The grandma from Encanto is so relatable…

POP CULTURE & HEALING • November 13, 2022

The moment Encanto made you feel uncomfortably seen

It’s a Saturday night and you’ve put on Encanto because someone told you it was good. You’re half-watching, folding laundry, half-scrolling your phone. And then the movie does something you weren’t expecting: it makes you stop.

Not because of the songs — though the songs are remarkable. Because of her. The grandmother. Abuela Alma standing at the door of the Casita in her black dress, surveying every member of her family with that precise, calibrated gaze that misses nothing and forgives nothing. The way she holds her grief like a lantern — using it to illuminate what she needs from each of them, without ever quite setting it down.

Your folded laundry is still sitting in your lap. Your phone is face-down on the cushion. Something in your chest has gone very quiet.

Maybe you’re thinking of your own mother. The way she could make a compliment feel like a demand. The way love in your family always seemed to have a clause attached — I’m proud of you followed, after a beat, by but. Maybe you’re thinking of yourself: the way you drive your kids toward excellence and hate the way it looks on you, even as you can’t seem to stop. Maybe you’re simply sitting with the uncomfortable recognition that this animated grandmother from a Disney film has, in forty-five minutes, named something you’ve spent years trying to articulate.

That feeling — the slightly sick, slightly relieved sensation of being seen by a story — isn’t accidental. It’s the whole point. And if you’re sitting with it, you’re not alone. Encanto has become a cultural shorthand for a very particular kind of family system, and Abuela Alma has become one of the most discussed characters in pop psychology precisely because she’s so achingly, uncomfortably real.

This post is an attempt to explain why — using the science of trauma, the clinical language of family systems, and the genuine compassion that Abuela’s story deserves.

Why is Abuela Alma so relatable?

Most family stories in film give us a clear villain. Encanto refuses to do that. Abuela Alma isn’t cruel for the pleasure of it. She isn’t malicious, cold-hearted, or indifferent. She loves her family with a ferocity that is evident in every scene. And yet — she causes real harm. She dismisses Luisa’s exhaustion. She erases Mirabel’s worth. She assigns identities to her grandchildren before they’ve had the chance to form their own. She builds a family system organized entirely around performance, productivity, and the suppression of anything that might threaten the miracle.

That combination — genuine love coexisting with genuine harm — is what makes her so relatable. And it’s also what makes her so painful.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in her landmark text Trauma and Recovery that trauma survivors frequently organize their entire lives around the prevention of another catastrophic loss. The strategies they develop — control, vigilance, suppression of vulnerability, insistence on strength — are not signs of cruelty. They are the architecture of survival. The problem is that survival strategies are adaptive in crisis and maladaptive in peace. They don’t automatically dismantle themselves once the immediate danger has passed. They become woven into the person’s identity, their relationships, their family culture.

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind, has written extensively on how unresolved trauma affects not just the individual but the relational field around them. When a parent’s nervous system is organized by threat — even a threat that occurred decades ago — that nervous system communicates itself to children through attunement, tone, and the thousands of microinteractions that constitute daily family life. Children’s brains are wired to track their caregivers’ internal states. When the caregiver’s internal state is organized by fear, children learn to organize theirs the same way — not through direct instruction, but through the body’s most fundamental communication channels.

This is why Abuela Alma is so relatable. She isn’t exceptional. She’s a precise depiction of what unresolved, intergenerational, displacement-rooted trauma actually looks like inside a family — the way it shapes roles, demands, and the invisible rules everyone learns to follow without being explicitly taught.

Abuela’s ACE: how trauma organized a family

The opening sequence of Encanto is devastating in its clarity. We see Abuela Alma — young, in love, pregnant with triplets — fleeing violence with her husband Pedro and their neighbors. They reach a river crossing, and Pedro stays behind to face the soldiers. He’s killed in front of her. In the moment of her most catastrophic loss, she’s given a candle — a miracle that saves her family, that creates the Casita, that gives rise to the magical gifts her descendants will receive.

In Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) research, the kind of trauma Alma experienced — the violent loss of a primary attachment figure combined with forced displacement from home — represents a profound disruption of both relational and environmental safety. The landmark ACE study conducted by Vincent Felitti, MD, and Robert Anda, MD, at Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control demonstrated that traumatic experiences in childhood don’t simply produce emotional pain — they reorganize the developing brain and body in ways that shape health, relationships, and behavior across an entire lifetime. Alma’s experience wasn’t in childhood, technically — but the principles are the same: a catastrophic loss that overwhelmed her capacity to process and integrate what happened.

What’s particularly important about Encanto‘s depiction is what Alma did with the miracle in the aftermath of the trauma. She built a system. The candle became the organizing principle of the family’s existence — it had to be protected, maintained, never allowed to go out. And the way to protect it, in Alma’s mind, was to make sure every member of the family was useful, productive, extraordinary. There was no room for ordinary children. There was no room for doubt, weakness, or “not enough.” There was certainly no room for Mirabel — who received no gift and therefore, in Alma’s trauma-organized worldview, represented a threat to the very system she’d spent her life building.

The candle, in this reading, is the trauma response made literal: a flame that must never be allowed to go out, tended obsessively by a family organized entirely around its preservation.

Alma never told her grandchildren about the night she watched Pedro die. She didn’t need to. The entire architecture of her family communicated it for her: every expectation, every gift ceremony, every loaded silence when someone fell short. The story of that night lived in the family system even when it wasn’t spoken aloud.

The science of intergenerational trauma transmission

The mechanism by which trauma passes between generations has become one of the most important areas of contemporary psychological research. Understanding it is essential to understanding why Abuela Alma behaves as she does — and why so many people recognize her so immediately.

Epigenetic transmission

Research emerging from epigenetics — the study of how environmental experiences alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA — has demonstrated that the biological effects of trauma can be transmitted to offspring. Rachel Yehuda, PhD, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division, has conducted landmark research on Holocaust survivors and their children demonstrating that the children of trauma survivors show altered cortisol profiles — the stress hormone system is literally calibrated differently, even in people who never personally experienced the original trauma. This isn’t metaphor. The body of the survivor shapes the biological baseline of the next generation.

What this means in families like Abuela Alma’s is that her grandchildren didn’t simply inherit her behavioral expectations. They may have inherited, at a biological level, a nervous system primed toward vigilance and threat-detection. The hyperresponsiveness that served Alma during her trauma became encoded in the physiology of children who’d never experienced her particular loss.

Attachment and the transmission of emotional climate

Daniel J. Siegel, MD, describes in The Developing Mind how a caregiver’s “state of mind with respect to attachment” — which includes unresolved losses and traumas — directly predicts the attachment pattern that child will develop. Parents who have not integrated their own traumatic histories tend to communicate a particular quality of anxiety, unpredictability, or emotional unavailability that shapes their children’s internal working models of relationships. The child doesn’t need to know what happened. Their nervous system reads the caregiver’s nervous system directly and adapts accordingly.

In the Madrigal family, this shows up as a pervasive, ambient anxiety about performance. Nobody is explicitly told “you must be extraordinary or you’ll lose the miracle.” But everybody knows it. It’s communicated in every look Abuela gives when someone falls short, in every celebration of gifts that are useful to the family, in the conspicuous silence around Mirabel’s empty hands at her gift ceremony. Children are extraordinarily attuned to these signals. They don’t need explicit instruction.

Narrative transmission and family myths

Judith Herman, MD, writes in Trauma and Recovery that unresolved trauma doesn’t stay private — it becomes the organizing narrative of the family system, even when it’s never directly spoken. In Alma’s family, the story of Pedro’s death and the miracle of the candle is a founding myth that shapes every expectation about what this family is, what it’s for, and what its members owe it. Family myths like these function as invisible scripts — they tell children who they are before they’ve had the chance to discover it for themselves.

