One of my daughter’s favorite movies recently has been the animated film Encanto. After having mentioning it a few times and listening to the soundtrack quite often around the house, I finally got around to watching it, to understand what moved her in the film. The film is a really brilliant portrayal of the impacts of survival energies and their long-term destructive impacts, even when those survival energies have well-intentioned, good-hearted aims. Survival energies arise in response to trauma and while they may help one survive the trauma, they prevent thriving in the long haul. The fear in letting go of survival energy is that one will return to the collapse of a trauma state but also eventually the pain of the survival energies brings on its own pains. One can feel trapped, unable to move forward yet not being able to turn back. The film navigates the betwixt and between place with great compassion and insight, detailing the extended family of the Madrigals and how this thread of trauma healing and magic weaves through multiple generations.
The film expertly depicts a number of themes covered previously on the site: wholeness; the stages of the transformational process; emotional alchemy; the healing of trauma; the embrace of all the various aspects of oneself into integration.
This piece will review the movie with a focus on its exploration of trauma, transformational healing, and survival energies.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead (Go Watch the Movie First :)
The original trauma in the story involves the present-day grandmother, Alma Madrigal, when she was a young mother. A flashback in the film shows her as a young woman meeting a young man, Pedro, the two falling in love, getting married, and becoming parents (triplets: two girls, one boy). Their lives are tragically torn apart by armed conflict—the details of which are never really specified. But the young couple, along with their infant children, as well others from town flee the war zone as refugees. The civilians are fording a river while being pursued by these enemy forces (who are on horseback and quickly going to overtake them). Pedro, weaponless, turns around and goes back towards the oncoming threat to stall them and give more time for the others to escape and is killed. Just before facing the pursuers, Pedro hands his wife a candle. The young mother, now widowed, falls to her knees crying out in anguish. At that moment, the candle spontaneously becomes powered by a strange glow. This now magical candle changes the landscape, creating a protective shield and cloaking barrier for the young mother, her children, and the other refugees thus saving their lives.
Flash forward to the present the young mother is now a grandmother (Abuela). She’s loving but very stern and she looks to keep order and discipline and the family on what she sees as the right track. Behind her calm but strong profile lies a seething set of emotions: including rage. But mostly she looks to keep the lid closed tightly on those emotions.
There’s an extended family household consisting of Abuela as the matriarch, plus her now adult children, two of whom (the daughters Julieta and Pepa) have married and are parents themselves. There’s grandchildren, siblings, cousins, aunties and uncles. Overall the extended family feels full of joy and love and mutual care.
The candle resides in a special room in the home. The magic channeled through the fire of the candle continues to emit power. The house has magical capacities (due to the candle’s presence) and each of the family members is given a specific magical gift. Abuela refers to the magic as “the miracle.” Every member of the family has a gift except for one grandchild Mirabel, the protagonist (more on her in a second). Such magical gifts include the ability to heal through food (Mirabel’s mom’s gift), supersenory hearing (Mirabel’s cousin Dolores), super-strength (Mirabel’s sister Luisa), and the ability to make flowers and plants spontaneously spring to life (Mirabel’s other sister Isabela).
The town built up within this magical enclosure appears to be thriving. Abuela sees their family as the guardians of this magic and emphasizes how they “must keep the miracle burning” through “hard work and dedication.” Abuela instils a strong sense of social service to the family, which on the surface is a noble intention but as we’ll see, there are cracks in the edifice of this seemingly idyllic scenario.
Mirabel is the first to notice literal cracks forming in the house, a visual metaphor for the cracks beginning to show in the family’s emotional state. In the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of The House of Usher, there’s a play upon the dual meaning of house: 1) the actual building and 2) the family lineage. The building becoming a visual symbol of the inner state of the family’s emotional state. Like The House of Usher, this House too will fall (but, unlike The Ushers, will thankfully be rebuilt on better foundations).
But I’m getting slightly ahead of the story.
There’s an originating trauma—the death of the father/husband protecting his family. There’s a magical intervention and rescue. Alma, a grief stricken widow with three young children does the best she can to somehow give the children love and a happy life. She buries her grief deep down and focuses on the needs of the children.
Alma suffers from survivor’s guilt. Since the original trauma was never healed but rather suppressed it goes underground, like a poison leeching slowly into the groundwater. This unhealed trauma eventually will manifest in the subsequent generations. Alma does not believe they deserved the magical gift. Also how is she to make sense of the fact that the magic only arrived to save them after the death of her husband and why not before so he too could have been spared.
She refers obliquely to “receiving the miracle” but that is only half the story. The story is simultaneously trauma and enigmatic, strange miraculous rescue. The one does not cancel the other out.
Instead of acknowledging the paradoxical simultaneity of this trauma-miracle, Abuela develops a coping strategy. That coping strategy is to seek to earn the grace of the miracle. She does this by instilling in her children and grandchildren a strong service-oriented ethos. The gifts they each receive are meant to be use to build up the community and support others. Again all well intentioned and noble. Certainly it’s a better attitude than using those gifts for self-serving agendas.
