Cineterapia: Why Watching Movies Can Be Helping You

Watching a movie can be therapeutic because it connects us with our desires, activates memories, shows us new paths or puts words to our most intimate feelings. If you are having a difficult time, film therapy can help.

And it is that the spell of cinematographic images is one of the most powerful triggers of the unconscious: many films function as allegories, just like myths, jokes, fairy tales or dreams that are used in many therapies.

Cinema helps us understand ourselves

Often times, you feel a lot of things and you don’t know or can’t put them into words until you see that movie. As with some parts of the body – the knee, the elbow, the navel, the neck – which exist, but do not attract your attention, you can spend a lifetime revolving around something without paying much attention to it until, suddenly , that insignificant takes on meaning. How did it happen? If it is through a movie, you give meaning to the automatism. Why do we sometimes react emotionally to watching a movie and not to others?

To immerse yourself in a certain movie is to look at yourself in a mirror in which you may not have looked at yourself before. It is very useful to find out what there is of yourself or yourself in a movie. Seeing another to whom things similar to those that happen to you happen, or who does what you could do and you do not dare, suggests questions about the meaning of the life you lead and the decisions you have made. It is the beginning of change.

The cinema can be a mirror in which our life is reflected

It can connect you in a new way with yourself or with yourself. Activate your memories, your needs, your intimate desires, your gaze; It opens doors that might have remained closed. Actually, it works as a spotlight that illuminates a personal area, as a reflection, as a filter, as a loudspeaker. It transmits you a particular vision of your own reality and provides you with clues to change attitudes and habits that limit you.

Through cinema we can grow on a personal level

It is a stimulant of imagination and thought, an effective passport to emotions. Living is also changing. The situations experienced by the characters can be a warning for you, a revelation, a way forward, an impetus for change and lead you to reconciliation with yourself.

Be it a complex or banal film, it can suddenly install you in a personal aspect that you had not approached that way and makes you start thinking about it. If the protagonist acts as you would like, casual like Victoria Abril in The Doormat , or sure of what she wants, like Diane Keaton in When you least expect it, you recognize yourself in who you want to be.

It can also happen that the subject does not touch you directly, but it can suggest something that could happen to you and thus affirm your beliefs or your wishes. Thus, while for many, The Piano, by Jane Campion, represents the liberation of a woman; for others it is the binding of a woman. For all this film works as a warning.

The same happens with Almost all women are equal, directed by Brian Skeet, where the orderly life of an academic, Margaret Nathan, next to her husband, is altered when she begins the translation of a newspaper written in France. I know of those who rethink their partner every time they see a Woody Allen movie.

In reality, a film can show you what you could do or reaffirm what you would never do.

Now, a movie can mark you at one point in your life but not another. The one that upset you years ago may not suggest anything to you in the present.
When it happens to you, instead of writing it off forever, you could try to find out what happened. Knowing what mechanisms operated in you that are no longer activated (or vice versa) can give you a lot of information about your emotional state and act like a real therapy.