Family Therapist Breaks Down Encanto Family | Therapist Reacts to Encanto

hi guys welcome back to my channel and if you're new welcome to my channel my name is stephanie yates i'm wheeler steph anya for short and i'm a licensed marriage and family therapist in today's video i'm going to be breaking down the family dynamics in the film in kanto out on disney plus right now if you're curious stay tuned [Music] all right guys so i actually saw in kanto the weekend it came out in theaters back in november but i guess after it came out of disney plus now it's just gotten so popular and i've gotten a couple of comments asking about my thoughts on it i even had someone comment on one of my model reviews saying who's here after watching at kanto and i was like you know that's it i have to make a video about encanto and there's a lot to unpack there i can actually share with you the types of clients that i see and compare it to different characters in the film we're going to talk about enmeshed family dynamic and we're also going to talk a little bit about first versus second order change within a family first let me say this video will have spoilers so if you've never seen in content and you want to see it and you don't want spoilers then definitely finish watching the movie and then come back to this video so i want to start by talking about the different roles that we see depicted in encanto roles that you might be able to identify with so i want you to listen into these roles carefully and see if you either see yourself in them or someone in your own family so one of the things i've talked about in other videos are things like communication styles virginia satire is a theorist emerging family therapy who developed a model called experiential therapy or the human validation process model in her model she talks about different communication styles within the family these communication styles are evident in the madrigal family some of the ones that are very obvious are like the distractor think of them as like the class clown in class they are the ones who make jokes and break up the tension or conflict within the family the character that is most often breaking up the tension with the joke is camilo he is able to basically shape-shift into anybody and so sometimes he turns into different characters of the family and you'll notice that a lot of times if the scene is really tense for example when the house starts falling apart he makes a joke i'll be okay uh not if we don't have a house even when mirabelle was trying to find out from dolores if she knew what was going on with the house falling apart turns out it was actually camilo so he is what i would refer to as the distractor of the family they have a useful role in keeping family tensions from rising too high but it can be a lot of pressure when i have clients who come into the office and their whole life they've been fulfilling this role one of the main problems they'll encounter in life is let's say they fast forward and get into their own relationship you'll have the person who they're dating saying they can't take anything seriously every time i complain they make a joke out of it and the reason they do that is because they learn that's how you deal with conflict your role is to break or diffuse the tension but within context where they need to pay attention and focus and be serious they don't have as much practice in that area so that is most often when i will see that type of person presenting in therapy we have the nurturer this is julietta in the family she is the one who cooks and heals we have this person in most families who is the person who is the caretaker the person you can depend on when you're sick or need a listening ear when i have a nurturer which a lot of people identify as the nurturer in my caseload at least most of the time they have completely depleted themselves of energy and motivation because they've been giving giving giving to everyone else and so this is where with nurturers one of the main things we'll work on is building up those self-care tips and prioritizing themselves amongst all the people that they care for the next role i want to talk about is the strong one this is the role that is filled by louisa in the family in the film they really emphasize her physical strength the entire village depends on her and her strength and what's interesting about it though is that as you see over the course of the movie this physical strength is also leaning into emotional strength as well because at the end there's a beautiful moment between her and her sisters where they say you're so strong and she says but i cry sometimes so if we were only talking about physical strength that wouldn't even be a necessary comment but that is where they are showing that this is not meant to be taken literally right it's we're not only talking about physical strength and the strong one is a role i see within families all the time these are my clients that struggle the most with vulnerability they're the client who very rarely shows emotion they're usually a little bit uncomfortable with the motion they view let's say a family passing as okay we've got these checklists we're going to take care of these things i'm not going to fall apart i got to be there for everybody else in their time of need and i know it's a very westernized idea to really focus on what you can do for yourself instead of focusing on the needs of the family so i recognize it culturally sometimes we're talking about a difference in goals and that's why as a therapist you have to be super super careful before you say something is dysfunctional because if you're not fully taking into consideration the culture of the client that you're working with then you might be misdiagnosing based on your own biases and experiences but where i think it's universally dysfunctional is when you have a majority of people or a significant chunk of people within a family who are unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives because of the pressure within the family for them to meet certain objectives for the family's sake because we only get one life to live and if you've spent your entire life making decisions to benefit other people to me that's a very sad story to live with there has to be a balance of making time for yourself as well as making time for your family and those who need you so the strong one is very interesting because when by the time i see them that's when they're starting to try to acknowledge some of their weaknesses a lot of times we'll spend months maybe even years just working on improving their ability and willingness to be vulnerable with people and share about the weaknesses that