Psychologist Review!
"Being both a Christian and a Psychologist I found this movie realistically raw and powerful."
Benjamin Ironside Koppin’s new release ”The Pastor’s Kid” immediately grabs you and pulls you into the dysfunctional and challenging world of the main character, Riley, who is beautifully and painfully portrayed by Courtney Bankedo. One cannot help but feel the sheer intensity of her characters’s experiences.
So, first any preconceived notions of this being just a formulated Christian movie needs to be extinguished. Being both a Christian and a Psychologist I found this movie realistically raw and powerful. Be prepared to take a moving psychological journey into the past of a young girl’s intense, often overwhelming childhood and how it impacts her world when those memories demand to resurface. This film should be a must for any profession dealing with addiction.
Raised to be a good Christian girl Riley, checks all the boxes. As a young child, she finds herself in a role reversal with her mother who shows no maternal instincts. Riley is left to take care of her brother, herself and her mother. She becomes a parent to her nonfunctioning, mother as she battles the deepest alcoholic behaviors. The bottle is her moms first main relationship and concern. Her young children are an afterthought. Realizing this, Riley is left to grasp and struggle with abandonment and consequences of a childhood that is nonexistent and is replaced with neglect and chaotic, unstable living which leads to the development unhealthy coping mechanisms.
After living years as the absent adult, her mother finds sobriety and God . She is also lead to become a highly regarded pastor. Except by this time Riley is done, she sees the hypocrisy of how religion has been used in her life and of her now sober religious parent reprimanding her, now a teenager, to be more responsible. Forgetting what Riley cannot. Her childhood is spent being a good overly responsible Christian girl. In the film there are several flashbacks of young Riley having no other option but be overly accountable. Then of her picking up a plastic lamb. I see this as twofold she is her mother’s sacrificial lamb. Her childhood has been sacrificed by her mother’s alcoholism, yet the lamb she holds is plastic - it’s not real - it’s not the full truth. Her memories, her beliefs, her faith have been called into question.
College is a time when most young adults begin to slowly question and contemplate their childhood and upbringing. Issues that were compartmentalized or packed away into little safe mind boxes slowly reveal themselves and we explore them. Eventually leading us to be the adult we become.
When Riley awakes, she will not have the luxury of time to go through her boxes. They have exploded the lids, torn off and her memories released rapidly into her consciousness. She tries to avoid them, numb them, run from them. She desperately wants to resume her college life, where her chosen family are wonderfully unique friends. She has chosen limited contact with her biological family. Until that night, while roofied making constant calls to family obviously in an altered state. This results in the morning after her mom comparing the two of them, warning of her of the dangers , and how she knows what alcohol can do to a persons life, and Rileys goal is to just get off the phone . Before she’s able to do that her mom mentioned that she will be going to a conference in Sri Lanka and extends an olive branch for Riley to join.
As much as she tries to get away from it, she cannot get away from her mind, which is working overtime to have her focus think reflect on her life. Her mind is no longer allowing the compartmentalizing her past. It’s flying into her current reality. This leads her to question everything and no matter how hard she tries to avoid these memories they refused to return compartmentalized in their own nice neat little boxes. Instead they bring back memories long suppressed and now demanding to be remembered, experienced and questioned.
What happens when you’ve packed up years of abandonment, neglect ,and abuse in your childhood and in one unintentional action tears open every memory you’ve compartmentalized, and suppressed leaving you wondering what is life all about where am I going? Where have I been? What do I believe and what do I no longer believe. Who am I exactly?
Dr. Kimberly M. Antos-Hogan Ph.D