The identified patient, the golden child, and the scapegoat

Family systems theory — developed by psychiatrist Murray Bowen, MD, and expanded by generations of family therapists since — gives us the language to understand how trauma organizes the roles that family members play. In a trauma-organized family system, these roles aren’t chosen. They’re assigned, often before a child is old enough to know they’ve been cast.

The identified patient

Mirabel is the most obvious example of what family systems therapists call the “identified patient” — the family member who, through their symptoms, failures, or departures from the family norm, comes to embody the system’s dysfunction. The identified patient isn’t the problem. They’re the symptom-bearer: the one who, by breaking down or breaking through, is actually pointing to something the whole system needs to look at.

Mirabel’s lack of a magical gift isn’t a personal failing — it’s a message. Her very ordinariness in a family organized around the extraordinary is the system revealing its own unsustainability. Family therapists often note that the identified patient is frequently the healthiest member of a dysfunctional system, in the sense that they can’t perform the suppression that the others have learned to manage. Mirabel doesn’t pretend everything is fine. She sees the cracks in the Casita because she was never given a room to hide inside.

The golden child and the scapegoat in Encanto

Luisa is the golden child. She’s the one who carries the bridge on her back — literally, in Encanto’s visual metaphor — and whose worth to the family is measured entirely by her usefulness. Her gift is strength. The family needs strength. And so Luisa is celebrated, relied upon, quietly expected to always have more left to give. What she’s not allowed to have is a breaking point. The moment she sings “Surface Pressure,” the audience recognizes something they weren’t expecting to see named: the particular exhaustion of a person whose value has been entirely conditional on their output.

Isabela is the golden child of a different variety — the one whose gift is beauty, perfection, and the production of exactly what the family (and by extension, the community) expects. Her flowers are always perfect. Her posture is always perfect. Her feelings are always appropriately contained. When she finally produces a cactus — something unexpected, impractical, untidy — her face in that moment tells you everything about what it costs to always perform the approved version of yourself.

Mirabel, as we’ve discussed, is the identified patient. But she’s also, in a quieter way, the scapegoat — the one whose presence itself feels like a problem to the system, whose lack of gift communicates something the family would rather not face. Scapegoats in family systems therapy are often described as the truth-tellers: the members of the system who, consciously or not, refuse to perform the denial that keeps the dysfunction intact.

In my work with clients, I’ve noticed that women who identify with Mirabel often describe a childhood in which their very presence felt like an inconvenience — a puzzle the family couldn’t solve, a reminder of something everyone was working hard not to look at. They weren’t necessarily treated cruelly. But they were treated as if they were somehow the wrong shape for the family they’d been born into.

Camille’s story: when you recognize your mother in Abuela

Camille is a healthcare administrator in Chicago. She came to therapy in her late thirties, initially describing a persistent sense of insufficiency that she couldn’t explain — she’d built an objectively impressive life, led a team of forty people, was known for her steadiness under pressure. But alone, particularly after a conversation with her mother, she would feel a particular kind of hollowness she’d never found the right words for.

She watched Encanto with her daughter on a Thursday night and texted me the next morning: I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my mother. And then I realized — I also kept thinking about myself.

Camille’s mother had emigrated from the Philippines in the 1970s. She’d worked two jobs through Camille’s childhood, sacrificed continually, and communicated love in the most consistent way she knew how: through the relentless push toward achievement. The message was never cruelty. It was terror — specifically, the terror of a woman who’d seen what happened to people without credentials, without accomplishment, without the protection of an impressive résumé. She was trying to give Camille armor. The armor, over time, had become a cage.

What Camille was confronting, watching Abuela Alma on her couch at 9pm, was the recognition that her mother’s love had always come with conditions she’d spent her whole life trying to meet. And also — the recognition that she’d internalized those conditions so thoroughly that she was now administering them herself. “I do it to my daughter,” she said in our session. “I catch myself doing the exact same thing. I’ll be in the middle of celebrating something she did and I’ll hear my mother’s voice come out of my mouth. But have you thought about what’s next?“

That moment of recognition — I’m passing something on that was passed to me — is one of the most painful and most necessary things that can happen in therapy. It’s painful because it requires sitting with the weight of what you’ve received. It’s necessary because awareness is where the intergenerational trauma cycle can finally, actually begin to break.

