Heroic Growth

04/28/2026

National Superhero Day is usually framed as celebration, but it also gives us something more clinically useful: a window into how people reorganize identity after rupture. Characters like Spider-Man endure because they do not resolve their core conflict. Peter Parker does not “move past” responsibility after Uncle Ben’s death; he reorganizes his life around it. The story persists not through closure, but through sustained tension.

This is why comic narratives can function as a form of narrative reconstruction. They externalize a structure many people live internally: the attempt to carry responsibility without collapsing under it. In therapy, the goal is not to replace one story with a better one, but to help the person develop a capacity to remain in relation to their story without being fully defined by it. Spider-Man is not a fantasy of escape; he is a model of ongoing negotiation between identity and obligation.

When people say superheroes are unrealistic, they are often reacting to the spectacle. When we remove the spectacle, what remains is something highly familiar: a person trying to hold together meaning, responsibility, and limitation at the same time. That is not escapism. That is structure.


Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

04/28/2026

Every officer eventually encounters a moment where the system reveals its limits, and the work begins to feel cyclical and unresolved, as if the effort continues but the underlying conditions remain untouched. Like Hal Jordan in Green Lantern #76, they realize “I can’t”.
Continuing Heroic Growth’s Iconic Issues series with Green Lantern #76. This is the issue in which the superhero narrative undergoes a quiet but significant shift, not because the hero fails, but because the story reveals something that his power cannot reach. Hal Jordan performs his role as expected, acting decisively, resolving the immediate situation, and restoring order within the frame he serves. The disruption occurs when a different kind of question is introduced, one that directs attention to the conditions that produced the event rather than the event itself.
Simultaneously, the authority structure behind him, represented by the Guardians, begins to appear more distant and constrained, maintaining formal authority while no longer fully aligning with the reality on the ground. Hal does not attempt to defend or rationalize this misalignment, and instead responds with the statement, “I can’t,” which signals not weakness but the recognition that the system and the problem no longer correspond to one another. Green Lantern #76 expands the genre by introducing the concept of limits, demonstrating that not all problems can be resolved through force or clarity alone, and once that limit becomes visible, the narrative cannot return to its previous simplicity.
Thomas Coghlan

04/27/2026

Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

04/26/2026

Yggi says: “That wasn’t nothing.”

Not everything meaningful comes with an explanation.
Sometimes something just stands out—and you stop.

Most people move past it.
Some don’t.

Thomas Coghlan

04/25/2026

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comics-contemporary-myth-consulting-room-iv-wonder-woman-gelte
Continuing Heroic Growth's comic studies series with Contemporary Myth in the Consulting Room IV: Wonder Woman, The Amazon, and Authority Without Domination
Wonder Woman represents a form of power that is often misunderstood—not because it is weak, but because it does not rely on domination to establish itself.
In Jungian terms, her structure aligns with Eros: the capacity to organize through connection, regulation, and relational awareness. Toni Wolff’s Amazon archetype captures this precisely—a form of authority that is internally grounded, self-contained, and not dependent on recognition.
This is not symbolic abstraction. It reflects a real psychological structure.
What the article explores is how this form of authority operates both in myth and in lived experience—particularly in environments like policing, where authority is required but often narrowly defined.
The result is a tension between what works and what is recognized as working.
Wonder Woman does not resolve that tension by rejecting force—but by integrating it with relational awareness.
That integration is the point.

Thomas Coghlan

Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD , Owner, Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC “The way we experience the feminine shapes the way we experience power.

04/19/2026

Continuing Heroic Growth’s Iconic Issues series with #4 — Iron Man #128, Demon in a Bottle

In this issue, Tony Stark isn’t facing a villain in the traditional sense. There’s no final battle to win, no external threat to defeat. Instead, the story turns inward. Stark’s increasing reliance on alcohol begins to erode his judgment, his relationships, and his capacity to function. The armor still works. The world still sees Iron Man. But the system holding him together is failing. The defining moment is not a victory—it’s collapse, followed by a simple, disallowed act: asking for help.

Within comic studies, Demon in a Bottle is widely recognized as a structural turning point in the superhero genre. The conflict is no longer organized around physical opposition, but around internal regulation (Breed, 1981; Hall, 2020). Stark is not overcome by force—he is undone by the limits of control. His alcoholism is not incidental characterization; it becomes the engine of the narrative itself. The question shifts from Can the hero win? to Can the hero sustain himself?

