producers took a very long time to make this second part. The first part was released in cinemas 9 years ago.
That was 2015, the year I started working for the Gefühlsmonsters. So the topic of emotions came into my life at the same time and by chance in several ways, and has not let go of me to this day. But let’s start at the beginning:
In the fall of 2015, I found myself at a crossroads in my career. After a long break from work due to cancer, I had given up my long-standing self-employment as an analyst in market research (not realizing that this job would no longer exist in its current form 9 years later thanks to AI!).
At first, I was only looking for a job for a few hours to slowly get back into the swing of things and to reorient myself professionally. Fortunately for me, the Gefühlsmonsters were looking for exactly that at the time, and I started working as an assistant to our founder Lilli Höch-Corona in the fall of 2015.
“Inside out” was a pretty good description of my own situation at the time. A personal and professional new beginning with many different feelings that I didn’t really welcome all the time!
My children, then 6 and 9 years old, had been looking forward to our visit to the cinema since they had already seen the trailer for the movie. And for me, the movie had suddenly sparked my professional interest, especially since Lilli Höch-Corona had been interviewed as an expert on emotions in a newspaper article (in German) about the movie shortly before.
Our conclusion: As a family we were absolutely thrilled and unexpectedly had a shared movie experience which impressed us all so much and shaped our conversations for a long time, that I spontaneously decided to write a short report about it for my new job (you can find the article here, in German, I was the “customer” ). What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was the foundation stone for my professional development in the direction of Gefühlsmonster communication and training and the starting point for my own intensive involvement with the topic of emotions (until today!).
While the first part of “Inside Out” was dedicated to childhood and showed how the basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear press the buttons in the control center in our head, the new part is now about the developments in puberty. We experience what a wonderful chaos goes on in our heads during this time, because on the one hand, a complete renovation team arrives unannounced one day to renovate the control center, and on the other hand, other feelings join the familiar basic emotions and fight for their place at the control desk. Once again, a very successful metaphor for puberty, told with a lot of love. Definitely recommended if you haven’t seen the movie yet!
And how clever the unusually long wait for the second part was. Because 9 years later, the original audience kids are now in puberty themselves. So are my children, who in 2015 came home from school still raving about joy spheres that they had collected (a reference from the first part to the representation of memories in the form of different colored spheres). This time my son, who is now 18, didn’t even come to the cinema with us, as he has other priorities in his control center than going to the cinema with his mother, father and “little” sister. My daughter, 14, was there and answered the question afterwards about how she liked the movie with a detailed “Yes, it was good.” What feeling was she experiencing at the control center?
And for me, this second part was again a metaphor for my personal development with the Gefühlsmonsters. I now see feelings as useful companions (almost always welcome!) and even teach basic emotional skills in our basic and impulse seminars. I not only continue to write for my own life here, but also in book form since the end of 2020, in the form of my companion for women with breast cancer (in German). And what is my main focus still? Of course, dealing with all feelings in a good way!
At the end of the second part of “Inside Out”, by the way, we are shown that all our feelings naturally form us into a whole. And the film closes, almost as an aside, with the chaotic feelings in the control center no longer fighting over the control buttons, but being called to the desk by the protagonist. I thought that was a great solution! That is, that we have learned as adults to control our feelings ourselves.
But do we always manage to do that as well as we think we do? I can see a third part on the horizon! Until then, I’ll be happy to learn a little more myself. Of course, with and from the Gefühlsmonsters!
Tuesday, 06.08.2024