But there’s a dark side to this approach; there’s cracks in foundations. That dark side is that the subsequent generations, particularly the grandchildren, have not known a life full of the violence and danger that their grandmother knew and their parents (as very young children) also experienced.
Their experience is that their “gifts” and the family ethos towards the gifts is becoming burdensome for them.
Mirabel, who officially doesn’t have a gift (more on that in a moment), meets up with her older sister Luisa, whose gift is super physical strength. Luisa begins to confide in Mirabel that always having to use her strength to help others is starting to weigh her down. Luisa sings a song called Surface Pressure.
Luisa begins touting her outer strength but quickly the song moves to her inner life which is rife with feelings of worthlessness.
“I’m the strong one, I’m not nervous
I’m as tough as the crust of the earth is
I move mountains, I move churches
And I glow because I know what my worth is.”
Her worth is entirely tied to her outer work. So long as she is powerful and strong externally she feels worthy but this masks an inner set of anxieties.
“But under the surface
I feel berserk as a tight rope walker in a three ring circus…
Under the surface
I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service.”
She refers to the straw that might break the camel’s back (she being the camel of course) as
“Pressure like a drip, drip, drip that’ll never stop.
Pressure that’ll tip, tip, tip to you just go pop…
Who am I if I can’t run with the ball
If I fall?”
She continues:
“Under the surface
I hide my nerves, and it worsens,
I worry something is gonna hurt us…
Under the surface
I think about my purpose,
Can I somehow preserve this?”
Luisa’s intuition is actually on point. Something is going wrong but she’s suppressing it in order to be tough, to put on her “big girl pants.” She has to prove her worth through external validation in order to uphold the family name as servants of the public good. But her identity being subsumed by outer strength is not allowing her to also experience her inner vulnerabilities, worries, and feelings.
This level of suppression is causing her to live in a vigilance energy—the vigilance energy that has powered her grandmother. Survival strategies, aka coping mechanisms or vigilance energy, are meant to be short-term emergency protocols. Those survival strategies allowed Luisa’s Abuela to survive incomprehensible loss and tragedy and still raise children who in turn raise their children with love.
Unfortunately those temporary vigilance energies can become the default setting. They stay past their “best buy date” and, like milk, turn sour. Luisa’s inner angst is a sign something is very wrong with those whole setup.
The confusion of vigilance energies and generally speaking positive coping strategies—like being a helpful person—easily becomes confused with one’s purpose. That confusion has led Luisa to question if she has any value or worth as a human other than to carry heavy burdens. Her purpose is not in her being but only in her external doing, creating an incredible strain and stress on her being (the pressure).
Following in the line of her family, she continues to simply toughen up and push the feelings down.
Except for one brief fantasy-like moment where Luisa imagines another possibility. The music changes to a more uplifting tone as she contemplates life outside the bubble of vigilance energy:
“But wait, if I could shake
The crushing weight
Of expectations, would that free up some room for joy
Or relaxation or simple pleasure?”
Her question is most definitely answered in the affirmative. Survival strategies are meant to be short term emergency protocols as I mentioned. They are after all about surviving. But what they can not do is help us thrive after the threat is over. The threat is definitely over for La Familia Madrigal but they are still acting as if they are under threat. The strain of that vigilance energy is cracking the tough outer shell of Luisa, just like the spreading cracks in their home itself. Only when survival energies are calmed, soothed, and turned off, do the more natural generative energies of joy, relaxation, and simple pleasure come online. Those functions are turned off so long as survival is the number one objective. There’s no time for rest, relaxation, pleasure, joy, creativity, and the like when needing to survive.
Though the family appears to be happy they are running on vigilance energies. Their internal dashboards are starting to flash warning signals that are being ignored.
This same stress is negatively affecting Luisa and Mirabel’s other sister, Isabela.
Mirabel goes to visit Isabel. Isabel has been, in Mirabel’s words, “the perfect golden child.” She’s the beauty in contrast to Luisa’s brawn with Mirabel feeling the ugly duckling, the outsider because of her seeming lack of a magical power. Mirabel harbors jealousy towards Isabel due to Isabel’s supposedly perfect golden aura-ed life.
Isabel’s gift is to have flowers spring up wherever she walks. But as Mirabel will soon learn, her sister feels imprisoned by having to be perfect and never being able to make a mistake or try something new or learn to grow. While Isabel’s inner pain, manifests slightly differently than that of her sisters, its roots are in the same fundamental denial of the lights and shadows of life characteristic of vigilance energies.
Isabel sings a song—entitled What Else Can I Do?—which reveals Isabela’s inner world, shocking Mirabel initially but eventually allowing the two to put aside their conflict and understand each other and embrace in love as sisters.
Isabela begins:
“I just make something unexpected
Something sharp, something new
It’s not symmetrical or perfect
But it’s beautiful, and it’s mine
What else can I do?”
