What Inside Out 2 Teaches Children About Emotions: A Therapist’s Guide

Written by Dr. Laura Mraz, OTD, OTR/L
President, Illinois Occupational Therapy Association (ILOTA)

Every therapist knows the moment. You walk into a session with a plan, your materials ready, and your goals mapped out. Then your client smiles and asks, “Did you see Inside Out 2?”

And suddenly, your best therapy tool isn’t sitting in your treatment bag. It’s the movie they’re already excited to talk about.

That’s the magic of using trending media in practice. It gives us a shared language, familiar characters, and a natural way to explore big emotions. Emotional intelligence, understanding our feelings and responding thoughtfully to the feelings of others, is at the heart of so much of what we do.

Inside Out 2 does this beautifully. It opens the door to conversations about anxiety, self-awareness, confidence, and resilience in a way that feels fun, relatable, and anything but clinical.

And let’s be honest, any movie that allows us to ask, “What do you think Anxiety was trying to do?” has already done half the work for us.

Let’s explore how this movie supports emotional intelligence, how you can bring it into your practice with intention, and why trending media is one of the most effective tools we have for our clients, especially neurodiverse learners.

Why Inside Out Matters in Therapy

The original Inside Out introduced children to Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. These characters made emotions visible. They made feelings understandable. Most importantly, they made internal experiences external, which is exactly what we try to do every single day in our sessions.

Inside Out taught children that emotions are not good or bad. They’re simply part of being human. It showed that Sadness has a real purpose. It showed that Joy cannot run the whole show alone. It reminded us that our memories are shaped by emotion and that emotional intelligence is essential for well being. Many of us watched that first film and thought that we’d finally seen a story that explains co-regulation better than any textbook.

Co-regulation, or the way a calm and connected adult helps a child settle their nervous system, is the quiet foundation of emotional development. When we sit beside a dysregulated child and lend them our steadiness, we’re doing exactly what the film illustrates so beautifully. Inside Out gave us a visual for that work, and its sequel gives us even more.

What Inside Out 2 Adds for Therapists

Inside Out 2 introduces four new emotions: Anxiety, Envy, Ennui, and Embarrassment. If you work with children, you’ve likely met all four of these before nine in the morning.

Anxiety arrives with a plan, a backup plan, and a backup plan for the backup plan. Envy appears with wide eyes and a constant, aching sense that someone else has something better. Ennui floats in with a bored sigh and a complete lack of interest in anything you might suggest. Embarrassment hides inside his own hoodie and hopes with all his heart that no one notices him.

Here’s why these characters are such a gift in our work:

• They externalize complex emotions: A child can point to a character on the screen and say, “That is how I feel,” which is often far easier than describing the feeling from scratch.
• They normalize emotional diversity: Seeing so many emotions share one control panel reassures children that having big, mixed feelings is completely ordinary.
• They reduce shame: When Anxiety is a well meaning character rather than a personal flaw, difficult feelings become something to understand instead of something to hide.
• They build shared language: You and your client now have the same vocabulary, which makes every conversation that follows a little smoother.
• They connect the inside to the outside: These characters help children bridge what they feel internally with the behaviors we observe externally.

This is emotional intelligence work made accessible, and it happens while your client feels like they’re simply chatting about a movie they love.

Why Trending Media Works So Well in Therapy

We often reach for trending media because it does so much of the relational heavy lifting for us. Children already understand the characters. Families already know the storyline, which makes carryover at home so much easier. The visuals make abstract concepts concrete, humor lowers defenses, and shared cultural references build rapport before you’ve even opened your session notes.

Inside Out 2 is especially useful because it tracks real developmental experiences. Anxiety tends to grow as children age. Embarrassment becomes more prominent as social awareness sharpens. Envy grows more layered and complicated. Ennui shows up during transitions or plain emotional fatigue. The movie lets us name and explore these experiences without singling any child out, and that safety is where genuine progress begins.

Clinical Applications of Inside Out 2

Once you start watching the film through a clinical lens, the applications keep revealing themselves. Here are a few of the richest.

Emotional identification. Pause a scene and ask a few gentle questions. Who is driving Riley’s actions right now? Which emotion has taken the lead? And most importantly, what does that emotion actually need? This kind of guided noticing helps children identify feelings in themselves and in others, which is the very first building block of emotional intelligence.

Cognitive reframing. Anxiety’s catastrophizing, or her habit of imagining every worst case scenario at once, is a perfect teaching moment. Together with your client you can ask what Anxiety is trying to protect, what a more helpful thought might sound like, and what Joy or Sadness might say if they got a turn at the controls. This gently builds cognitive flexibility, or the ability to shift our thinking when our first take is not serving us well.

Behavioral modeling. Embarrassment and his hoodie give us an opening to teach coping strategies, grounding techniques, and self compassion. Envy’s longing glances open the door to gratitude, perspective taking, and value based decision making. Because the characters model both the struggle and the recovery, children get to see emotional skills in motion rather than as abstract advice.

