DIRECTOR'S CUT: Therapist Reacts to ONWARD

Something that's really powerful to me about that ending part with Barley meeting his dad is that we're watching it from Ian's perspective, so we don't really know what's happening. When we see Barley and their dad hug, it's like, "aww, he finally got to say goodbye, he's getting his closure, etc." And then when Barley tells him what happened, we find out that the hug was acually for Ian as much as for Barley.; I think there's something so beautiful about that--that even meeting Barley was the one who got to see him, he still found a way to give his love to Ian. And the way they hug mirrors the exact way Barley and their dad hugged: with the person initiating it first, and the other person stunned and emotional for a moment before slowly reciprocating it. Their dad gave Barley a hug to then give to Ian as *his* father father figure and I'm not crying, you're crying

I hope it is okay if I share this here, but rewatching this video just got me weeping. I had a stillbirth almost a year ago now, and around two months later, my grandmother died. During the time in between, I did not manage to visit my grandmother or even talk to her longer than a few minutes on the phone. Every time I was about to go visit her, she would call me on the same day and cancel because she was not feeling well. I did not want to do it over the phone, which means I never talked to her about what happened with my daughter. I regret that so much because she was such a wonderfully rational person, in contrast to me being very emotional. I would still love to know what she would have said to me and right now, I really wish something like what happens in this (wonderful) movie could be real. 🥲 Also, about keeping your distance after somebody close to you lost someone because you don't know what to say: After my stillbirth, most of my friends sent their condolences and told me to reach out if I needed anything and then just kind of went away. I felt really lonely because I did not have the strength to initiate any conversations myself, but I actually needed someone other than my boyfriend or my therapist to talk to. I think I was also too proud to admit that, and I did not want to bother anyone. I know people grieve very differently, but I think what helped me the most during that time was the one friend who would still message me and ask me how I was doing. Ultimately, we would often end up talking about her problems and me giving her advice. That was just the perfect distraction for me. So, if you have a friend in such a situation, I would recommend sending a short text message to them from time to time, just to let them know you are thinking about them. I think that if they would rather be left alone, they will just ignore the message anyway, but if they are anything like me, they will appreciate the gesture.

I haven't seen Onward, but will rectify that soon. [Sorry, this is a long one, I hope that's okay.] I follow and support CT for various reasons, one being the constant reinforcement of the importance of being centered on self. I've spent time analyzing things from when I was growing up. Having more information now has helped me shift my perspective and open me up to things that I never realized. (CT helps a lot too.) I never really struggled with trying to "find myself." I've always just kind of taken things as they are, so I accept reality as it is rather than overlay my preferences on it. That doesn't mean standing by as terrible things happen. I am a meliorist, only we can solve our problems. My identity struggle came from not really having a community, so I learned early on to rely on myself. This was mixed with moving a lot (16 times in 15 years by the age of 21, 7 of those years in 2 places), being a gamer when playing D&D made you a social pariah and the whole Satanic Panic BS, and becoming a christian right at the beginning of my teens. Bad idea. That dropped the entire "you are worthless without god complex" right on top of normal teenage angst and learning to hate myself for things that are natural. I also never had a mentor in life. My parents divorced when we were young, and we grew up with the damage inflicted upon society during the "good ol' days" when America was Great; when racism was fashionable and beating your wife and kids was "a family matter." The band-aid to that was the Civil Rights movement, and we grew up believing the hollow words that everyone was equal and people were just fine. (The words were true, but the people saying them parroted them without believing them. Regardless, I believe them unwaveringly.) And the Brady Bunch just taught me that you started off in the mail room and moved up when your talent got noticed. I guess you could say TV was my mentor. In short, I was an ignorant mess. I suffered for decades under all of this. I learned to hate myself. I took on board every criticism and amplified it into self-loathing. One year, I made a New Years Resolution, which I had always avoided: I would stop insulting myself. I was mostly successful. Whenever I started, I would cut myself off. But I wasn't dealing with it in a healthy way. Stopping myself was just a step. It was all dammed up. Then in March, the dam burst. One day, I couldn't sleep and I couldn't stop myself. I just went all in and dove deep into shredding my psyche. I lay in bed for hours when I should have been sleeping for my night shift. I tore into myself, rabid and gleefully unrestrained. Wolverine couldn't do this much damage. I did not spare myself from anything. The more I indulged my self-destruction, the greater the conflagration that burned through me. Every crevice of my mind, every mistake I had harbored, every failure I committed, every stupid word I said, using them all, each compounding on the previous as weapons to tear down even more. How I didn't wind up committing suicide, I don't know. Suicide and death ideation were not insignificant parts of my psyche. They helped me overcome a lot of fears. When I had burned through everything, eradicating even the dust of who I was, the only thing that remained were the words, "None of that is true." They were just that simple. They weren't a lie. Nor were they pretentious. I wasn't trying to deceive myself; I had nowhere to hide and nothing to hide behind. I wasn't even being exposed. The words weren't even trying to save me from myself. They were just truth. Nothing more. Even though I had not slept at all, removing the decades-old burden of self-loathing filled me with massive amounts of energy, I was more awake and aware the entire 12 hours than I has ever been. (Then I crashed after 36 hours of being awake and slept like a baby.) Regardless, I would never recommend such an extreme purging of the soul. A few years later, my accepting-reality-as-it-is grew into full blown evidence-based skepticism. Carl Sagan was an important influence on me, and still is today. My false religious beliefs evaporated, I was a christian because of social influence; it was the proper thing to do even if it wasn't me. About this time I became a parent. I started to actively form my identity rather than leave it solely to happenstance and society. I became a humanist since it aligned with the tenets, philosophies, ideologies, and core beliefs that I already held. Part of my self-actualization is changing my vocabulary. I don't seek to be right, instead be better. My soul is who I am. My spirit is the expression of my soul. I separate ideas from my identity and hold them in different layers of importance - not everything is equal, the more important stuff is closer to the core of who I am. I am not my job, I bring who I am to my job; it's reflected in my work. I'm still working on changing the defaults (the fast thinking) that years of self-loathing programmed into me. I still encounter things that cut through everything to those defaults. Now, I've learned to examine them critically and actively choose a better way. This helps to prevent me from making the same mistake again. I learned to value learning and boredom. I maintain my sense of wonder, feed my curiosity, and explore things regardless of anything to stoke my creativity. I read and study more today than I ever did in school. Skepticism taught me not to commit the Fundamental Attribution Error, basically, I don't know what's going on in someone else's mind. I can speculate and I might be right, but there's more that I am entirely unaware of. When I look at my own experience and all the suffering in silence I endured unnecessarily, I know others are, so I extend grace rather than impose my ignorance upon them. I recently read The Way of Integrity. It has a lot of great things to say on how to reach the point where "To thine own self be true" aren't just words (or an excuse to be a dick). The last couple of chapters get too woowoo for my preference, but it doesn't detract from the previous parts. Instead of pursuing everything society tells us we need to be happy (money, fame, awards, material, sex, money, recognition, prestige, money), pursue what is true to you, even if (when, actually) it conflicts with the social structure imposed upon us. I define myself and find what's out there and see how it connects with me. And I balance who I am with how I believe society perceives me. Like the yin and the yang, they feed into each other. We have thousands of these feedback loops. When things aren't right, I tweak the balance to improve the outcome. Thank you CT, you've helped me a lot.

