No Bad Parts: Forms of Self-Compassion in Inside Out 2

There is a scene near the end of Inside Out 2 that made me ugly cry. The protagonist, Riley Anderson (voiced by Kensington Tallman)—a sprightly, well-adjusted, thirteen-year-old hockey player—has just been sent to the penalty box after aggressively shoving a member of the opposing team during a high-stakes scrimmage. Having (falsely) convinced herself that her future prospects for friendship and belonging in high school rest on successfully winning this game and earning her place on the Firehawks team, Riley is suddenly overcome by the symptoms of a full-blown panic attack. She begins to hyperventilate, rapidly moving her eyes back and forth and frantically scratching at her face in frustration and confusion at the rising tide of unfamiliar bad feelings.

Zooming into Riley’s mind, the film imaginatively shows viewers just what this psychological state might look like “on the inside”: a literal hurricane of anxiety swirling around Riley’s emotional core. The orange-haired avatar for Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawk) first appears in Riley’s adolescent consciousness as a bubbly, energetic, pixie-like presence whose “job is to protect [Riley] from the scary stuff she can’t see.” Now Anxiety has transmuted into a violent, all-encompassing electrical storm of anticipatory stress. At the eye of this weather system, Anxiety appears frozen, with hands clenched in a death grip at Riley’s emotional switchboard, suddenly paralyzed by her own drive to forecast every possible scenario necessary for Riley’s future social success. Attempting to break through Anxiety’s seemingly impenetrable defensive shield, Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), that most powerful of Riley’s emotions and arguably the film’s moral center, lovingly but firmly commands her emotional coworker: “You have to let her go!” As Joy says these words, we see a single trembling tear fall from Anxiety’s tensed and searching eyeballs.

Aaaaaaand, that’s when I started to weep, conspicuously, in front of a hundred children and their parents in a packed movie theater. Why? Because I have never encountered a more viscerally accurate visual description of the kind of anxiety I lived with for most of my adulthood until the age of forty. I encountered this scene in the early summer of 2024, during the first time in my life when I felt truly free of anxiety, or at least finally capable of putting it in its place. That freedom was hard-earned, a result of more than a decade of therapy, lay Buddhist practice, yoga, and learning and implementing new mental-health protocols while working in a highly competitive, productivity driven field: academia. I was on a yearlong sabbatical, having just turned the big four-oh, feeling hopeful about a future in which I could honor my commitment to sharing ideas with the world without driving myself into the ground or scrambling to prove myself at every stage of my professional development.

It was precisely this state of mind that allowed me to witness this scene of Anxiety and feel immense compassion for my younger self and the emotional state that had dominated my mind for so many years as a gay Middle Eastern second-generation immigrant: namely, the mind-numbing, anguished drive to be perfect in a homophobic and racist world; to dazzle; to go above and beyond; to mitigate any possible chance of failure to succeed, fit in, find community, be a star, or whatever. The single potent tear Anxiety sheds on-screen was one I’d spilled so many times before, in an obsessively clenched state, hoping I could control the future, yet knowing how desperately I wished and needed to “LET GO!”

How is it possible that an ostensible children’s movie that depicts one of the most painful, self-critical emotional states imaginable became the single most watched movie of the season, and the highest-grossing animated film of all time? The answer, I believe, is simple. In a moment of intensifying global mental distress, Inside Out 2 rejects the impulse to diagnose or pathologize difficult feelings, instead attempting to fully integrate them into the fabric of our lives. It is a movie that not only depicts the logical operation of anxiety on our vulnerable minds but also offers a meaningful remedy to its manic, controlling impulse. The solution on offer from Inside Out 2 involves the honest recognition and tender response-ability toward our human need to belong in an unpredictable and ever-changing world.

