Behind the Glow

   I watched Encanto, the Disney movie, again last week with my children. I have lost count of how many times I have seen it now. And yet something landed differently this time, something I had felt before but never quite found the words for.

   Everyone in that family has their own battle. And nobody is allowed to say so.

   That is what Encanto is really about, underneath the magic and the music and the colour. It is about a family so busy performing its miracle that it has forgotten to ask whether anyone inside it is actually alright. And it is one of the most quietly precise portraits of family systems I have ever seen, not in a textbook, not in a clinical paper, but in an animated film that my children watch with joy while I sit beside them and feel something much more complicated.

   I want to walk through that family one person at a time. Not to analyse a film, but because I recognise these people. I meet versions of them in my consulting room. I have been a version of some of them myself.

   Luisa carries everything. Literally and otherwise. Her gift is physical strength, and the family has arranged itself around her capacity to bear weight without complaint. She moves mountains, redirects rivers, relocates entire buildings, and she does it all with a smile that is fixed just a little too firmly in place. Nobody asks how she is. Why would they? She is strong. She can handle it.

   What nobody sees is what is happening underneath that smile. The anxiety that visits her at night. The terror of what would happen if, just once, she put something down and did not pick it back up. Her worth has been so completely tied to her usefulness that she has lost access to the part of herself that exists when nobody needs anything from her.

   I feel Luisa every time I watch this film. Not physically, but in the particular exhaustion of being the one who carries, the one others lean on, the one for whom the expectations never seem to find a natural limit. There is a version of Luisa in every family, and a particular version in families where there is only one child, where the whole weight of hope and pride and need lands on a single pair of shoulders with nowhere else to go.

   Isabella is the other side of the same coin, though her prison looks very different from the outside. She is beautiful, graceful, effortless. Everything she touches blooms. The family adores her, holds her up as its jewel, and in doing so has locked her inside a version of herself that was never fully real. She grows roses because roses are what the family needs from her. What she actually wants to grow is wilder, stranger, more honest. Thorns and cacti and colours that do not match anyone's idea of perfection.

   The moment Isabella discovers she can grow something other than roses is one of the most moving moments in the film. Not because she becomes free immediately, but because she realises for the first time that there was a self underneath the performance. A self she had never been permitted to meet.

   Between Luisa's impossible strength and Isabella's impossible perfection stands Mirabel, the one who received no gift at all. Or so the family believes. Mirabel does not move mountains or grow flowers or control the weather. She has no door, no power, no place in the family's framework for what value looks like. And so she is quietly, persistently, painfully excluded. Not cruelly. Just inevitably, the way systems exclude what they cannot categorise.

   But Mirabel is the only one who can see the cracks. The only one willing to follow the truth even when everyone around her is looking away. Her gift is perception, courage, and love that does not require anyone to be more than they are. She does not need a cape to be a hero. She never did. The family simply did not have the eyes to see it.

   Then there is Bruno. The one they do not talk about. His gift is seeing the future, which sounds extraordinary until you understand what it actually means. It means he sees painful things before anyone is ready to hear them. It means the truth he carries is unwelcome. And so the family does what families do when something is too uncomfortable to hold. They externalise it. They give it a name and a face and a door, and they shut that door and agree, collectively and silently, never to open it again.

   Bruno's exclusion is not just a family drama. It is a clinical portrait of denial. Not the denial of one person, but the denial of an entire system, sustained by everyone's participation, disguised as protection, and passed off as simply the way things are. He lives in the walls of his own home for decades, still warm, still loving, feeding rats and telling himself stories because the need for connection is so deeply human that even the most rejected person finds a way to keep it alive in secret.

   And at the centre of all of it, Abuela. The one from whom everything flows, including the wound.

   Her story is devastating. She lost her husband on the night everything fell apart. She fled with nothing, carrying three infants and an unimaginable grief. She built the miracle, the house, the family's gifts, from the rubble of that loss. Her strength is not a performance. It is survival made permanent.

   But what she never did was grieve. What she never allowed herself was the full weight of what she lost. Instead she converted that pain into purpose, into control, into a family system so rigid and so oriented around performance that it began cracking from the inside. The crack in their Casita is not a structural problem. It is the physical expression of everything the family has been refusing to feel.

   Her suffering was real. Her loss was genuine. And yet, and this is perhaps the hardest thing to say with compassion and mean it, her pain did not give her the right to bleed on others. Understanding why someone became who they are does not erase what that cost everyone around them. We can hold both truths at the same time. We can honour the wound and still name what it produced.

   This is what intergenerational trauma looks like when it is not processed. It does not disappear. It becomes the architecture. It becomes the expectations Luisa cannot put down and the roses Isabella cannot stop growing and the silence nobody breaks about Bruno and the door Mirabel was never given.

   Every family has its Abuela. Every family system has an original wound that gets passed down in the language of expectation, control, and silence. And every family has its Mirabel, the one who feels the cracks, who cannot pretend they are not there, who loves everyone enough to walk toward the truth even when it costs her everything.

   Sometimes, and this is perhaps the hardest truth of all, healing requires letting the house fall. Not because destruction is the goal, but because some foundations are built on denial and performance and unprocessed pain rather than on truth. And a house built on those things will keep cracking no matter how many mountains Luisa moves or how many roses Isabella grows. The miracle returns in Encanto only after Casita falls completely, after there is nothing left to protect or perform. It is in the rubble, with every illusion gone, that the family finally sees each other clearly for the first time. That is terrifying. It is also, sometimes, the only way through. In my work as a clinician I have sat with people at exactly that moment, when everything they built their life around has collapsed, and I have learned to recognise it not only as devastation but as the first honest ground they have ever stood on. You cannot build something healthy on a foundation that was never true. Sometimes you have to let it fall before you can finally build something that lasts.

   I watched this film last week with my children and I felt, as I always do, that it was made for anyone who has ever carried more than their share. Anyone who has performed strength or perfection so long they forgot what it felt like to simply be. Anyone who was excluded not because they lacked something but because the people around them lacked the eyes to see what they were offering.

    If you are reading this and you recognise yourself in any of these characters, I want to say something simple.

   You do not have to keep carrying what was never yours to carry alone. The expectations others place on your life are loud, but they are not the ones who will live it. You are. And only you will bear the weight of the choices you make or fail to make on your own behalf.

   People can judge your life all they want. But it is you who will live it. You alone who will bear its consequences.

   That is true for any of us. Even the ones who were given a magical gift. Even the ones who were not.

This piece reflects personal observations and clinical reflections. It is not intended as a clinical assessment of any individual or creative work.

© Dr. Saoussen Chebaiki (Sue), July 2026. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced without the author's written permission.