47: Join Ariel, Stef, and special guest Helen Garcia from Yellow Chair Collective for a heartfelt, hilarious, and insightful discussion on Inside Out 2 and the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence. This episode unpacks how the film portrays anxiety, perfectionism, and identity shifts with surprising nuance, and why so many of us saw our younger (and current) selves in Riley’s journey. Whether you cried, cringed, or left the theater texting your therapist, this episode holds space for it all!

00:00 Hosts and guest intros
01:10 Inside Out 2, its massive marketing push, and what got left behind
04:00 Spoiler warning and movie synopsis
06:00 Anxiety’s debut and the anatomy of a panic attack
09:00 When Joy can’t reach Anxiety—symbolism of helplessness
11:00 Emotion combos, Internal Family Systems theory, and dynamic identity
14:00 The evolving sense of self and grounding techniques
17:00 Cultural misattunement during puberty (e.g., immigrant family dynamics)
20:00 Why Riley’s experience didn’t feel universal for everyone
22:00 Cultural TikToks reimagining emotions: Wu Ting, Honor, Filial Piety
24:00 Core belief shifts: “I’m not enough” and perfectionism
27:00 Visual art therapy and naming personal narratives
30:00 Complexity vs. affirmation-only approaches
32:00 Revisiting Joy, Sadness, and emotional integration
34:00 Classroom tools for building identity through the school year
37:00 Changing education systems and honoring the whole child
39:00 Perfectionism as a survival response in racialized and immigrant communities
42:00 Reflections on gamification, experiential learning, and emotional literacy
47:00 Symbolic meanings in control boards and character design
51:00 Are we all driven by one dominant emotion?
54:00 The fragility of identity and metaphor of the belief system design
56:00 Ice skating, burnout, and overachievement culture
58:00 Sports as metaphor for identity, connection, and drive
59:00 Where to find Yellow Chair Collective and final thoughts

Speaker 1 0:00
Shrink wrap radio, number 300 on the neuroscience of dreaming with Robert Haas.

Speaker 2 0:07
Shrink wrap radio, all the psychology you need to know, and just enough to make it dangerous. It’s all in your head. And now here’s your host, Dr Dave music.

Speaker 1 0:27
My return guest today, after a long absence, is Robert J Haas and we’ll be discussing recent developments in the neuroscience of dreaming. Robert Haas MS is author of the book Dream language. He’s also a director and past president of the International Association for the Study of dreams. He’s on the faculty at Hayden Institute for Dream leadership training and a former adjunct faculty for Dream studies at such institutions as Sonoma State University, Richland College and Scottsdale College, a former corporate executive scientist and researcher with training in Gestalt and humanistic psychology, he now devotes his skills to dream studies for which he has been a frequent guest on radio and TV and an internationally acclaimed lecturer and instructor for over 30 years. His unique, simple but powerful dream work approach is based on his training in Gestalt therapy and background in Jungian studies the neurobiology of dreaming, plus his pioneering research on the significance of color in dreams. Now here’s the interview. Bob Haas, welcome back to shrink wrap radio. Well, thank you. It’s great to be back. Yeah, it’s been five years since you were here, back on episode number 90, announcing the 2007 dreams conference and speaking about the language of dreams. Now this is going to be episode number 300 and you can help me celebrate, yeah, you can help me celebrate our 300th shrink wrap radio. And of course, after our interview, I’ll ask you to say a few words about the upcoming 29th annual iasd conference. That’s the International Association for the Study of dreams. But before we get into that, I understand you’ve been doing some work on recent developments in the neuroscience of dreaming.

Speaker 3 2:27
Yes, there’s a tremendous amount of interesting stuff going on now, particularly since over the last decade, certain researchers have been able to use brain scan equipment, PET scans, MRI, things of that sort, or fMRI, to understand what Saturn’s of the brain are active and inactive during the dreaming. Tremendous amount of research out there, and I basically just been kind of compiling it and reporting on it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 2:57
yeah. And you’ve done a terrific job. You sent me a couple of articles that that you’ve written, and very impressive. So what are some of the more exciting things that neurological research has discovered about the dreaming brain?

Speaker 3 3:10
Well, just just kind of going into past history, way back in 1952 the discovery of REM occurred, and at that point in time, we suddenly realized that we dream a great deal of our evening two hours, or roughly for adults, about 24% of our sleep time is spent in in dreaming, or in vivid dreaming. What is what typically happens in what’s known as the REM state, which is a rapid eye movement, but now what? What’s happened during through a lot of other testing and research has been done, as they found that we really dream throughout the entire night, even outside of REM state. However, the Dreaming is the dreaming that we think of as dreaming, which is the more vivid dreams and all still occur during this, this REM state. So there’s been a lot of focus with with brain scan type research on neuroscience, on the REM state as being more associated with the kind of vivid dreams that we typically think of. And what has occurred is that the researchers have found that during our this REM state or this more vivid dream state? A great deal of our brain is active. It’s actually awake. And there are other parts of the brain that are that the activity is diminished in or they’re relatively asleep, and they really create the sort of characteristics we see in a dream, for example, the parts of the brain that tend to be asleep, if I can use that simple term when we dream, are the parts of the frontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is our thinking brain, and the rational thinking part of our brain. If. And other areas like motion and parts of the brain responsible for waking consciousness remain pretty much inactive, and what that does is it tends to make our dreams the kind of bizarre characteristics that that we see in our dreams we because there’s no rational filtering going on or rational directing of the dream activities so dreams can hyper Connect.

Speaker 1 5:27
Yeah. Is that because that prefrontal part of the brain that you were talking about is asleep?

Speaker 3 5:34
Yeah, the dorsalatal prefrontal cortex is a part of the frontal cortex that really is responsible for our rational thought, and that tends to be inactive. But now that the a whole bunch of centers are active in our dreams, for instance, in particular, the emotional processing, the emotional brain, the emotional part of our brain, called the limbic system, is highly active, also parts of the frontal cortex, lower frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, which deal with analytical problem solving, learning and problem solving, about those kinds of activities, are quite active. And the really interesting thing is that our visual our primary visual cortex, is not active, the part we see with which is interesting because we’re seeing our dreams. How...