Archetype: The Matriarch / The Ruler / The Overcontroller
Abuela Alma is the emotional spine of the Madrigal family - and its source of tension. As the matriarch, she symbolizes intergenerational resilience, but also inherited trauma. Her controlling behavior is not arbitrary; it’s a survival strategy encoded by early loss and displacement. After her husband’s death, Alma becomes the protector of a magical legacy that is, to her, synonymous with safety and identity. This fixation is reflective of what trauma therapists call "legacy burdens": inherited beliefs passed down to ensure safety in a dangerous world. In her eyes, the miracle is everything - and any threat to it, including Mirabel’s nonconformity, feels existential.
In Jungian terms, Alma oscillates between The Ruler and The Devouring Mother - a shadow version of the nurturing mother who seeks control through conditional love. Her drive to preserve the family system at all costs mirrors a Manager part in Internal Family Systems (IFS) - one that overfunctions to keep deeper pain (exiles) from surfacing. Her managerial protector part prevents vulnerability from entering the system, inadvertently suffocating individuality in others.
From a 7 Inner Child perspective, Abuela may carry an unhealed Fearful Child within - a part so frightened by past loss that it now insists on order, legacy, and tradition as substitutes for love. Ironically, this fear drives a form of conditional love that harms the very people she seeks to protect. Only when she confronts her grief and allows herself to feel again does she begin to transform.
Alma’s arc - her eventual recognition of how her pain shaped the family - marks her evolution from protector to conscious elder. In doing so, she steps out of her archetype’s shadow and into a more integrated form of leadership: one that makes room for uncertainty, emotion, and human complexity. Abuela represents the family's source of tradition, discipline, and unyielding expectations. As the system's Controller, she mirrors trauma patterns rooted in survival: rigidity as protection. In Jungian terms, she embodies both The Mother (nurturing and devouring) and The Ruler, maintaining control through emotional and structural authority.
