How ‘Inside Out’ (and My Wife) Taught Me True Empathy
The Scoop features personal essays on movie-centric topics.
By Josh Bailey
I am a rock star at sympathy. A master of the concerned gaze and blameless apology, a la “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I genuinely care about the suffering of friends and strangers alike, and I work hard to convey it.
Empathy, on the other hand, is like a foreign language to me. Not a romance language with its shared roots and familiar conjugations, but an Asiatic tongue with 20,000 characters and tenses that evolved far from western influence. We didn’t talk about feelings in my house growing up, so the idea that I should “understand and share others’ feelings” simply doesn’t make sense to me.
Or didn’t. At least not until I saw Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out.
When feelings don’t make sense
My wife, Ali, has struggled with anxiety and depression her entire life. Like the prevailing attitude toward mental illness in our society, I have too often treated her sadness like a flaw in her character: If she would just look on the bright side and take stock of all her blessings, she would be happy. But she clearly doesn’t want to be happy.
I realize now how destructive my attitude was. Depression is a mood disorder that affects millions of Americans without their consent, and it doesn’t matter how ostensibly happy their life may be. In a 2013 TED Talk, comedian Kevin Breel described it perfectly: “Real depression isn’t being sad when something in your life goes wrong. Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right.”
Without understanding or seeking to understand, I have approached Ali’s feelings with well-intentioned zeal for more than a decade. I have sympathized until the sympathy wore out. I have offered countless words of affirmation to buoy her self-esteem. I have gone to great lengths to defeat her depression by the power of almighty Logic: “Your feelings don’t make sense because of X and Y and therefore Z.”
But all I really did was invalidate her. I made her feel stupid. Unloved. Alone.
I don’t mean to imply that seeing Inside Out was a watershed moment in my approach to Ali. I have been working on empathy for a long time. But one emotional scene in this blockbuster children’s movie made it all make sense in a way that conflict and counseling sessions never could.
Be like Bing Bong
The story follows the travails of personified emotions that live in the brain of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. We learn that all of our emotions—including Sadness—are part of a delicate balance that makes us fully, beautifully human.
At one point in the adventure, Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong (a long lost imaginary friend) are stranded on the edge of Riley’s subconscious. After Bing Bong’s wagon rocket is lost in the Memory Dump, a place where Riley’s memories fade away, he loses the will to go on.
The ever-sunny-yet-slightly-panicked Joy does her best to cheer him up. She bounces around Bing Bong making goofy faces, tickling him, telling him to focus on the positive. Yet Bing Bong ignores her pleas.
Sadness, voiced by The Office’s endearing Phyllis Smith, takes a different approach. Sitting down next to Bing Bong, she says, “I’m sorry they took your rocket. They took something that you loved. It’s gone. Forever.”
“Sadness! Don’t make him feel worse!” cries Joy. But Bing Bong starts to open up to Sadness:
“It’s all I had left of Riley,” he laments.
“…I bet you and Riley had great adventures,” replies Sadness.
In my adult life, I had never identified so much with a cartoon character. I was Joy. I watched as my foolish attempts to defeat my wife’s depression played out on the screen, and I saw just how silly Joy looked compared to Sadness.
Bing Bong opens up to Sadness in that moment because she embraces his despair; she doesn’t try to sweep it under the rug. She emphasizes how hard it must be to feel the way he does. For once, Joy is the foil. Only Sadness knows how to care for Bing Bong.
Understanding empathy inside and out
Watching this metaphor play out in vivid color, I finally understood that empathy means being there. It means validating sadness. Like Joy, I used to think that this approach would make my partner feel worse. I now understand that the first step toward feeling better is to feel richly.
I owe a lot to Pixar for this revelation, but I owe even more to Ali—who had sort of been telling me these things for years. Though I may not feel the same intensity of emotion that she does, I do know what it’s like to feel sad, angry, anxious, and lonely. Instead of hiding my feelings, Ali has encouraged me to talk about these painful stories more often. She feels less alone and more connected to me when she knows that I can imagine, even a little, what depression feels like.
I’ve stopped trying to cheer up my wife. I no longer list all the reasons she has to be happy. I try my best to listen. I tell her how hard it must be to feel the way she does. I hold her when she just needs to be held.
I show her that she’s not alone, instead of telling her.
Inside Out may be an adorable movie for kids, but it also made this adult a better husband and a better human being. That’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment—even for Pixar.
Josh Bailey is the Sr. Consumer Marketing Manager for Right At School, a devoted husband, and soon-to-be father of a baby boy.