Family Movie Night | ENCANTO: We Don’t Talk About Control… | Podcast

What if your family looked “normal” on the outside—but your inner world felt like a tightrope walk of compliance and perfectionism?

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In this episode, we unpack how the Madrigal family in Encanto mirrors so many real-life family systems that confuse fear with love. We walk through six trauma patterns that show up in high-functioning dysfunction: control, manipulation, forced compliance, deflection, isolation, and entitlement.

We also explore how Encanto becomes a blueprint for transformation—showing how rupture and repair can lead to a home rebuilt on truth and safety.

🎁 Download the free discussion guide to turn this episode into a powerful conversation with your kids.

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Meet your hosts: 

🧠 Sarah McDugal – high-conflict communication strategist guiding protective parents through family court chaos with integrity, clarity, and calm under pressure (no tiptoeing, no legalese, no playing nice with coercive control)

🧬 Bren Wise Mays – neuro-sensory wellness provider translating wild-but-true neuroscience into real-world tools for resolving toxic or traumatic stress (no fluff, no fakery, no bypassing—just real regulation)

Together, we blend somatic support, legal strategy, and zero-BS tools to help you stop spiraling and start thriving.

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THINGS MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

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• A 3-step blueprint to name the tactics and shift the power

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This strategy guide walks you through:

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Bren: Welcome back to This WILD Journey, friends.

Today is part two of our Encanto deep dive, and I get to sit in the host chair and ask Coach Sarah some real raw questions about relational dynamics and emotional health and why some parts of this film hit us in the gut.

Sarah, you talk a lot about the difference between functional families and emotionally safe ones. Can we start there?

Sarah: Oof. Yes. So in the survivor community, so many survivors grew up in homes that looked fine. On the outside they looked fine. Bills got paid, chores got done. There was food, there was shelter. Rules were followed. But in so many of these homes, no one ever asked, "how's your heart? What are you struggling with? How are you doing... really under the surface?"

And in Encanto, we see a very high functioning family system. I mean, they're the coolest family in town, right? Everyone wants to be one of the Madrigals. They're magical, helpful, admired, but emotionally, every single one of them is unraveling because function without freedom is always tied with fear.

Bren: So let's get specific. What are the core unhealthy patterns that show up in this story?

Sarah: Well, there's a whole bunch, and that's a great question. Now, before we dig into that, remember, we're not villainizing individuals, we're just naming behaviors.

So here are some key relational flags that are going to be present in any abusive family system. Actually any abusive system anywhere, whether it's church or work, or social environment or a family.

One of the first ones is control.

Abuela makes the rules, all the rules, even for the other adults. She decides who matters, who gets included, who has to change. And everyone walks on eggshells around her trying to please her, not only out of love, but also out of fear.

Another one is deflection. When things start cracking, Abuela blames Mirabel. She refuses to look at herself. It's all passed on, the blame is passed on to everyone else and everything else.

Another one is manipulation. Luisa and Isabela are trained to perform. Their value is based on their usefulness, not their humanity. Their manipulated into making the family look good, into making Abuela look good, right?

Different ways. Different paths to that performance and perfection. One is tiny and perfect and beautiful. The other one does so much heavy labor. She's stronger than everyone else.

And there's just this, this overall concept that if you let the family down, if something isn't perfect, if you weren't fulfilling your place perfectly, you're going to betray Abuela's confidence and the public image of the family.

So the family and Abuela, they get to look good as a result. All the good stuff comes to them, and that's that manipulation.

Another thing is this forced compliance. No one can say no without risking rejection. Look at Isabella. She's all this close, almost forced into a marriage she doesn't want, just to please the family.

And in this, the whole system, and this is really, really important as far as abusive systems are concerned. The whole system kind of hums along without much friction as long as everyone is compliant with the role that they've been assigned. As long as no one breaks out or thinks for themself or does anything outside of the role that's been forced onto them... as long as they're compliant with the control, with the manipulation, with the deflection, with the isolation, with the entitlement, with the intimidation... the system kind of hums along like a well-oiled machine.

It just takes one person refusing to be blindly compliant to change the whole thing.

And the last one, I mean, I mean there's, there's other things I can point out, but the last one I'm gonna mention right now is isolation.

When someone or multiple people are pulled away from healthy relationships by the person who is controlling and pulling all the strings.

Bruno is where we see this a lot in the Encanto movie. Bruno effectively just gets erased. He's not just excluded, he's erased. And he still lives in the house, but none of the kids know. He's in hiding. He's behind the wall... just trying to get a peek at his family that he deeply loves, but he is completely isolated.

