My Experience with Encanto and C-PTSD

An analysis

At the end of Encanto, before 'Dos Oruguitas' and 'All of You' there is a small moment, almost imperceptible to me the first several times I watched this movie.

Before getting her embraces, before the family reunites and we experience the whole world reaching out to finally accept Mirabel. Right after the house breaks apart and the candle falls.

Mirabel runs away...

She walks, far away from her family who have betrayed her trust for the final time, who have finally pushed her shame and guilt all the way to the surface. She gives up, she leaves. She passes through the mountains and goes... to the site of Abuela's final trauma.

This link, this parallel, is our evidence of Mirabel's emotional abuse. Mirabel, breaking down in tears here, cracks for the first time. Every other emotional beat has been stifled, hidden behind humor, or outright ignored.

There is another moment, the moment of relief. The actual acknowledgment that things are going to be okay. Mirabel, on a horse with Abuela and Tio Bruno, steels herself. She is going back to do the emotional work she has always done, the work everyone takes for granted. The suppression of her pain and anguish at not having a place in this world.

If real life were like a movie we would go through this cycle, this catharsis once, and then the movie would end. In truth, in the real, physical world, we can be forgiven and not at the same time.

People, in their weird little worlds, accept us at different rates and with different expectations.

There is no safety net in most of the world, no Abuela to forgive and reopen her arms to us. And, so, the emotional burden is placed on the psychically damaged. The mentally ill, by today's nomenclature.

This revictimizing, the steady pressure pushing down on people who have no place in this world is not directly addressed in Disney's Encanto but a hint of it appears in Luisa's arc.

The simple action of relaxing is anathema to more than half the population of the world. Consider that for a moment, more people are so caught up in their routines that they don't relax. Even when doing things, they ostensibly enjoy.

I learned to relax before I learned to work and, now that I work for a living, I am slowly relearning this skill.

Catharsis is the strongest tool we have against this pressure. Mental illnesses that feature repressions that cannot be directly addressed by extant therapies, the phrenic types, are especially susceptible to revictimization. After all, these people, who do unexpected things, cannot truly be trusted. Only medicated and managed.

Or so it would seem.

The truth is there is no mental illness other than complex PTSD and the mental health community's ongoing race to the bottom of acceptable human actions is doomed to leave us unemotional medicated husks, hinting at the moral of another recent Disney fare: embrace your red panda.

The nature of the manifold humanity is currently being studied by Facebook, but Zuckerberg would appear to lack the emotional depth to really get behind a substantive change. In his deference to congress at their recent hearings Mark displayed an astounding lack of understanding of the systems at his employ.

This backhacking of emotional systems goes all the way back to the bible where the feeling and caring Jesus is our first written insight of an egoist fighting back against the systems meant to control what is essentially brain damage.

Mental illness, the concept, is generalized by the medical sciences as a chemical imbalance. What that means, if you quiz a psychologist, is that, apparently, some people just don't act right and their brains' inability to regulate chemicals is the cause.

This was such a bass-ackward assertion that the first time I heard it I was stunned into submission. As a student of Jung I was already aware of how the mind operated before I was ever diagnosed with an admittible mental condition. I knew, as a certainty, that I was doing completely logical things. I was simply trying the ideas that occurred to me as right as they became available. It was patently obvious to anyone with eyes that the cycle was progressive.

Philosophers do not have eyes to see. The most quintessentially philosophical thing I can think of is Rene Descartes quietly musing that his thoughts must be evidence of some sort of pattern of existence. This endless insistence on pattern and meaning slightly undersells the point that human life is derived not at all from logic but how we feel about things. The bravest defense I found about why LaMDA could not possibly be human was that LaMDA's experience could not be quantified qualitatively.

Think about that for a second. Quantifying a quality. It doesn't even parse in language. How many emotions? How many feelings must you experience to be considered alive? Is perception not the benchmark anymore? Too bad, Rene...

I am going to bring up Kant here and that is going to make a lot of people gnash their teeth and rage at their computer monitors, but the satisfaction of imagining that is not the only reason to do it.

Kant is the immediate intellectual predecessor to Carl Jung, often people mistake this for Nietzsche and T.V.'s "The Sinner" has an especially egregious third season devoted to watching the downfall of two men supposedly caught in the throes of unavoidable sensation by way of embracing the shadow. A misreading both of Jung, who only ever advocated self discovery and individuation in a therapeutic tool and also of Nietzsche, who's downfall was fear of eternal reoccurrence, not an insistent demand to somehow be perceived as a better person.