Graphic medicine readings push this further. Stark is not framed as morally weak, but as an individual whose coping system collapses under strain. The same mechanisms that sustain performance—drive, control, pressure tolerance—become destabilizing when they narrow the range of available responses. The armor remains intact. The system does not. (https://publishing.escholarship.umassmed.edu/gmr/)

That structure maps uncomfortably well onto policing.

Post-2020 research shows that 25–35% of officers meet criteria for hazardous alcohol use, with ~30% reporting binge-level drinking, strongly associated with PTSD, sleep disruption, and burnout (Violanti et al., 2020; Stogner et al., 2020). These are not isolated patterns—they are consistent across departments and roles. And importantly, they are not driven by exposure alone.

Policing places individuals in repeated proximity to events that strain regulation: use-of-force encounters, life-or-death decision-making, the aftermath of violence, and the moral weight of actions taken under pressure. Like Stark’s decision to act in high-stakes situations—sometimes with irreversible consequences—these experiences accumulate. They do not simply resolve when the shift ends.

But the research also points somewhere else: culture.

Sociological work describes what is called an “oppressive alcohol norm”—a social environment where drinking signals belonging and abstaining introduces friction. In these systems, alcohol is not just coping. It is participation. It is cohesion. It is how people come back down together after carrying what they carry.

Over time, this creates a narrowing of options.
If drinking is the most available and most acceptable way to regulate, then not drinking has a cost.
And if not drinking has a cost, then asking for help has more—because it breaks from the structure itself.

That is exactly what Demon in a Bottle captures.

The critical moment is not Stark’s deterioration. It is the interruption of it:

“Please… help me.”

Not weakness. Not failure.
A break from a system organized around control, performance, and self-containment.

Heroic Growth is built on a simple premise:
The turning point is not when things fall apart.
It is when something different becomes possible.

For officers reading this—
the job asks you to hold the line under pressure. It always will.

But if the only way to manage that pressure is the one everyone expects,
then the system has already narrowed more than it should.

The most important decision isn’t the drink.
It’s the moment you decide it doesn’t have to be the only option.

And when that moment comes—
say it.

“Please… help me.”
Thomas Coghlan

04/18/2026

In this next piece in the Comics as Contemporary Myth in the Consulting Room series, I turn to Ghost Rider as a way of understanding a different kind of psychological structure than the one most people associate with anger or escalation. In comic terms, Johnny Blaze is not simply a character who loses control, but one who is bound to something that acts through him with its own logic, its own authority, and its own criteria for action.

Read through a depth psychological lens, Ghost Rider becomes a model of possession, not in a supernatural sense, but as a way of describing moments in which a system of judgment takes over and organizes perception so completely that alternatives disappear from view. That structure shows up in clinical work with police officers more often than it is recognized, particularly in cases where action feels necessary in the moment and only later becomes difficult to fully reconcile.

This piece builds on the earlier articles in the series and continues to use comic canon not as metaphor, but as a precise way of mapping how identity, authority, and action organize under pressure.

Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC “A complex can take possession of the ego… so that the individual is no longer himself but is assimilated by the complex.

04/17/2026

Rorschach is not driven by morality, rather he is organized around the elimination of ambiguity.

In Watchmen, his world is simple: “There is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished.” But structurally, this is not clarity—it is defense.

As Melanie Klein observed: “The striving for goodness is often bound up with the fear of one’s own destructive impulses.”

What cannot be tolerated internally is split, projected, and pursued externally as certainty.

Jung makes the consequence explicit: “The identification with a principle is always a sign of a certain one-sidedness.” (CW 8)

Rorschach does not integrate conflict - he resolves it by removing ambiguity.

In comic studies terms, this is part of what makes Watchmen enduring. Moore does not present Rorschach as simply “dark” or “extreme,” but as structurally coherent—an identity organized around moral absolutism in a world that no longer supports it.

In policing, this structure is recognizable.

The job demands decisions under pressure, with incomplete information and real consequence. One adaptation is simplification—reducing complexity into something actionable.

But over time, that narrowing can become rigid:

• good / bad replaces judgment
• rule replaces reflection
• certainty replaces tolerance for ambiguity

The system holds—but only by excluding what cannot be held.

Rorschach is not an outlier.
He is a symbolic extreme of a structure that can emerge under sustained strain.

