Jurassic World released in theaters this past weekend. The long awaited fourth installment to the blockbuster smash of the 90s drew crowds of movie goers who were thrilled to revisit the dinosaurs of their youth. The latest installment has a new, synthetic hybrid dinosaur called the Indominus Rex. Director Colin Trevorrow has stated that the dinosaur is “meant to embody (humanity’s) worst tendencies.” The Indominus Rex exemplifies all of the most dangerous traits of other dinosaurs rolled into one of the biggest, baddest, killing machines that nature never intended. And, there is one living inside all of us.
You heard that right; we each have the emotional equivalent of the Indominus Rex residing in our minds. We take all of our perceived faults, flaws, and shortcomings and combine them with our past failures and mix in a little splash of the judgment we receive from others until we have a lumbering emotional dinosaur to chase us willy-nilly through life. Then, once we have created the perfect beast, we lock it away and feed it tiny bits and pieces at a time with our insecurities and our fears, always making sure to leave it hungry for more. The I-Rex paces inside the cage we have created roaring loudly for freedom, gnashing its teeth, and scraping its claws through our mental health while waiting for the opportunity to escape and wreak havoc on our lives.
Each part of the beast has a point of origin. The claws are borrowed from severe depression. The teeth are taken from anger and resentment. The jaws come from pent up anxiety. The powerful sweeping tail originates in paranoia and all of those pieces have been knit together by low self-esteem. It’s fast and it’s fierce and just like the Indominus Rex of the movie, this I-Rex was made to be the most fearsome and most terrifying beast ever conceived.
I-Rex has a weakness, though. It was made up of parts of dinosaurs resurrected from the past, dinosaurs that were extinct and should have remained extinct. If we accept that the emotions that built our version of I-Rex are extinct, they have no power over us and we can move on. We can defeat him. We do not have to live in fear of the I-Rex escaping from his cage and destroying our lives. We can choose to dismantle the beast a piece at a time until he is no longer a danger to us and the ones we love by processing through past traumas and doubts. By reclaiming our power we can rob I-Rex of his and return him to extinction.