Without ever naming them explicitly, Inside Out 2 synthesizes three key conceptual frameworks that have been central to contemporary mental-health discourse. The first is the Tibetan Buddhist concept of shenpa, or egoic overattachment to certain outcomes and feeling states. This idea builds on the broader Buddhist claim that life’s suffering is born out of our obsessive pursuit of a narrow and instrumentalized conception of joy or happiness, which, in turn, requires us to compartmentalize the full range of our emotions, causing distress because of our attachment to a single rigid outcome in all our worldly interactions.¹ The second idea embedded in Inside Out 2 connects with holistic medicine’s focus on balancing the human organism’s need for authenticity and independence with social connection and belonging. In his best-selling book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022), Gabor Maté stresses how late-capitalist social norms encourage us to suppress our full authentic selves—through people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, emotional numbing, and outright deceit—in order to gain acceptance from others and accumulate cultural and financial capital.² Contemporary science is now revealing the fatal costs of such emotional self-censorship, including a radically increased risk of cancer and autoimmune disorders that emerge from our willful psychological banishment of our true feelings, which wreaks havoc on our nervous systems.³

Finally, a third and potentially even more intriguing link to contemporary research on psychology in Inside Out 2 is its apparent visual translation of the internal family systems (IFS) model of the human psyche. Created by psychologist Rick Schwartz, IFS is a multidimensional framework that sees all human beings as composed of many psychic “parts” or avatars who emerge over time to respond to complex environmental factors impinging on the subject. IFS assumes, like Inside Out 2, that people are internally multiplicitous and that even the most negative behaviors like addiction, violence, and self-harm also act as highly developed self-protective processes requiring curiosity and repurposing rather than judgment and exile.⁴ Schwartz calls these multiplicities “parts.” He explains: “I started trying to help my clients listen to their troublesome parts rather than fight them, and was astounded to find that their parts all had similar stories to tell of how they had to take on protective roles at some point in the person’s past—often roles that they hated but felt were needed to save the client. . . . [E]mbracing . . . and loving parts allows them to heal and transform as much as it does for people.”⁵

All three of these psychological models take a loving view of distressed emotional states as necessary and valuable components of subjectivity requiring careful exploration, not rigid emotional management. All three reject pathologization or diagnosis in favor of what Maté calls “compassionate inquiry”: the curious, studied attention to the origins and purposes of different feelings, desires, and attachments.⁶ Finally, all three refuse a mechanistic view of emotional states as easily controlled or manipulated by force of will. While Buddhism, holistic medicine, and IFS have gained traction in the popular imagination through podcasts, talk shows, self-help books, social media, and wellness retreats, translating them into actionable, everyday practice has proved a far more difficult task in contemporary US society.

Inside Out 2 is conceptually indebted to these frameworks but also literalizes or models them in visual form. It explicitly depicts what it might look like to integrate Buddhist self-compassion, a holistic commitment to living as one’s authentic self, and the IFS model’s view of a multiplicitous mind into our view of ourselves, which can in turn positively influence how we behave in relation to the world of others. This speaks to the film’s formal qualities, however, not just its themes. After all, animation is about the creative invention or crafting of shapes organized in space and unfolding across time for the viewer to cognize and interpret, often with a pleasing disregard for physics or conventional ideas of realism. (As far back in critical theory as Walter Benjamin’s notes on Mickey Mouse [1931] and Sergei Eisenstein’s celebration of the anarchic kinetic potential of Disney’s “Silly Symphonies” [1928–1940], film theory found a liberatory potential in the formal qualities of animation—in particular, Mickey’s unusual ability to cope playfully with the stresses of modernity even while they bend him out of shape, and the Silly Symphonies’ dazzling depiction of animals, plants, insects, and inanimate objects continually shape-shifting or imbued with dynamic animacy against the stifling rigidity of the modern assembly line.) By projecting emotional states as a series of personified avatars (or “parts,” in the IFS model), Inside Out 2 visually renders the extraordinary range of human feelings as well as those feelings’ complex, rapid-fire communication as figurative interlocuters in the mind. The film limns various emotions’ continuous, often frightening speed of interaction in response to unpredictable stimuli, and the tenderness required to adequately take care of our wildly diverse affective reactions to the world (which means loving ourselves in all our dimensions, as difficult as that is in practice).

Some critics have claimed that the two Inside Out films present a superficial, mechanized depiction of human affective states. They dislike the franchise’s depiction of a sprawling emotional switchboard that is “controlled” by various feelings throughout the narrative. Against this simplistic reading, however, I think that these films actually figure feelings as participating in an elaborate flow, or spontaneous rhythmic collaboration, where the switchboard functions less like a computer or machine, and more like a metaphor for the sparking of neural networks in the brain, which are complex affective responses to worldly phenomena. This allows animation to depict things that seem impossible but feel true to life, especially regarding maladaptive patterns of thinking, as when certain feelings or beliefs become rigidly entrenched in the psyche, and thus less amenable to change. Both films rail against the jarring interruption of the organic flow of human feeling states through aggressive emotional compartmentalization and instrumentalized visions of self-worth. By avoiding live action, Inside Out (2015) and Inside Out 2 can demonstrate visually how the mechanization of emotions—or attempts to control how we feel—acts as a kind of psychic violence garbed in a cloak of self-protection.

Inside Out and its sequel follow two pivotal moments in the young life of Riley, a precocious, kind, goofy, sports-crazed tween (and, in Inside Out 2, a teenager), as she encounters major life transformations in each movie. In the first film, Riley faces her first great life upheaval when she and her family move from their hometown of Minneapolis to San Francisco; in the sequel, Riley encounters the all-important transition (or so it seems to every kid at the time) from junior high to high school. As two of the most successful entries in Pixar’s archive of vibrantly colored and crisply rendered computer-animated films, which commonly feature sentient “nonhuman” characters, the films are formally distinguished by their rapid-fire movement in and out of Riley’s consciousness as her emotions (initially confined to the primal feeling states of Joy, Disgust, Fear, Anger, and Sadness) react to and confer with one another, making decisions about unfamiliar scenarios in her swiftly changing life. These include encountering new friends, eating vegetarian pizza for the first time, moving into a new house, and discovering that her best friends will be going to a different high school.

Inside Out finds Riley overcome by Sadness, a previously minor and overlooked emotion in her affective repertoire, when her father takes a demanding new job in California and the family relocates from the Midwest. The film traces Joy’s frantic attempts to suppress Riley’s growing depression, which unleashes havoc in her mind and ultimately leads Riley to attempt to run away back to Minnesota. The film ends with Joy’s recognition of the importance of Sadness to Riley’s mental well-being—namely, the ability to properly mourn that which has passed and recognize life’s bittersweet complexity. Inside Out 2 picks up Riley’s story when she has finished adjusting to life in the Bay Area. Now she faces a new set of challenges and their attendant emotions, catalyzed by the realization that high school will radically reorganize her social life.

Inside Out 2 takes place over the course of a three-day hockey clinic organized by the coach of a celebrated local team, the aforementioned Firehawks. Though the clinic is intended to showcase the skills of potential recruits, the event collides with Riley’s impending arrival at puberty, activating a series of new and unexpected emotions who dramatically barge into the seemingly placid architecture of her mind. Here come Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. Across the course of the film, these emotions, led by Anxiety, stage a coup to control Riley’s mind, literally bottling up her primal feelings. (“It’s not forever,” Anxiety sheepishly tries to explain, “it’s just until Riley makes varsity or until she turns eighteen, or ma-maybe forever. I don’t know. We’ll have to see. Uh, bye!”). This chaos dislodges a statue that represents Riley’s “sense of self” as a good, kind, upstanding person, hijacking her imagination and driving her to behave in ways radically out of character. As a result, Riley shuns her two best friends in order to sidle up to the current members of the Firehawks, lying about her identity and tastes to fit in with a new friendship circle, and abandoning her good sportsmanship to impress Coach Roberts (voiced by Yvette Nicole Brown). The crisis of the film lies not only in Riley’s encounter with new, seemingly negative emotions but also in her realization that such emotions can reveal sides of her personality that dramatically clash with her self-perception as a loving and loyal friend.

Both movies have essentially the same conceptual structure, but transpire at different developmental stages in a child’s life. And both are about the use, or rather misuse, of Joy for the calculated suppression of negative feeling, which ultimately places the mind under terrible stress that expresses itself externally in the body’s involuntary rebellion. Riley’s increasingly inauthentic behavior literally alters her physical presence, making her appear more manic, fidgety, and moody, while her contradictory actions figuratively tear open a “Sar-chasm” in her mind, a gulf she fills with alienated, caustic irony deployed to look “cool,” but which serves only to further separate her further from her true self. Thus, the films depict the transformation of Joy into what the IFS model dubs “the protector,” a psychic part of ourselves whose purpose is to defend us from perceived threatening external forces but often ends up overperforming its task, with detrimental results for our ability to connect with others.⁷

Inside Out 2 focuses on how Anxiety limits Joy’s ability to facilitate genuine self-compassion, turning Riley into a figure who must perpetually engage in a false front of cheery optimism and willed “happiness” in the face of difficult processes of change. But the repetitious nature of the two films’ plots speaks to the fact that emotional acceptance—the necessary allowance for all our feelings to exist simultaneously alongside one another—is a perpetual process, needing to be enacted again and again in different developmental stages of life and in countless contexts.

Taken together, the Inside Out movies offer a surprisingly sophisticated account of how emotions actually work, one that roughly accords with cognitive science, popular psychology, and in-depth spiritual practice. Inside Out tells us that we come equipped with a set of “feeling states” necessary for our survival, including Joy, Disgust, Fear, Anger, and Sadness, which allow us to draw positive social attention from others, avoid potentially harmful substances and situations, articulate our emotional boundaries, and acknowledge pain. Life experiences activate these emotions and magnetize them to particular events, objects, people, or circumstances. Thus, feelings carry information about our past that helps us anticipate and prepare for future experiences. The attempt to banish, exile, or reject various emotions robs us of vital knowledge about what is happening to us, who we are, and who we might become. This is why in the first film, Joy’s obsessive desire to suppress Riley’s Sadness at leaving Minnesota leads Riley to become even more melancholically attached to the past rather than helping her adjust to her new surroundings, mainly because of her failure to properly mourn the loss of her original home.

Inside Out 2 complicates this portrait. In this all-ages blockbuster sequel, we see a new range of feelings and states of mind emerge in response to developmental realities, like the alarming signs of puberty and the scary advent of high school. But this film also investigates the construction of beliefs or worldviews grounded in these various emotions. At one point, for example, Joy explains to her fellow emotion states (and thus to the audience) that Riley’s most powerful memories, like the first time she stood up for her friend Gracie or won a hockey game working as a team, have facilitated the formation of certain internal beliefs. These include statements like “I’m a good person,” “I’m a good friend,” and “My parents are proud of me.” To mitigate against the production of so-called bad beliefs, the audience learns that Joy has spent years systematically weeding out Riley’s negative life experiences by using a “memory ejector,” which she describes as her “super high-tech Riley protection system” for relegating difficult or painful memories to the back of the mind (or, in her words, “a one-way expressway to ‘We’re not gonna think about that right now’”). This can be read as a visual expression of the “protector” function discussed above. “Keep the best and toss the rest!” Joy cheerfully exclaims. In light of this well-intentioned but misguided project, the film asks what happens when we base our youthful beliefs on a narrow range of emotional data, and, consequently, build our sense of self on a limited view of “positivity” that often feels aggressive and toxic in its disavowals of the bad stuff. In a nutshell, our sense of self becomes simplistic, one-dimensional, and unrealistic, unable to weather the inevitable blows to our ego that life will bring. As Maté explains:

Appropriately arriving in Riley’s mind with a literal ton of baggage in hand, Anxiety makes her appearance at the dawn of Riley’s adolescence: “I’m Anxiety. I’m one of Riley’s new emotions and we are just super jazzed to be here. Where can I put my stuff?” Anxiety visually appears as a bright vertical ponytail of tightly scrunchied hair whose “body” is mostly a massive, plaintive smile that reacts with outsize feeling to every statement she hears or event she witnesses. Vigilantly attempting to identify and manage other people’s perceptions of her, Anxiety careens wildly between ecstatic smiles and devastated frowns throughout the movie. From her first appearance onward, she is depicted as the consummate people pleaser, an exceptionally insecure, energetic planner who claims to exist to help Riley become the best version of herself. “I can take notes, get coffee, manage your calendar, walk your dog, carry your things, watch you sleep,” Anxiety notes. “Anything. Just call my name and I’m here for you.” By extension, Anxiety drives Riley’s increasing misrepresentation of herself to the current members of the Firehawks, attempting to appear more mature, interesting, self-assured, and “cooler” than she actually is—thus, in Maté’s terms, misidentifying inauthenticity with social survival.

In this way, the film explicitly depicts the dysfunctional social expectation that requires us to be less like ourselves in order to please others or fake our sense of belonging. “And what happens if we don’t become a Firehawk?” Anxiety condescendingly asks at one point, “Well, thanks for asking, Joy. I’ll tell you. . . . We have no friends and we die alone.” It quickly becomes clear that Anxiety is driven by an anticipatory logic, where the best version of Riley always exists in an imaginary ideal horizon that holds out an illusory promise of a secure future free from all possible loneliness.

In one of the film’s most telling scenes, while traversing the vast expanse of Riley’s deep memory, her primary emotions discover that Anxiety has hijacked “Imagination Land,” that part of Riley’s consciousness brimming with creative energy. “Fort Pillowton,” the formerly enchanted venue for Riley’s childlike playfulness, is now awash in Anxiety’s radiant orange glow; inside is a vast warehouse that looks like an animation studio, where hundreds of illustrators sit at desks rendering possible future outcomes of Riley’s current decisions. On a massive screen, Anxiety is delivering orders to these illustrators to offer as many “projections” as they can so that she can fine-tune her calculations. True to her nature, Disgust (voice by Liza Lapira) exclaims in revulsion, “Oh, no! They’re using Riley’s imagination against her!” Intervening on this logic, Joy and her companions stage a mutiny by projecting a series of potential positive outcomes to Riley’s weekend. These alternative visions include Riley’s making new friends, impressing her teammates by being herself, and pursuing unexpected gestures of kindness that make her a valued member of the team. Thus, the film likens the art of animation to the cognitive work of creativity, which involves the continuous projection of possible imaginative scenarios that have the potential to break apart habituated or dysfunctional patterns of thought.

Though Joy initially appears as Anxiety’s emotional opposite, it becomes clear throughout the film that, in fact, these dueling emotional states are conceptual twins. Anxiety is a form of aggressive joy-seeking that, paradoxically, becomes a state of perpetual misery when left unchecked. The film suggests that the unbalanced pursuit of anticipated, desired, imagined, or wished-for future joys—or rather, the mirage that attaining something in particular will secure ultimate happiness—works counterproductively to remove peace and contentment from the present. Upon their first meeting, Anxiety informs Joy, “I’m such a huge fan of yours.” She explains that her entire purpose in life is to help Joy improve Riley’s chances of success in the world. “I’m doing this for you,” Anxiety tells Joy. “This is all so Riley can be happier.” Though Joy ultimately rejects Anxiety’s method for accomplishing this task, by the end of the film she realizes that their approaches are, for all intents and purposes, the same. As her primary emotions travel deeper and deeper into Riley’s psyche, Joy begins to realize just how much she has manipulated Riley’s worldview, shielding her from the painful aspects of life and helping her build a sense of self based on the false promise of forever being that “perfect,” “good,” “kind,” and impossibly infallible person. The insight that joy (and the single-minded pursuit of it) can also be a nightmare—a fundamental conceit of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy—reflects one of the core complexities of Inside Out 2. Joy’s great power comes not from exiling or banishing bad emotions, but from her capacity to recognize and love them; that skill is directly akin both to the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation, which encourages us to cultivate the capacity to withstand the full range of our emotional states, and to the IFS model, which actively seeks to acknowledge, embrace, and reintegrate one’s various psychic parts. This includes Anxiety herself, who, when firmly put in her rightful place (a massage chair that soothes her frenetic energy), comes to serve the important purpose of helping Riley get motivated or energized to tackle life’s challenges in the present, not in some imaginary future.

This notion—that the multiplicity of our emotional states helps forge an equally multiplicitous self-concept—is formally rendered in the film’s depiction of the self as a sculpture or a work of architecture (in Joy’s words, “a masterpiece”) produced out of one’s developing beliefs about the world and one’s place in it. At the beginning of the film, Riley’s “sense of self” is presented as a pure white abstract sculpture composed of symmetrical looping petals, like a pure radiant flower, with a vertical structure at the center echoing the shape of a human subject—presumably, Riley herself. As the story unfolds, Anxiety aggressively displaces this statue and crafts a new one out of a series of fear-based beliefs that come to infect Riley’s mind. (A particularly cruel example of this maladaptive thinking is: “If I’m a Firehawk, I won’t be alone.”) Though Anxiety is convinced that Riley’s new sense of self will be categorically better, stronger, and more capable than her previous one, what emerges is an electric orange form made of jagged shards whose central guiding belief is “I’m not good enough!” Thus a rigid conception of self, grounded in the simplistic belief that Riley is a universally “good person,” flips almost effortlessly into its mirror image. In this scene, the film depicts the drive to achieve an impossible standard of perfection leading to the equally categorical belief that one is hopelessly inadequate.

Shocked by the negative outcome of her own good intentions, Anxiety twists this scene of horror into yet another motivation for her plan. “Uh, don’t worry,” she says. “It’s just that [Riley] knows that there’s always room for self-improvement. She’ll be fine.” It is this aching belief in her own deficiency that leads to Riley’s panic attack at the end of the film. Viewers of all ages learn, along with Riley herself, that the solution to this conundrum is not to reassert Riley’s unshakeable “goodness” but rather to recognize and honor her multifaceted nature. In a final daring gambit, Joy decides to unleash every bad memory she has protected Riley from, allowing them to cascade into her psyche in an epic avalanche of feelings. Though Disgust initially fears that this event will lead to Riley producing “bad beliefs,” it has just the opposite effect. For the first time, Riley begins to see her life clearly, as a rich landscape of multivalent events, encounters, and experiences that contain countless emotional data—the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the profound, the terrifying, and the peaceful.

As her beliefs begin to reorganize themselves around this new information, an unexpected and radically transformed sense of self begins to form. This takes the appearance of a radiant, shape-shifting structure that rapidly changes colors, forms, and vibrations, each new shape echoing complex, even contradictory beliefs: “I’m selfish. I-I’m kind. I’m not good enough! I’m a good person. I need to fit in. But I want to be myself! I’m brave. But I get scared.” Together, Riley’s emotions collectively engage in a group hug around the shape-shifting glowing core of her psyche. In this scene, Inside Out 2 animates the IFS model by giving forms to Riley’s many “parts,” visually depicting what it would look like to embrace them all. The film redefines Joy not as a permanent state of blissful (and often delusional) happiness, but as the potential for making peace with oneself (or one’s selves) that comes with recognizing and accepting the entire sprawl of one’s emotional landscape.

In its intense focus on the figurative “inside” of the human psyche and its relation to a host of interpersonal bonds at a pivotal stage of human development, Inside Out 2 offers a life-affirming vision of what it might look like to claim an authentic self without sacrificing one’s sense of belonging in a community of others. At the same time, the film fails to mount a convincing critique of the very “outside” world that causes anxiety in the first place—namely, a capitalist, white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal culture that diligently works to convince everyone that they’re not good enough. By depicting Riley’s move toward her acknowledgment that there are “no bad parts” as a fully internal and individualistic resolution, the film downplays the necessity for vast structural interventions in a society that constantly erodes equality, breaks down friendship networks, denies access to mental-health resources, resists awareness of the socially constructed nature of identity, and so on.⁹ And yet . . .

Somewhat like Greta Gerwig’s ingenious Barbie (2023), another massively profitable social-uplift movie with a deceptive veneer of simplicity, Inside Out 2 formally transmits a message of self-love to an audience that may be aware of the concept but still has little idea of how to actualize it outside the platitudinous echo chamber of wellness memes. In a sense, Inside Out 2’s failure to tackle the structural realities of anxiety speaks to just how little society understands the collective implications of its worst affects. The film acknowledges that despite our endless rhetoric of mental health we have yet to truly grasp the basic idea that compartmentalizing (or bottling up) one’s emotions is bad for you, that it kills the human organism and devastates the social fabric in turn. Inside Out 2 demands that we fully embrace our feeling states, even the most painful and difficult ones, by showing them curiosity, compassion, and love; in so doing, the film suggests, they just might transform into our greatest allies. Joy says it best: “Maybe this is what happens when you grow up, you feel less joy.” But maybe that also means you feel more like yourself.