Sensory and emotional co-regulation. Ennui’s flat disengagement is a wonderful entry point into conversations about sensory overload, emotional fatigue, and even burnout. From there you can explore concrete strategies for re-engagement that fit the child in front of you. In many ways, the whole film functions as a visual map of emotional regulation, and children can follow that map far more readily than a printed chart.

Six Practical Ways to Bring Inside Out 2 Into Sessions

Let’s get concrete. These approaches adapt across school based practice, outpatient settings, and home programs.

• Watch together: Use short, carefully chosen clips during a session. Pause often and discuss what each emotion is doing and why. Preview anything that might be activating, especially the panic sequence, so you’re ready to support big feelings if they surface.
• Identify and label: Invite your client to name their own emotions using the characters. Putting a face to a feeling reduces shame and increases clarity, and it gives you both a starting point for deeper work.
• Role play the head office: Build small scenarios around the new emotions and practice responses together. This is a lovely fit for group work, where children rehearse perspective taking and problem solving in a low pressure, playful frame.
• Emotion journals: Encourage your client to draw or write about their emotional experiences, using the characters as prompts. This supports self reflection and gives you a window into their inner world between sessions.
• Creative expression: Reach for art. Draw the characters, build collages, or sketch a personal control panel showing who tends to be at the controls and who gets overlooked. This connects naturally to goals around self awareness, fine motor skills, and executive function.
• Open dialogue: Use a single scene to spark honest conversation about real life. When a child sees Riley wobble and recover, it becomes so much easier for them to talk about their own wobbles.

Every one of these targets measurable outcomes, from emotional identification and regulation to social participation and self advocacy. Anchor each activity to a documented goal so your creativity holds up in your notes. Meeting a child inside their own cultural world is not a gimmick. It’s thoughtful, evidence informed practice.

Challenges You May Face

Teaching emotional intelligence is deeply rewarding, though it’s not always simple. Some families still view emotional expression as a weakness rather than a strength. Some schools lack structured emotional learning programs. And some caregivers genuinely want to help but feel unsure where to begin.

This is where we get to lead with warmth and patience. You can offer plain language teaching about how emotions and the nervous system work, so families feel informed rather than lectured. You can model emotional language in front of caregivers, create safe spaces where expression is welcomed, and support families as they build emotional literacy at home. When the moment calls for it, you can advocate for social and emotional learning in your local schools. Trending media helps bridge every one of these gaps, because it starts a conversation that families are already halfway into.

Recommended Resources for Therapists

To extend the themes in Inside Out 2, a few favorites are worth keeping close.

For picture books, consider The Color Monster by Anna Llenas, In My Heart by Jo Witek, and A Little SPOT of Emotion by Diane Alber.

Each one gives children an accessible way to name and sort their feelings.

For your own continuing education, look into RULER Emotional Literacy Training from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, the social and emotional learning resources offered through CASEL, and introductory courses that help caregivers support emotional development at home.

These pair beautifully with the ideas in the film and deepen your own toolkit at the same time.

Bringing It Home

Inside Out 2 is so much more than entertainment. It’s a clinical tool, and a generous one. It hands us a shared language for feelings that often seem too big or too tangled to explain. It helps children understand themselves. It helps families build emotional literacy together. And it reminds all of us, therapists very much included, that emotions are not problems to fix. They’re experiences to understand, honor, and learn from.

We don’t help our clients thrive by teaching them to feel only Joy. We help them build a control panel where every emotion has a seat and a voice. So the next time a child mentions the movie, lean in and ask who is running their console today. You may discover a session that moves further than any worksheet ever could.

Your creativity is one of your greatest clinical assets, and stories like this one give it somewhere wonderful to go. Let’s keep finding the tools our clients hand us, and let’s use them well, together.

Frequently Asked Questions

What if a family hasn’t seen the film or doesn’t have access to it?

You don’t need the movie in the room for this approach to work. The characters and their emotional roles are easy to describe in a sentence or two, and many children already know them from trailers, merchandise, or friends. A simple drawing of the control panel or a printed character card is enough to open the conversation. The film is a doorway, not a requirement.

Is Inside Out 2 appropriate for all age groups on my caseload? The film resonates most naturally with children ages seven and up, though the emotional concepts translate across a wide range of developmental levels. For younger children, focus on the original cast of Joy, Sadness, and Anger before layering in the new emotions. For older adolescents and even adults, the Anxiety storyline in particular opens rich conversations about self regulation and identity. As always, screen for individual fit and be ready to support strong emotional responses, especially during the panic sequence.

How do I document sessions that use media like Inside Out 2 in my clinical notes?

Anchor the activity to a specific, measurable goal in your session plan before you begin. In your note, describe the skill you targeted, such as emotional identification or cognitive flexibility, the activity you used, and what you observed. “Client used character references from a film clip to identify and label three emotional states” holds up in documentation and supports reimbursement just as well as any structured worksheet.

Do I need to show the whole film in a session to make this work?

Not at all. Short, carefully chosen clips of two to five minutes are often more effective than a full viewing. The goal is to pause, reflect, and connect, not to run a movie night. A single scene with Anxiety at the controls can open more conversation than an entire screening if you use it with intention.