Sometimes therapy comes with popcorn
If you can’t or won’t see a professional, maybe these will help
Suppose something is gnawing at you, but you have a reason for avoiding therapy: shyness, skepticism, stubbornness, cultural issues, money, whatever. If the wound is festering and loved ones can’t help, maybe you need to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Start with an episode or two of “Cinema Therapy,” a YouTube show analyzing popular movies, discussed by filmmaker Alan Seawright and therapist Jonathan Decker, who adeptly mingle light-heartedness with some heavy psychological issues.
In “Coco,” for example, young Miguel struggles to fit into the family’s culture because he wants to be a musician, against his parents’ wishes. He has to deal with intergenerational trauma because his great-great-grandfather was a musician who abandoned his family. Allegedly.
Seawright said that when people don’t know the truth about their ancestors, sometimes they heap the guilt in the wrong place. “Cynicism is the easy way out, right? If you assume the worst, you’re never disappointed. It can only go up from there.”
Family dynamics and dysfunction are among the hosts’ favorite topics, whether it’s the parenting struggles and successes in “The Incredibles” or the toxic perfectionism in “Encanto.” They also talk about how sometimes one person gets scapegoated — like Bruno in “Encanto” — when the issues are more complex.
Obviously if you’ve gone through a trauma like child abuse, you need counseling from a real person — not the internet — but Decker uses a clip of therapist Joan Cusack in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” to help illustrate why.
“What she does really well there is asking questions and listening,” Decker said. “So much of counseling isn’t counseling — it’s asking, especially because people are struggling to organize their thoughts or because they’re not giving themselves permission to ask certain questions, and so you implicitly give them that.”
He also tackles the “it’s not your fault” scene from “Good Will Hunting.”
“There’s a disconnect often between what we know rationally and what we feel, especially in cases of abuse and trauma in childhood,” Decker said. “We can grow up and look at it objectively and say that wasn’t my fault, that was the adult. We can say a kid doesn’t deserve to be treated that way. We can see it rationally, but so often emotionally it still feels like, ‘I was abused because I was bad.’”
Don’t assume from these heavy topics that Decker and Seawright don’t get into fun stuff, too, and they obviously love movies. For the New York Times, they analyzed film characters like Barbie, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Indiana Jones, and their YouTube show has covered everything from Jack Sparrow and his anti-social personality disorder to the struggles of Severus Snape to “7 Movie Marriages That are Actually Healthy.”
They point out that many of the relationships in “Love Actually” are infatuation, actually — and often cringe worthy — and explain why the film’s best example of love involves a widower and his stepson.
Affairs of the heart often do merit counseling, of course. In their Dear Therapists podcast, Lori Gottlieb and Guy Winch cover all sorts of topics, including this one with a young couple who have been together 10 years but struggle with having disagreements that turn into shouting matches.
“You both interpret each other’s behavior as an attack,” Gottlieb said.
“You interpret questions as an attack,” Winch added, then suggested a calmer path. “You need to be much slower in how you have these discussions because you say one short thing and another short thing and then there are 10 assumptions in between those things — and a lot of them are wrong.”
Gottlieb also cited an adage about how emotional baggage can make us overreact: “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.”
You’ll hear more from Cinema Therapy and Dear Therapists in two weeks, when I’ll touch on a glaring omission from today’s column: the death of a loved one. For now, though, here are a few resources I’ve mentioned before:
Washington Post advice columnist Carolyn Hax offers consistently insightful advice and has a weekly online discussion.
The Los Angeles Times has a Group Therapy newsletter that answers questions and addresses a variety of topics.
A terrific podcast from a few years back features Johann Hari talking about his great mental health book “Lost Connections.”
The stage version of “Dear Evan Hansen” is great, with a couple of lyrics that are particularly powerful. You don’t have to be in high school to feel like you’re “lost in the in-between.” It can happen to all of us. But the bigger message is one of hope: “You will be found.” That can happen to all of us, too.
Murphy Slaw
Something old: In this episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Famous & Gravy, the hosts rightly criticize the lede of a New York Times obituary for comparing Nora Ephron to Dorothy Parker, who was reasonably well known 60 years ago, but died in 1967 and is pretty obscure to non-writers these days.
Eighty-three percent of Americans are under 65, so a cultural touchstone to one person might be a dusty rock to another. Maybe my old column on pop-culture Frankensteins will help.
Something new: If the “Only Murders in the Building” theme song keeps bouncing around in your head, listen to composer Siddhartha Khosla explain what was bouncing around in his — from Hindi music to twigs and paint cans to mimicking cat screeches.
Something borrowed: People who moved fast for at least 3 minutes a day were about 30% less likely to die of many types of cancer than those who mostly strolled, according to this Washington Post report.
Something blue: If you’re having one of those days, weeks or months, maybe this will help.