back to December newsletter 
by Pooja Gupta, AMFT

Through this past year, Cinema Therapy Club, a CAMFT initiative, provided us with a unique opportunity to sit with the feelings and lived experiences of many different characters as beautifully portrayed in different movies. We screened a movie every month, starting February 2024, and then reflected on and processed our personal responses to the movie after the screening. These screenings allowed us to explore the experiences of the diverse group of people that we all represent, including but not limited to Autism awareness, Addiction recovery, Aging and experience of older persons, and Diverse identities based on Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation and Physical abilities. In spite of the diversity of characters being represented through the movies, the experiences of the characters were unified around love, friendship, adversity, resilience, courage, and survival and invoked a range of emotions inside us, the audience.

Movies are and always have been a powerful medium of storytelling, providing us with an immersive experience of peoples’ lives, emotions, and perspectives. Watching and reflecting on movies as part of the Cinema Therapy Club presented us with a unique chance to parse through the rollercoaster of emotions bubbling up inside us in response to the stories depicted on the screen, which could very possibly be the stories of our patients in the therapy room. Some parts of the stories brought a smile to our faces and others brought tears to our eyes; there were some scenes that led us to covering our eyes in terror and others led us to sit on the edges of our seats with excitement or anxiety. Some of our emotional responses while witnessing the same sequence of events were shared and others were unique to each one of us.

We hope this experience not only allowed participants to reflect on their feelings but also provided an opportunity to examine our hidden or unconscious biases in response to the stories unfolding in front of us. As therapists, we are more familiar than most with the human need to protect ourselves from any pain or anticipated danger. The experience of examining our own response to the diverse group of characters being portrayed in the movies probably allowed us insight into whether we were distancing ourselves from the pain by putting ourselves in a place of privilege and allowing ourselves to believe that somebody else’s pain is uniquely their own and can never be ours. These were moments of introspection that reminded us of all those times in therapy that challenge our empathy, our non-judgmental stance, and our ability to provide a safe space to our patients. These were moments that, hopefully, brought us face-to-face with our blind spots and led to our growth as people and as therapists.

As the year ends, we are so grateful to have had this shared emotional journey with everyone who could join us for the movie screenings this year. We hope to continue this cinematic experience in the coming year, hopefully in greater numbers and with more thought-provoking movies that can help us reflect and grow together.

Pooja Gupta, AMFT