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Ok I need to confess








I watch Disney films regularly.


Emerie my daughter is 5 and she loves Disney films.

I’m fact Beauty & the Beast is one of her favourites.

Everyone talks about Disney films hidden meanings and there are many articles and reviews about Beauty & The Beast and what it’s about.

There is no doubt that Belle experiences Stockholm Syndrome and this is a key theme which has been written about on multiple occasions.

What of the Beast?

My interpretation is the Beast itself is not a character, but an illness.

The Prince experiences trauma as a child

As a young prince who lost his father, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. Feeling abandoned and duffering the trauma of conflict. The queen leaves him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult; when he refused, she transformed him into a beast.

The beast is his trauma.

It takes both a physical and phycological toll on him, his appearance changes, his back is hunched, he grows claws, he is unkempt.

He grows suspicious and isolated himself from the rest of the world for years, anger and anxiety become his coping mechanisms. Unable to feel worthy of love and lost in his own pain, his worst characteristics are relied on in order to keep his trauma hidden.

He experiences hyperarousal, always on alert for the next perceived threat, disturb thoughts. We see this in the way that the characters talk about their years spent cursed. They’re described as doing nothing, just staying with a sense of hopelessness in this dark and secluded castle.


As lonely, lost and desperate as the Prince is, the Beast is tamed.

It’s tamed by kindness.

Not only the kindness and love of Belle but of all those who recognise The Prince beneath the weight of the Beast.


Very often we have to look beneath to see the authentic reality 

#trauma #mentalhealth #bekind #diversityandinclusion