FYI my brother storyboarded that scene where he figures out his brother is his dad. I get emotional every time

I can't believe this directors' cut slipped through the cracks for me!! Onward is criminally underrated, and the story personally means a lot to my siblings and me. Onward got put on disney+ in the midst of my parents' divorce, and I remember being 19 and watching it with my sister (14) and my brother (9) in our living room. I can count on my fingers how many times I've seen my sister cry, and when we got to the "share my life with him" montage, she wept. Afterwards, I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, and she said, "Tres, it's us." Needless to say, then we were both crying, my brother was confused, and Onward is in my top 5 Pixar films.

It means so much to me when Jonathan speaks about grief/loss and the life changes that come from losing someone close. I was in my twenty’s when my father passed away and I saw this movie the day after his funeral. It was so comforting to see characters that reflected my emotions and to have that experience validated by this video.

Shared the YouTube video with a friend who’s missing her dad right now, and decided to watch this on Patreon. Still need to watch the movie Onward, but such a good episode! I love the mom in the movie, thanks for sharing about your families Jono and Alan 😊

There is nothing wrong with being happy for someone else, when they get/have what we don't - Romans 12:15 - Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.

It's disappointing to realize a lot of people thought Onward somehow had a bad ending. I think people forget that the only real way to approach a movie like this is to set aside your preferences to focus on the story that the filmmakers are trying to tell. I would have loved an ending where both boys got to spend time with their father, but if you take that wish to its logical conclusion you might as well be angry that the movie didn't give them their full 24 hours with him that they wanted in the first place. I think one of the unspoken realities the movie touches on is the concept of not missing what you never had. Barley feels the *loss* of their father in a way that Ian never will, because he had just enough experience OF his father to actually FEEL the loss. Put more simply, it's the difference between loss and *lack*. That's not to say that children who grow up never having met their fathers don't feel a kind of loss - but it's a fundamentally different kind of pain. The point here was that Ian had the longing to meet his father, but Barley's the one who NEEDED him. As y'all point out, Ian did grow up with a father-figure who provided the things a father is supposed to. Barley's the one who truly missed out. That's the beauty of Ian's realization at the end, and his act of selflessness in letting Barley have that gift of a precious few minutes, which, it has to be said, would not have been the same experience if Barley had had to share it with Ian.