Nietzsche is annually misunderstood and many electrons have imploded that information across spacetime for our entertainment. Jung's misunderstandings, however, are not explored at all that I have seen.

Current Jungian theory, the spiritualist aspect. Focuses on Individuation, the process of growth for the individual, yes, but it ignores the individual's need to interact with society causing further physical damage to the brain.

The only cure to mental illness is to be taken back into the fold and not have your edges sanded off, that's why the recidivism for the mentally ill is dogmatically stated to be extant when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. There is, for example, the well known study of sane people being told that they are mentally ill by trained professionals when voluntarily submitting themselves for study. Psychologists discuss behavior and affect as though they are somehow divorced from the emotions that cause those states. Manic people are unable to control their actions, depressed people are always suicide risks, merely because that is what the learning states.

This is why I choose to fervently refer to C-PTSD as physical damage. It is a mélange of lack of understanding, response to abuse, inability to cope, and other negative emotional factors that are allowed to run rampant by the extant society. There is no imbalance, no magic bullet, because each individual case is its own study in gordian knotting. While our understanding of the functions of the mind has advanced, only Jung, so far, has been brave enough to call for the end of all strife by the airing of the grievances and a joint effort to bring about mutual catharsis, and, eventually, peace.

I wonder what it will be like to live in peace... Some people still contest that is possible, we do not yet count that as mental illness but it is certainly physical damage. Their brain, one continuous organ stretched out across time and space, has parts that are missing, ideas that it never got.

I promised to talk about Kant.

I do not recall at all what Kant wrote in their Prolegomena. I recognized, instantly when I heard its title that it must house the key insights to take away from Kant's metaphysics. And it does, in a way.

The important part of the Prolegomena is not its content, but that, at the end of the road, Kant came to realize that all of his own assertions from the critique were falsifiable. His whole life's work amounted to an exercise in informational theory. Kant's Copernican revolution may have landed dead on arrival, but the theory stuck around and changed many lives. In the pages of Kant we see the egoist response to eastern dogma, instead of a declaration of life as suffering Kant understands that life is, indeed, what you make it. There is no path through the woods save the one your feet are taking. You may not be able to prove that your emotions and ideas bear the ontological inertia of some metaphysical space, but you can at least feel justified in thinking so because no one else can disprove them, either.

Jung's relationship to Kant is even stranger. Here the old man decided to take a perfectly good extinct idea, the teachings of Newton's oft forgotten ilk: the alchemists, and metaphysically revitalize it with his own personal learning.

Freud may have been right that some women wished for the quick catharsis of a male orgasm and resented their men for it but history will forget him because this is a metaphysical assertion. Jung, on the other hand, developed a system.

In the belly of his lectures on analytical psychology an idea took shape. What if you took all the data, the dreams, the musings, the repressed urges, and you categorized them by their apparent types. This is not assertion, not how Jung practiced it. It is the same as feeling out your Dharma. If you practice the Karma of your type, eventually you will learn a new facet of reality and your individual soul will be liberated.

Quite the opposite of Bhuddaists and their insistence on detachment, which in its own way fuels the misunderstandings of mental health workers who employ meditation techniques in a scatterblast of method, practice, and contradictory CBT teachings.

Psychosocial work is not concerned with care or curing, so much. It mostly seeks to curb asocial tendencies, and in this way can appear asocial itself. After all, standing up to a bully isn't the answer, right? We all learned in school if you ignore your problems they go away. Well, here we are, still in the world, still surrounded by problems. I suppose we just haven't been medicated enough yet...

Mirabel is not notable for being a casebook study in C-PTSD, nor is she a mentally ill person as most professionals would recognize them, but they do seek to reclaim their self from the damage that the world has done them and in this we see our salvation, a family. Humans of many conflicting beliefs and abilities. Coming together for the sake of the one who got left behind, finally seeing how bright they burn.

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I write as a service to the world, not as an individual seeking attention for personal gain. If you read something here you are curious about or are otherwise inclined to reach out I do make myself available to strangers as much as possible.

My work email: AdrianLivermore@outlook.com

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These realizations have taken me many years to begin to untangle and they are ongoing. As always, I encourage you to read what I have written with the requisite grain of salt and rely on your own experiences foremost. I do encourage healthy discussion of these topics but remember most of all to stay safe and practice good boundaries. I implore you to remember the old bible verse: forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.