The question is not whether morality is present - it is whether it can still hold complexity, or whether it has become a system that can no longer bend.

04/13/2026

04/13/2026

Superhero comics are not just stories about good and evil. They’re systems that hold tension.

A recent article argues that even when superhero comics critique policing, they ultimately reinforce it. That’s a strong claim—and there’s truth in it. But it also misses something essential about how the medium works.

Superhero comics don’t resolve contradiction. They sustain it.
Since Umberto Eco, we’ve understood that these stories exist in a kind of ongoing present. Change happens, but nothing fully closes.

That means critique doesn’t just disappear—it stays in circulation.
And readers aren’t passive. As Henry Jenkins shows, people actively interpret and reshape meaning. What a story “says” and what a reader takes from it are not always the same thing.

That’s where comics get interesting.

They can reinforce systems—and at the same time expose their cracks.
Full write-up on LinkedIn.


Thomas Coghlan

Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD Superhero comics are not reducible to copaganda.

04/11/2026

Continuing Heroic Growth's Iconic Issues series, Iconic Issues #3, Batman #404, Year One, Part I.
Every cop has heard it, and most have said some version of it at some point in their career: “Something’s wrong.”

In police work, that realization doesn’t come all at once. It builds. It shows up in the job itself, in the way things are done, in what gets tolerated, in what gets ignored. And once you see it, you don’t really get to unsee it. The question becomes what you do next.

That’s where Batman #404 hits harder than most people realize.

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli open Year One by putting Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne into Gotham at the same moment. This isn’t a coincidence or just parallel storytelling. It’s structural. Both men encounter the same city, the same corruption, the same institutional breakdown. Gordon walks into a police department already compromised. Wayne walks into a city where crime is not just present but embedded.

From there, the book does something very precise. It splits them.

Gordon stays inside. Wayne steps outside.

Gordon tries to fix the system. Wayne tries to do what the system can’t.

What makes this issue iconic is that neither path is treated as more “right.” Gordon isn’t naive. He sees exactly what he’s dealing with and chooses to confront it anyway. He pushes back, he applies pressure, and at times he uses fear to draw lines where none exist. Wayne, on the other hand, tries to operate as himself first and fails. That failure matters. Batman is not his first move. It’s what comes after he realizes the system isn’t built to hold what he’s trying to do. The symbol becomes necessary.

You see it clearly in the early sequence where Bruce attempts to intervene without the mask and gets beaten nearly to death. You see it in Gordon’s arrival, where corruption isn’t hidden, it’s normalized. You see it in the famous moment when the bat crashes through the window, not as inspiration in a vacuum, but as a response to failure, fear, and the need to become something that can actually function in that environment.

Both men come to the same conclusion. The difference is where they stand when they act on it.

For anyone who has worked the job, that split feels familiar. Some stay and try to push the system back into alignment. Others stop believing the system can do what it claims and start operating in ways that are more independent, more controlled, sometimes more rigid. Both positions come from the same place. Both are attempts to restore order where it’s breaking down.

From a clinical perspective, that matters. When an officer says the job isn’t what they thought it would be, or that the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, that isn’t just frustration. It’s a shift in how they are organizing themselves in relation to the work. Some move toward engagement and reform. Others move toward control and distance. Neither is random. Both are structured responses to the same pressure.

Batman #404 endures because it doesn’t romanticize that process. It shows two men shaped by the same environment, making different but equally necessary adaptations. Gordon and Wayne are not opposites. They are two ways of answering the same problem.

They both start in the same place. They just take different paths once they realize what they’re up against.

Thomas Coghlan, Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

04/06/2026

Most officers have either said or heard some version of the same thing: “I don’t know what happened. It just flipped.” What is striking is not the intensity of the reaction, but how quickly it occurs. One moment everything is handled and under control, and the next it is not.
This is often described as anger, but that description is incomplete. In The Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner does not gradually lose his temper. He loses the ability to hold what he is feeling, and when that happens, something else takes over immediately.

The same pattern shows up in policing because the job requires holding experiences that are not always processed in the moment. When those experiences accumulate without being thought through, they do not disappear. They emerge later, often without warning.

The goal is not to eliminate anger. It is to create enough space to recognize what is building before it turns into action. That space is what allows control to remain in place.

Heroic Growth Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD “A complex is a psychic fragment which has split off owing to traumatic influences or certain incompatible tendencies… it leads a relatively autonomous existence.