The sharp, imperfect yet beautiful, unexpected thing arises when Isabela finally breaks through her perfect outer wall and feels her feelings. Isabela’s angry (note again the grandmother’s hidden rage) and her anger brings forward a different kind of flower. Something with thorns, something irregular, reflecting her anger and yet somehow, in its own way, right and true and beautiful.
She continues,
“I grow rows and rows of roses
Flor de mayo, by the mile.
I make practiced, perfect poses
So much hides behind my smile.”
While Luisa, though a young woman, has to hold up the classically more masculine image of toughness and strength, Isabela is beholden to the more classically feminine stereotypes of being dainty, beautiful yet fragile (like a flower). Instead Isabela wants to bring to life vines, shrubs, and other assorted wild things. By the end of the song she’s dyed her hair a wild combination of vivid colors.
The answer to the question of “What else can I do?” is to follow the deep creative impulse and longing in each moment, even if wild and not perfectly colored within the lines.
Isabela’s grandmother has all but arranged a marriage for her to the scion of a prosperous important family in town. The marriage seems political. Isabela, with her perfect practiced poses, plays along but deep down does not love her fiancé.
As Mirabel is meeting her with sisters and learning about their inner pain, she starts to notice more and more the cracks appearing on the walls of the house. Others are not seeing them (though as we saw Luisa has some inkling of them) but ultimately Mirabel is blamed as the troublemaker, with her grandmother telling her this is all in her head.
Mirabel eventually decides to break the last and greatest of the family taboos—seeking to learn the whereabouts of her Uncle Bruno. Bruno, the lone son of the triplets, fled some years ago, for reasons unknown. The song We Don’t Talk About Bruno shows the family’s coping strategy of shutting down any discussion of Bruno.
Bruno’s power was to be able to see the future. Instead of being seen as a visionary he was blamed for the bad things he predicted that came to pass. The truth is that he foresaw a coming family disaster and realized that Mirabel would be blamed so he goes into hiding to protect her.
Bruno is the lone boy of the three children in his generation. He becomes the black sheep of the family rather than seek to fight his mother’s suppressed emotions (the true source of the cracks forming in the edifice). While his twin sisters manage to stay connected to their mother and the larger family (becoming themselves mothers), Bruno seems to experience the loss of his father most particularly. The family repeats the now two-generational pattern of a a missing male presence.
Eventually the house does start to crumble and while Mirabel makes a heroic attempt to save the candle, it eventually goes out. Mirabel takes on a false sense of responsibility and blame and runs away.
She ends up running to the very spot where the initial trauma of her grandfather’s murder takes place. As it often happens individuals find themselves “returning to the scene of the crime” either literally or figuratively by enacting similar storylines in their own lives. The trauma is trying to come back into conscious awareness to be healed but just as easily can simple be a case of re-traumatization passing down from one generation to the next.
Abuela confesses that she had been given a miracle, a second chance at life, but she lost sight of the purpose for which the miracle existed. She apologizes to Mirabel and the trauma spell is finally broken. Mirabel wisely tells her grandmother that it was her survival energies that saved them and let them become a family.
Both statements are powerfully true. Abuela’s love and dedication did save her family through a profound horror. And (not but) her survivor’s guilt came at a price. Survival energies are laid to sleep not by making them wrong but by honoring them and giving them the proper hero’s salute they deserve but also for the survival energies to be told that the war is over and it’s time to relax.
The final song All Of You speaks to this healed, whole, integrated state.
Abuela sings,
“The miracle is not,
Some magic that you’ve got
The miracle is you. (All of you).”
The rest of the village comes to the family rebuild their home. When one takes on the survival energy of being the helper and healer for others it becomes very hard to receive true genuine support from others. As the foundations are literally and symbolically being rebuilt, they are rebuilt on a proper balance of giving and receiving.
All of You has a double meaning. All of You, in part, refers to the whole family as well as the larger community—the you being plural. The song includes the reconciliation of Bruno to the family. But also All of You refers to the many parts of each person—you in the singular. I’ve written about the many different attributes and parts and their integration previously.
The family acknowledges Mirabel’s courage and leadership during this transitional time by having her place the door knob on the newly rebuilt front door. This act heals Mirabel’s deep wounding—that she didn’t receive a gift (it would seem) when she was young. Each person in the house who received their gift had a special door that acted as a passageway to the special world of their gift. Mirabel’s door never unlocked.
Earlier in the film Mirabel sings a song called Waiting on a Miracle, a song expressing her sorrow of not receiving a gift and feeling like an outsider. That song is the sharing of her inner world in the same vein as her sisters’ songs.
Mirabel looks into the reflection of the brass door knob. Her grandmother asks her what she sees. Mirabel answers, “all of me.” She finally sees herself for who she is, whole, imperfect, flawed, but also, in her own way, magical.
When Mirabel places the door knob the house comes back to life. Her gift was the most enigmatic and perhaps powerful of all: to intuit the pain and bring it forth and then bring it to healing for herself and the rest of the family. Mirabel, whose name means wonder (another word for miracle by the way), has undergone her own courageous healing process which has in turn led to the healing of the wider family.