Heroic Growth

02/20/2026

Continuing Heroic Growth’s comic series with Thomas Coghlan at Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC, Johnny Blaze is not organized around anger. He is organized around identification.

What appears as righteous force is, structurally, a complex operating with archetypal intensity. When such a complex is activated, subjectivity narrows. Action feels inevitable. Reflection collapses into ex*****on. The individual does not experience choice; he experiences necessity.

Jung warned that complexes can have us. In these states, ego differentiation recedes and the psyche organizes around a single charged pole — vengeance, justice, purity, control.

The clinical task is not suppression of intensity. It is restoration of tension.

When the ego can remain in relation to the activated complex without fusing with it, compulsion becomes thinkable. The fire is no longer discharged; it is symbolized.

This movement — from possession to differentiation — marks the beginning of psychological freedom.

02/15/2026

"Unfortunately, there is no doubt about the fact that man is, as a whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it... But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected." ~ Jung, Psychology and Religion, §131

02/05/2026

"Words I could speak to you. Will you hear them?"

In depth psychotherapy with police in, meaningful change rarely looks like emotional catharsis. More often, it appears as the collapse of an identity structure that once functioned effectively but is no longer viable.

This moment represents a critical analytic phase: the relinquishing of a role-based adaptation that protected functioning under prolonged threat but has begun to constrain psychological authority and self-regulation. The discarded “cloak” is not pathology—it is a former survival configuration whose usefulness has expired.

Clinically, this is the transition from externally organized control to internally anchored authority. The shift is quiet, embodied, and irreversible. The work is not about replacing the role, but about allowing a more integrated self to step forward without it.

02/05/2026

“You cannot enter here.”
This is what integration sounds like when the Self sets a boundary with the Shadow.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dínen.

'You cannot enter here,' said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. 'Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!'
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.

'Old fool!' he said. 'Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!' And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a c**k crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "The Siege of Gondor"

01/30/2026

01/27/2026

Shadow work.

01/27/2026

Integrate.

01/16/2026

Happy Friday. Let’s get to work. Today we work with the Shadow.
“The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly.” — Jung, CW 9

01/15/2026

“Nobody can point you to your path.”

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTgH7rrku2w/?igsh=MXM0b2Zjem1kMjhkNQ==

01/10/2026

“You’re going to be quite a mess after doing all this stuff.”
~ Alex Ross

Scars are a cost of doing business - inside and out.

https://youtu.be/rvoDD_jSLiM?si=M-0i0xM_F190wRHE