Both/And: Abuela was surviving AND she was causing harm

One of the things that makes Encanto so unusual — and so clinically sophisticated — is its refusal to resolve the tension at the center of Abuela Alma’s story by making her simply a villain or simply a victim. She’s both. That’s the whole point.

This is the Both/And framework that I use constantly in my clinical work, and it’s essential to understanding families like the Madrigals — and maybe like your own. Both/And isn’t a way of excusing harm. It’s a way of holding complexity without collapsing it into something simpler and therefore less true.

Abuela Alma was a trauma survivor who built the best family system she knew how to build. AND that system caused real, measurable harm to the people living inside it. Both of those things are completely true at the same time. Holding them both doesn’t mean the harm doesn’t matter. It means you can grieve it clearly — and understand it clearly — without having to decide whether your mother was a monster or a saint.

In my work with clients, I see what happens when people can only hold one half of this. When they can only see the harm, they stay locked in rage — which is understandable, but doesn’t lead anywhere generative. When they can only see the survival, they minimize their own pain and keep waiting for an apology that may never come. The Both/And is harder. It requires holding two things that feel contradictory. But it’s the only position from which actual healing becomes possible.

For women who grew up with mothers like Abuela Alma — immigrant mothers, mothers who survived poverty or violence or displacement, mothers who loved fiercely and demanded enormously — this framework can be particularly liberating. You don’t have to choose between honoring what your mother survived and naming what her survival cost you. Both of those things are real. They can coexist. And allowing them to coexist is not betrayal. It’s finally being honest.

If you’re recognizing this pattern in your own family, exploring parts work can help you identify the internalized voices — the ones that sound like Abuela, even when they’re coming from inside your own head.

The systemic lens: refugee trauma, displacement, and cultural pressure

To fully understand what Encanto is doing, you have to understand that Abuela Alma’s trauma isn’t only personal — it’s cultural and political. She and Pedro were refugees. They fled violence. They lost a home, a community, a world. And they built a new one under the miracle’s protection, in isolation from the culture they’d been displaced from.

The systemic lens asks: what does it mean to carry not just personal trauma but collective trauma? What does it mean to be the matriarch of a family whose very existence was secured by someone’s death?

Rachel Yehuda, PhD, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division, has conducted landmark research on intergenerational transmission of trauma in refugee and diaspora communities. Her research makes clear that what Alma is carrying isn’t just her own grief — it’s a collective wound that her body and her family system have been trying to metabolize for generations. The miracle, in this reading, isn’t just a narrative device. It’s a representation of how traumatized communities construct systems of meaning and purpose around their survival — and how those systems, while lifesaving at first, can become constraining over time.

The additional pressure of being a visible representative of her community — the Madrigals are the heart of the village, their magic is what makes the town function — adds another layer of complexity. Alma isn’t just protecting her family from private suffering. She’s protecting a community’s hope. That’s an enormous weight. And it’s a weight that many first-generation immigrant women, many women who are the “first” of their family, many women who feel the weight of being a symbol as well as a person, will recognize immediately.

This is also why the ending of Encanto — the literal cracking and rebuilding of the Casita — is so emotionally resonant. The system had to break for something more honest to be built in its place. The miracle doesn’t disappear; it returns, renewed, after the truth has been told. That’s not a fairy tale ending. That’s a clinically accurate description of what family healing actually looks like.

Understanding how siblings cope with trauma differently within the same family system helps explain why Luisa, Isabela, and Mirabel all processed Abuela’s wound so differently — even living in the same Casita, drinking from the same source.

Sarah’s story: when you recognize Abuela in yourself

Sarah is a startup founder in San Francisco who came to coaching in her mid-forties, initially framing her goal as “work-life integration.” She had two kids and a company that had just raised a Series B. By most external metrics, she was succeeding. But she came to me with a question she’d been circling for a while: Why do I keep pushing my kids the way I do? Why can’t I just let them be?

