Rewriting History To Heal The Past: Walt Behind The Scenes Of Mary Poppins
Why can rewriting a story heal the past? Today we will approach the analysis of a film with a very deep psychological training: ‘Walt Behind the Scenes of Mary Poppins’. It tells a tragic story with a happy ending; the story of a girl who drags a traumatic event into her adult life.
Pamela Travers has written a series of books based on her childhood story and the main character has become an icon around the world: Mary Poppins. While this only happened when the works fell into the hands of Disney writers many years later, the characters reinvented and saved themselves, allowing for the healing of Travers’ childhood trauma.
A beautiful story based on some real facts and some added ones, which tells how rewriting a story can heal the past. After all, our life story has a lot to do with who we are in the present. When there are emotional wounds that have not closed and are still with us, we cannot leave the suffering behind.
Rewriting the past offers the possibility of experiencing it and feeling it differently; and to fix it in a new way in memory.
The central argument of ‘Walt Behind the Scenes of Mary Poppins’
Pamela Travers is the real name of the author of the Mary Poppins stories. His childhood was marked by an alcoholic father and a mother who did not know how to deal with this family situation.
When things got really serious, one of their aunts came to help them. She suddenly appeared, with her umbrella and briefcase full of magic remedies for everyone, determined to help them in their chaotic lives.
Many years later, as an adult and becoming a writer, Pamela Travers (masterfully played by Emma Thomson) wrote eight stories about a character based on her aunt and her childhood story: Mary Poppins. The books were an editorial success. For twenty years, Walter Disney, the American tycoon of the Disney empire (Tom Hanks in the film ), chased Travers, trying to convince her to give him the copyright to bring Mary Poppins to the movies.
‘Walt Behind the Scenes of Mary Poppins’ tells how the reinterpretation of the characters from the book and the changes Disney’s writers managed to make to the original work began by horrifying the author, but ended up healing the open wound, the childhood trauma that was with her. all life.
Healing the past: when wounds don’t close
Sometimes life prepares painful events, hard blows, which are a test of our emotional intelligence. Traumatic events that occur in childhood are complicated because at this age the tools needed to regulate high levels of emotional pain have not yet been developed.
This pain will be with you forever and will enter your daily life without time easing it. Certain situations in your adult life may be linked in some way to this trauma, and reopen the wounds over and over again.
Rewriting history to heal the past
People who work with language know that its main power is not just in communication. Language and the word are also tools that can heal.
Language intervenes at different levels of cognition and thinking. Therapists use speech as a way to work with the patient. Therapy offers the possibility to tell a story again.
By rewriting and shaping a situation with words, a world of possibilities opens up: emotional encounters with the past and the prospect of a new future narrated in the present. A review of values, strengths, weaknesses… Professionals work in therapy to generate the necessary changes in the patient’s narrative of life. Language is a way of bringing order out of mental chaos.
Emotions change and so the memory of events also changes. Looking at our life as if it were a story helps us find imaginary solutions that allow us to survive beyond obstacles.
