If only Simba had had a good therapist…

I recently watched the original Lion King with my kids. It’s a classic, and I forgot how much I enjoyed that movie. My wife and I had avoided it for some time, not knowing when our kids would be old enough to process the complicated themes of murder and death and whatnot… but we allowed our kids to watch it and our 4 year old spent the next 3 days processing death. She wanted to play out the death scene between Simba and Mufasa. So she would tell us to pretend to be dead, and then she would come up and nuzzle her head against us and cuddle up to us while we were forbidden to move. Then she would bounce back and forth between Simba and Scar, asking, what did you do, Simba? She was just playing, but the rendition brought me to tears once or twice…

For those who have never heard of Play Therapy, the understanding is that children process through play in the same way that adults process through language (or artistic expression). My daughter was processing the idea of death and loss through her reenactments. As our kids are exposed to violence and sexuality and everything else in this entertainment driven society, they too will likely have a need to process and reenact what they are seeing on their TVs, computers, and phones – and we would do well as parents to consider their “play” in light of such nuances rather than getting annoyed, angry, or embarrassed by the things they choose to reenact. As adults, we also reenact traumas and wounds – but often times the underlying stories are much less clear and the mess we create much more complicated… but that’s another matter.

I had wanted to talk about Simba. In the movie, The Lion King, the villian (Scar) conspires to kill the king in order to ascend to the throne. He uses Mufasa’s greatest vulnerability to do so – his son. But he also has to get rid of the rightful heir as well. After using Simba to lure Mufasa into a trap, Scar comes to Simba who is laying next to his father’s lifeless body and asks him, “Simba, what did you do?” He takes on an empathic tone as he says, “of course no one wants these things to happen,” but he

To be continued…