Over several months, we traced the pattern back. Sarah’s mother had come to the United States from Vietnam in the 1980s. She’d rebuilt a life under enormous strain, and her primary form of love had been the relentless push toward excellence. Sarah had absorbed that push and redirected it — first at herself, with impressive results, and then at her children, with results she was starting to find troubling.

“My son cried last week after his piano lesson,” she told me, “because he got something wrong and he was scared I’d be disappointed. He’s seven.” She said it flatly, but her face was doing something complex. “I didn’t yell at him. I wasn’t even actually disappointed. But he knew to be scared anyway. And I don’t know how he knew that.”

He knew because children are exquisitely attuned to the emotional climate their caregivers create. Sarah didn’t need to say anything for her son to read the anxiety that lived in her body — the particular frequency of a woman for whom falling short was once genuinely dangerous. She hadn’t transmitted it through instruction. She’d transmitted it through the ten thousand small signals that a nervous system organized by achievement communicates to the nervous systems around it.

This is what childhood emotional neglect can look like in driven families: not absence, not cruelty, but a subtle, consistent message that the child’s emotional life is less important than their performance. The love is real. The harm is also real.

Sarah’s work wasn’t to become a less driven person — it was to become someone whose drivenness didn’t require validation from a seven-year-old’s piano practice. That’s the Both/And in action: she could honor what her ambition had given her AND learn to put it down when she walked into the kitchen after school. Both things, held at the same time.

What the ending of Encanto teaches us about healing

The ending of Encanto is the most therapeutically honest moment in the film. The miracle has died. The Casita has crumbled. And in the ruins, Abuela Alma finally tells Mirabel the truth about the night Pedro died — not the family myth version, not the organized narrative, but the raw, human thing: I was so afraid of losing this family that I lost sight of this family.

That confession doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t undo the years of conditional love, the suppressed gifts, the silent suffering of Luisa and Isabela and Bruno. But it makes something possible that wasn’t possible before: an honest relationship. A relationship that doesn’t require performance in order to be sustained.

If you’re in a relationship with someone who operates like Abuela Alma — or if you’re recognizing Abuela Alma in yourself — here’s what the ending of this film suggests about what healing actually requires:

It requires the story to be told. Not the organized myth. The actual, human, painful story. Abuela had never told anyone the truth about the night Pedro died. She’d organized an entire family system around the traumatic event without ever speaking it aloud. Healing required that silence to break.

It requires the identified patient to be seen. Mirabel had been the symptom-bearer for the family’s dysfunction for her entire life. She had to be recognized — not as a problem to be solved, but as the person who was pointing at something real. In families like these, the person the family has identified as “the difficult one” is often the one most worth listening to.

It requires the system to be rebuilt differently. The Casita doesn’t just repair itself. It’s rebuilt, by the whole community, in a different shape. Healing from intergenerational trauma isn’t a return to what was — it’s the construction of something new. It’s choosing a different way to carry the grief, the love, and the legacy.

If this resonates — if you’re sitting with the recognition that your family system shaped you in ways you’re still untangling — trauma-informed therapy is one of the most powerful tools available for this kind of work. Not because therapy fixes the past, but because it helps you understand it clearly enough to make different choices in the present.

The miracle, in the end, doesn’t belong to the candle. It never did. It belongs to the family — their capacity to hold each other, to tell the truth, to rebuild. That was always the miracle. Abuela just needed someone to help her see it.

You can read about the tools that support this kind of parts work and internal healing. And if you want to understand the broader landscape of what it means to recover from a family system organized around one person’s unhealed wound, this guide to recovering from a narcissistic parent covers the terrain with clinical specificity — even if “narcissist” isn’t quite the right word for your particular Abuela.

Whatever drew you to this post — whether you came looking for a cultural analysis or a mirror — I hope you found what you needed. You’re not alone in recognizing Abuela Alma. A lot of us grew up in her house.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer