All right, welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Rachel Blackston. She is the co-owner of a thriving group practice of 20 plus therapists here in Orlando. She does intensives.

She has three daughters, which I mentioned because we are going to be talking about Inside Out 2, which is about coming of age females. And we are in the in the thick of it, I mean, Rachel together.

And then we have Eric Bender, psychiatrist therapist. He was on my episode on the shrink next door. He practices in San Francisco. He is my go to referral in San Francisco, probably two books to receive any of my patients, but I send it to him nonetheless.

He is on YouTube, on GQ's online show, the breakdown, wired magazines, tech help. And yeah, it's great to have you all join to talk about Inside Out 2. Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much for having us.

So I was thinking we will kind of go through sequentially through the movie. And if you haven't watched it yet, this will be full of spoilers. But I think you will still enjoy the movie nonetheless.

Before or after you view this, and we will be talking about this kind of like adolescent coming of age, right, for females. And yeah, so Inside Out 1 to 2, there's a transition of characters.

There's addition of characters. So I was thinking maybe we could like set the stage for the kind of the beginning of what happens, but when puberty arrives, right.

So Rachel, do you remember that moment that the red button came on in on the console?

Yes, I felt it. A wrecking ball comes in to the scene and starts dismantling and disrupting. And that's sort of what it felt like in my household.

Okay, yeah. So there's this kind of like a new device that preceded the puberty button showing up in which happiness took this memory, which was kind of maybe not something she wanted Riley to remember. And she put it in this like container that shot the memory all the way to the back of Riley's mind into the unconscious Eric.

I remember that and he thoughts on, I do. Yeah, Joy has this device. And she says, keep the best tossed the rest and she launches all these memories that she doesn't want in the back of the mind of Riley Anderson, who's now 13, whereas in the first Inside Out, she was 11.

And at this point, she is transitioning to the next school in her life. And she learns in the beginning of the movie that her friends Bri and Grace are not going to be attending the same school with her. So this is really rocked her world.

So in addition to the puberty team coming in and suddenly wrecking what was there rewiring everything, she's also got this sudden new set of feelings of wait, I'm not going to be with my friends what's going to happen. And that paves the way for this introduction for a new character, a new set of characters.

And that includes anxiety one of the main characters that we're looking at in this film.

Yeah, it's kind of like, those are the other things. I don't know if it happened before anxiety or not, but this idea of like, if you remember from video number one, there's these kind of core experiences, like sport island, family island.

And all of a sudden, friend island, like blows up in size and then family island gets like shoved to the back of the mind and Rachel's having a Rachel, you're experiencing this in real time, right?

I am. And I'm grieving this a bit that friend island is flashy and fun and exciting. And you know, I, those willow tree angels used to be popular years ago, family island kind of backs up and it almost looks like this family of willow tree angels in the background.

But I think I've tried to ground myself in knowing that part of that is because of secure attachment that, you know, family island is is able to kind of pull back.

But yes, I think when David and I were discussing this at one of our, our daughter is basketball games and I had my other daughter, he's almost 13 coming up to me, just, you know, scanning my phone, like, have you heard from my, my friend yet? Is she coming with us?

Yeah, this is all playing out as we were talking about friend island.

Yeah, I like that scene as well, David, I'm glad you bought that out because it is such a reality as you're both describing.

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