Why? Because he saw the patterns. Because he could see what was coming next. Because he had really good pattern recognition like so many survivors do... and that wasn't okay.

Bren: And the whole time Abuela thinks she's protecting the family, and that's what makes it so heartbreaking.

Sarah: Yes. And, and I think it's a really important point to to point out. There are, I believe, three categories of people in situations like this.

There are evil people, people who are hell bent on doing harm.

There are broken people who are not willing to do the work to change and to become healthy.

And there are broken people who are willing to do the work to become healthy and change and do things better.

I don't think there are any unbroken people in the world. I think we're all broken in some level, whether it's by selfishness or trauma or whatever else. It's important to acknowledge that brokenness and work on ourselves. So you have evil people, you have broken people who won't do the work and broken people who will do the work.

Any collection of broken people who are willing to do the work, you can build something with that. You can't build something with evil people and you can't build anything safe and healthy with broken people who won't do the work.

So Abuela isn't evil. Her trauma though... losing her home, her partner, everything starting over from scratch... creates this fear-based drive to control. And she believes that "if everyone just does what I say, we'll be safe."

That mindset turns love into control, and ultimately into coercion.

Because if you feel that you're entitled to control others and then they don't comply, you're gonna try to force them, right? And coercion isn't love. Fear isn't love and Abuela, in the end... we see that she's a broken person, willing to do the work. Willing to acknowledge that the things that she's done to try to protect her family were actually harmful and they were rooted in her own fear. And that's what makes Encanto so beautiful.

Bren: Let's, let's dive a little bit more into entitlement. So what does that really look like in Abuela's role?

Sarah: So in Encanto, we see entitlement showing up in Aela, not because she's evil again, but because she believes that what she thinks is best... that it's acceptable for that to outweigh everyone else's reality. Her needs and fears and desires are more valuable, more powerful than everyone else's needs, fears, and desires.

So she centers the miracle, the reputation, the public image... as the core thing that everyone must maintain. She doesn't ask how anyone's doing. She demands compliance to maintain the system, even if it's costing them their identity.

Bren: And that moment when she finally like sees Mirabel, wow, that that got me.

Sarah: It's one of my favorite parts of the film because it's this stack of ruptures over and over and over again. And then there's this repair.

She lays down her control. She names her fear. She takes radical responsibility for the harm she has done, even though it was with good motives, and she starts to see each person, not for their magical gift and what it can do for their public image and the family... but for them. For their hearts.

Bren: Hmm. Yeah, there's this beautiful reversal. The Casita is destroyed, but the real home 

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Bren: is rebuilt on the foundation of emotional safety.

Sarah: Yeah, for the first time in the whole story, at the end they're rebuilding on truth and connection and honesty and support of each other instead of fear. They're rebuilding on freedom and autonomy, instead of performance and facade.

Bren: So Sarah, what do you want protective parents to take away from this?

Sarah: Well, if you're sitting here and you're thinking, "Man, this sounds familiar!"

Bren: Haha.

Sarah: I mean, you're not alone. You might have grown up under control and fear and pressure to be perfect. You might have married into control and fear and pressure to be perfect.

And now you get to break that pattern!

Let's say you are in your own home now and you're trying to rebuild something that is healthy and safe. You get to create a home where it is safe to say no, to be different, to fully tell the truth, to rest without guilt.

You get to create a home where your children are seen for who they are. Not just the grades they make, or the trophies they win, or the behavior and compliance that they perform. Who they are, not what they do.

Bren: And we made something to help you to do exactly that.

Sarah: Yes, we did. So if you haven't downloaded it yet, I want to encourage you to go grab our free resource. It is a Family Movie Night discussion guide one sheet on Encanto, helping kids build emotional safety through story.

It's got age appropriate questions, trauma informed language, and different tools to help your kids understand what's really happening in the story.

And transfer that into their own experiences. This is one of the ways that you can help your kids to learn to spot healthy and unhealthy relational patterns, and even the red flags of abuse, without ever naming your abusive co-parent or other abusive family members.

You don't have to point fingers. You can just let them start to extrapolate the concepts and the principles and apply it to their own lives with a goal for healthy future.

Bren: And you can use it for movie night, or homeschool, or church groups, whatever.

Sarah: Yes, because you and I both agree that your kids deserve to grow up emotionally safe, and you deserve to have emotional safety too.

Bren: Thanks for joining us. And always remember, you don't have to walk This WILD Journey all alone.

Sarah: We'll see you next time and don't forget to turn your next movie night into a powerful tool for emotional growth. Grab our free one sheet in the link in the show notes.