they know that they have but would not communicate or let anybody else know about what's going on the strong one is always trying to be the stability in a moment of crisis and uncertainty we need those people in our family for sure but they also need a soft place to land and a place to admit how they're feeling as well so helping them to develop more intimate more authentic connections even though they feel that they are the strong one is so so important whenever i'm working with someone who falls into this role within the family then we have the emotional one the basket case of the family i think this is beautifully illustrated by peppa they give us the visual of the weather going along with her moods she's trying to keep herself calm she doesn't want to lose herself in a moment she keeps telling herself everything's fine everything's fine this person is almost the opposite of the strong one they are the person who the family can count on a lot of times to be the reflection of what's happening emotionally for everyone else that they might not actually be expressing so notice that throughout the entire movie we really saw like a cloud over her head rain storm pending and that's really what was happening in the family there was attention and anxiety within the family that was not being expressed by many people and she was one of the few that even though she wasn't putting it into words we could see that everything was not sunny and bright for her so the basket case is another role that i'll see in the family that can be very limiting i'll have those clients come to me saying i just need to get in control of my emotions i feel like i'm so immature i'm overwhelmed by how i feel everybody tells me i'm dramatic they'll basically want to fix themselves instead of acknowledging their role in the family which a lot of times is to express on the behalf of everyone else how everyone's feeling and people don't often acknowledge that or respect that role within the family but they definitely serve an important role in the family a lot of times when i'm seeing an entire family that's the person that i'll pay the most attention to during certain sessions to get an idea of how everyone might be feeling i'll say okay so you become really emotional and you're crying what's making you sad and they'll share what's making them sad and i'll go through each person and say what do you think about that making them feel that way can you understand why they would feel that way have you ever felt that way and usually through enough probing we can see they're usually not the only one but they might be the only one comfortable enough to express it we also have the role of the gossip the person who hears everything and that's dolores you know as soon as she hears that mirabelle had this vision from bruno right they already knew right away she's not going to be able to keep the secret it's so interesting too about the gossip of the family because they are important and that they are the person who keeps the family connected a lot of times you know they're the ones who will let the family know somebody's pregnant so people aren't probably going to be offering that person drinks or they might be the person that lets people know hey this person is actually sick so maybe somebody that wouldn't typically let everybody know that they're sick now this person is communicated to the family and people are showing up for that person right they take a lot of flack a lot of times for spreading people's business but sometimes it's necessary when the information needs to be spread but people's pride keeps them from sharing it with the people that can support them a lot of times the main issues with the gossips of the family is that misinformation is inevitable it's like a game of telephone right so you spread it to this person spreads it to this person surprising this person and the information is probably wrong by the time it gets to the person that it would actually matter to and so you have to be really careful with the gossips of the family i often don't see clients who acknowledge that they're the gossips of the family if they are either that's something that's embarrassing for them or that the gospel of the family don't often find enough fault within themselves to work on the issue of gossiping because their focus right is pinpointing the flaws and everybody else in the family and sharing that information across the family network so that's a role within the family we all are familiar with but i'll be honest that i don't often see people who identify as the gossip in my sessions of course we have the matriarch or patriarch of the family that's the role that abuela feels within the family of course the most important thing here is when you lose that person in a family this is when i see the family most often they have this person that held the family together that established the family rules right and once that person is gone or you know maybe ill and the way that they are incapacitated the family completely loses its structure each person loses their purpose maybe grandma did sunday dinners or she made it so everyone went to church and when she's not there and not the person that's being approving or disapproving of family choices it can be so so hard to re-establish that family structure and this is where i see families really take a long time to resettle themselves and you see a lot of bickering you see a lot of finger pointing you'll see a lot of angst and anxiety within a family that wasn't really as on display prior to the death and so those matriarch roles are very fundamental to the health of the family so you want to make sure that you are taking those opportunities to learn from that matriarch and patriarch what all they do for the family a lot of times they can be very possessive of their responsibilities within the family because it gives them a certain sense of importance and power you don't want to take that away but you do want to be learning paying attention because when they're gone you know that's the the cycle of life i see families fall apart unnecessarily when they could have kind of had a contingency plan in place another role that i see in the family often the person that shunned the the most often is the person that left bowen who is another very well regarded respected family therapist coined the term differentiation and one of the family dynamics or roles that he specifically outlines is the person who is so lowly differentiated and i'll talk about differentiation a little bit later in the video that they cut the family off completely they leave the family or you know like that might be a physical geographical absence or they just become completely uninvolved with family life so this is the person who lives maybe down the street but never shows up to any family reunions or birthday parties you know they're the person that you probably are only going to see it like funerals or big things right and so the person that ends up being in that role a lot of times is the person who sees the world so differently from the rest of the family that people start pinpointing them as the issue and this takes us into the next role which is the identified patient this is the most important role for a therapist to pay attention to i see this most often when people bring kids to me they say this kid is completely out of control they're wild they're getting in trouble in school they are rude to their siblings we can't get them to listen at home fix them and what's not said is so that our family can be perfect right i actually had a supervisor who said he doesn't see kids because children don't have problems parents do and this is one of those things where it's a hard pill to swallow but most of the time we see these children with drastic behavior difficulties because something within that family culture or system is actually perpetuating that behavior let's say this is the example i always go to because really is the most common example you have that child that's super mischievous that's always getting in trouble but you also have parents that are always arguing or never on the same page maybe never spend any time together the only time you see them come together is when they are having to discipline this child so the kid might see that both parents comes to their school or that you know their siblings and parents all unite complaining about them and on a subconscious level they are seeing that this behavior actually brings their family together if their biggest fears are the parents breaking up or their siblings you know staying away whatever the case may be they are learning that there are positive benefits to this behavior maybe you know they get this individualized attention from their parents that they typically wouldn't get if they weren't misbehaving there can be so many small rewards that help perpetuate that behavior so the identified patient is the person that the family blames most of their problems on but they're actually usually just fitting into the family how they're supposed to fit in for them to keep the status quo or homeostasis if you remember that from like 7th grade middle school this is how you keep the family in balance is through those behaviors and the most important thing to think about there is that when we see a new client they might say okay we need you to work and fix this person that person might completely change they go from a straight d student to a straight a student they might stop becoming argumentative they learn how to communicate their feelings they have no coping mechanisms usually that doesn't solve the problem because the problem is not that kid or that individual for example within the madrigal family bruno we don't talk about the identified patient he's the person that is ruined peppa's wedding he's the person who's killed somebody's goldfish she made somebody have a gut and people are looking at him he is the problem you know this is the person that we both pity and resent so he leaves so this is something i see often that person that is always blamed as the problem they leave they cut the family off they go away and what's interesting is that were the family's problems completely resolved and fixed after bruno left no we got this big hole of this person we don't talk about for example and then now everything's pinpointed at mirabelle right so it doesn't change the dynamics of the family where you have this one person that you're blaming all the problems on all you do is change roles that is first order change first order change is when you were working with the family and it seems like everything is smooth sailing because whatever very specific problem we say we're going to work on has been addressed but what we didn't do is change the rules of the family so that we don't have a need for an identified patient or we don't have a need for misbehavior because what we'll see is one kid starts behaving right and the next kid starts acting up right or now parents are arguing all the time you have to go beyond that go deeper so sometimes it's tempting for my families to say oh everything's fixed we don't need therapy anymore when in actuality we're just getting started and we need to start restructuring those family rules and we won't see that behavior again and the last role i want to talk about is the successful one or the perfect one as mirabelle says about isabella and this is interesting because i see this role two ways in my office one way is you've got that person that my client is always comparing themselves to you know they'll say oh i didn't get married like such and such or i didn't become a lawyer like such and such or i'm not as beautiful as this person their self-worth is completely tied to this person that they feel is essentially living out the life that they were either expected to live or the life that they want to live and instead of using it as inspiration or motivation or just saying hey kudos to you for doing that thing and i'm doing my thing over here they spend all their time almost seething and being resentful of that person that jealousy is actually very unproductive in a way because it keeps them from making moves to make their life as close to that as possible or do their own thing completely separate right the second way that i see the perfect one or the successful one is that person being my client and they're talking about the pressure of being perfect being overwhelmed by never being able to make mistakes or admit mistakes these are the people who very often have never had a chance to really explore their parents wanted them to become a doctor and they became a doctor and they hate their job but they're doing everything by the book i see this most often with like the oldest child i'll see a lot of times the oldest children feel all this pressure to be an example for their younger siblings and they'll deny themselves a lot of their desires wants the opportunity to make mistakes and fail because they just don't want to let the family down they might be the first to go to college and different things like this but inside this person is they're self-loathing you know because they have had this expectation of being perfect they are hyper focused on their imperfections and hyper focused on hiding those from the people around them so i see these people struggle most often with being able to explore and try new things