Becoming Real: What the Barbie movie taught me about Self-Development
As a child of the ’80s I was a girl who owned, and sadly wrecked, Barbie dolls. I have tender memories of playing with my ‘Frigidoll’ (yes, I really did call her that). She was my stereotypical Barbie who came with a fridge, fitted with tiny plastic juice cartons and assorted food neatly lined up inside.
So naturally, I was the target audience for this year’s Barbie film phenomenon — a mother from ‘The Real World’ with nostalgia for the late twentieth century. I expected it might be a bit of fun, all light and frothy. It didn’t cross my mind that Barbie would affect me deeply, and that quotes and images from it would whirl and tumble within me weeks after my trip to the cinema. By the look of the box office records, the same seems to be true around the world.
The least likely bit of all: I couldn’t have imagined that, of all things, Barbie would make me reflect on mindfulness theory and the journey of self-development! This particular detail sits somewhere in my mind between ‘insane in the membrane’ and ‘batsh*t crazy’. Somehow, my inner child aged 4 and my present-day teacher of psychology, mental health and mindfulness have become beautifully intertwined. Let me go back a few steps…
The theory goes that when you practise mindfulness, meditation or engage with awareness-based practices generally, you become conscious of the core awareness that’s always there in our experience. This deeper awareness forms the backdrop to the internal and external noise of our day-to-day — the mental, emotional and physical ‘stuff’ of life. In our daily lives, we don’t necessarily have any concept of this awareness that lies deeper, because everything comes from it; it’s so fundamental that it’s rare we notice it. We are far more likely to get lost in the activity on the surface of life than to question where our experience of it comes from — like a beating heart within that we don’t always know or understand. Imagine the sun that sits behind the clouds: on a cloudy day, we are more likely to notice the clouds that pass by than to remember there’s a big yellow ball up there hidden out of sight.
As a postgraduate, I trained in Psychosynthesis, also known as ‘a psychology with a soul’. Psychosynthesis explores the concept of will, a point of pure energy and consciousness that sits below our surface awareness. When we are aligned with our will, this is where conscious choices and actions stem from. The process of expressing will includes waking up out of our survival personality, the personality we created, mostly completely unconsciously, to ‘survive’ our setup. This is our adaptation to the expectations and demands of our parents, family and society; the way we approach dealing with them. Say, for example, we had quite forceful parents, we may have become meek and mild to survive our childhoods, and to try to get the love, care and protection we all need to stay alive in this world. This doesn’t mean there’s not something fundamentally true about our identity as a meek person, but there may be an element of having to play a certain role that isn’t totally authentic for us. On a deeper level, it may feel staged, or fake: but we mostly forget this as we grow up and get lost in the strength of identities we’ve long held.
Cue Barbie’s doll-like reality at the start of the film: a place where everything remains the same, where autopilot reigns supreme and things function as they always have. You could say the same about Truman in the Truman Show, Lester Burnham in American Beauty or Neo in The Matrix: at the start of these films, they don’t question their place in the world because they are stuck in the default programming of their survival personalities (note to self: every film I’m mentioning is a favourite film for a reason!). Barbie, Truman, Lester and Neo are not yet in touch with their essential ‘will’, according to Psychosynthesis. They are identified with their survival personalities instead, endlessly playing out the same internal and external stories.
Survival personalities aren‘t just about us as individuals, they also connect us to our early development as a human species. As hunter gatherers, we developed a highly reactive nervous system to evolve in a constantly threatening environment. The hangover of these earlier times means that our default state is one of survival, not one of happiness. One of the misconceptions around happiness I hear all the time is that it ‘should just be there’. In fact, this isn’t true. We are far more likely to look for the mistakes, the threats, the things that could go wrong than the things to be grateful for — after all, this is what kept us safe in former human days.
This negativity bias means we humans can easily get caught in the daily detail of surviving rather than doing the work of creating the conditions for happiness to arise (or realising that we have a will we can connect to in the first place). We get trapped in an endless cycle of longing, deferring our human happiness always one step beyond our reach — that job, that car, that house. We forget what we know and who we are deep down. There’s nothing wrong with reaching for any of these symbols that society paints as success. The question is, are they what make us happy? Do these goals we reach for reflect something essential about us and who we know and want ourselves to be? Do they connect to that deeper core awareness and will inside? Only through doing this inner work can we remember what we value, what is true to us.
It’s at the point where Barbie starts to have thoughts of death — when she starts to become mortal — that this breaks the amnesia of her survival personality programming. She starts to become ‘weird’ and ‘complicated’: in other words, she starts to become an authentic human being. She questions her world and is forced to step out of her comfort zone. This is where Barbie begins to break the mould, connecting to her vulnerability, her values and her ability to feel. Ultimately, this is where Barbie chooses for the first time to break out of her survival personality, symbolised by finally escaping her cardboard Barbie box (and becoming conscious of the patriarchal order that created it).
Barbie’s journey can be reflected in the journey of self-development as a whole: questioning what we’ve been told, the messages we’ve received, the identities and conditioning we’ve worn like clothing. This is literally brought to life with Barbie’s wardrobe — she magically changes into it with a single thought. It’s often through pain, or crisis, or failure that we start to see a crack in our identities — we begin to do the work of sorting through what we’ve been told, the messages we’ve received, the identities we’ve worn like clothing, and we start to see what’s true for us on a more fundamental level. In this process of evolution that every human being ultimately goes through, we emerge from a more 2D understanding of the world ruled by autopilot, into a place of deeper presence. We move from the mind into the body: from the conceptual to the embodied. We become guided more by what’s free within us rather than what’s programmed, transported into a new level of awareness and understanding.
Barbie says at the end of the film, “I don’t know who I am”. She is humbled, matured, taken out of the confines of her constructed personality, stating “maybe I’m not Barbie anymore”. Breaking out of a known identity can be bewildering, it can feel like the death of an important part of ourselves. In its wake, however, we can begin to align with the will that Psychosynthesis points to, connecting to something greater. The process of growth, and reinvention, is ultimately a death and a rebirth, reminding us of the core awareness behind our fixed identities — a place where our potentiality and aliveness reign.
As the film draws to a close, we hear Barbie’s will coming to life as she says “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to do the imagining, I don’t want to be the idea” We get to experience the thrill of watching Barbie wake up to the realisation she has a conscious choice in creating her own life — the same joy I’ve experienced over the years working with clients. Barbie is awake, connected and energised — asking the big questions, mirrored by Billie Eilish’s soundtrack: ‘What was I Made for?’. Barbie feels united with a deeper sense of her ‘why’. She’s literally become real in front of our eyes.
The film makes me wonder if there is any greater gift we can offer ourselves and the world than doing this same work of becoming real. What more could we hope for our individual and collective futures than entering this process of homecoming? My invitation is to take a journey together to that core place where we make our own meaning and do the conscious imagining of our own lives. This eyes-wide-open approach to life is the wellspring where our happiness, productivity and wellness naturally flow from.
Over on my Instagram page, I’m focusing on practical ways to come back to our essential selves this autumn — a process that begins with exploring our beliefs, emotions, values and physical bodies. I’ll be asking some questions to help you feel more at home inside yourself in these rock ‘n roll times. I’d love to hear your answers — you can send comments over on my Instagram page, or share your views right here.