the idea of failure to them is enough to keep them from trying at all and some people might say oh that's the case for everyone but that's not true right the only way we've had inventions and people who have been innovative is through certain people being willing to take a risk while other people are not willing to take those same risks so if you are the person who is viewed as the perfect one or the successful one allow yourself some grace to not be perfect to mess up to fail and you might be pleasantly surprised that that failure doesn't crush you or change your identity in a way that you can't deal with the last thing i want to talk about is this family dynamic as a whole this family is what i would define as an enmeshed family i go into a lot more detail about an image family and some other videos especially in my video where i talk about marae bowen um and also my video where i talk about salvedorminution but essentially it's when a family doesn't have enough boundaries it's when individuals in a family are not differentiated so differentiation there are two facets to it that bowen talks about first is intrapersonal differentiation and the second is interpersonal differentiation intra-personal differentiation is the ability to both accept and appreciate your emotions while also accepting and utilizing your rationality so you don't want to be so headstrong that you only look at situations from a logical standpoint and don't take into consideration your feelings but you also don't want to be like peppa for example who's completely ruled by her emotions and it's very difficult for her to be rational and make sense of something like bruno cannot make the weather on your wedding day change right that's not his gift she's not using her rational mind to make sense of what happened on her wedding day the second part of differentiation is interpersonal differentiation with interpersonal differentiation in universal terms it's about both recognizing your similarities within your family and your differences this is what it breaks down to when i'm working with my clients who struggle with differentiation you should be able to see yourself as a part of the family right you are a part of the major golf family for example you have a gift you have shared memories you have a shared history you have shared meals right those things bring you together they give you purpose within your family but you should also have your own separate identity outside of the family things that you can explore you know if you want to change your hair color you should be able to do that if you want to marry someone of the same sex or a different race you should be able to explore and try those things based on your own values and your own wants for your life so differentiation is extremely important and what we can see when there's a lack of differentiation even bowen talks about it in terms of anxiety so there's a lot of tension and anxiety happening within the family and that's what's leading to the house the family literally cracking and breaking apart everyone is so tense filling their roles and doing the things that they're supposed to be doing within the family that they're completely neglecting themselves and their own needs and again i know there's going to be a little bit of debate about own needs versus needs of the group and i know in westernized culture we're so individualized and so self-centered but there is a balance you know you can find the balance of figuring out how you can best support your family while also making time for doing things that are purely for yourself so that is something i see a lot that's displayed within this family and it leads to that enmeshment where nobody can leave right and if you leave you're shunned we don't talk about you we don't talk to you you have to stay here and i see this with my clients all the time i have so many clients who said they want to move to a different country or a different state but their parents or their grandparents they make them feel so guilty and so ashamed for leaving or wanting to leave their family that it stifles them and being able to grow and develop and create the life that they're wanting for themselves and even though they're being there for their family there is this internal clock happening in their mind where they feel like all of these years are passing and i'm not making it any closer to the things that i want to do so that enmeshed family dynamic can be very very dangerous so if you are feeling that pressure within your life where you just feel like everything you do is for the people around you and you're making so many sacrifices that you don't even recognize who you are anymore i'd encourage you to you know maybe dedicate start out small five minutes for yourself ten minutes whether it's journaling whether it's doing your art whether it's practicing your music whether it's you know getting on a dating app doing different things that maybe your family would disapprove of but brings you joy start working on those things so that you become more familiar with your own identity so that's all i wanted to talk about today i wanted to talk a lot about the different roles that i saw in encanto but also talk with you a little bit about their communication styles the family dynamics and then also a little bit about boundaries i hope that you found this video entertaining and useful let me know below if you identify with the characters or just who your favorite character is for me my favorite character is bruno let me know that in the comments below i appreciate all of your suggestions those who sent me the comments about encanto and all the other shows that i need to watch you guys keep sending them i do watch them and i have a running list of videos that you've requested you guys keep this channel running i appreciate you and i need you thank you so so much for watching all the way until the end that really helps with the youtube algorithm and everything like this video share it with a friend and come back to watch more of my videos thank you thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: Steph Anya, LMFT

Views: 1,104,840

Keywords: marriage and family therapy, whats anya mind, what's anya mind, marriage family therapist, marriage and family therapist, marriage family therapy, steph anya, Encanto, Encanto Reaction, Therapist Reacts to Encanto, Therapist reacts, Encanto Explained, Encanto Tik Tok, We dont talk about Bruno, Cinema Therapy, bruno encanto, encanto camilo, first time watching encanto, cinematherapy, psychotherapy, family therapy, georgia dow, gq the breakdown, therapist breaks down

Id: Aew-MogogXE

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022