Heroic Growth

06/07/2026

Why does Daredevil endure?
Not because Matt Murdock wins, and not because he always saves the day. And certainly not because his life gets easier.
Across decades of storytelling, Daredevil repeatedly confronts a reality most superheroes spend their careers avoiding: some losses cannot be prevented, some wounds cannot be repaired, and some outcomes remain beyond human control no matter how deeply we care.
Heroic Growth's newest article in the Comics as Contemporary Myth in the Consulting Room series explores Daredevil as a modern myth of unfinished obligation. Through the lens of narrative reconstruction, depth psychology, and contemporary myth studies, I examine why Matt Murdock continues to resonate with readers long after individual storylines end.
The article argues that Daredevil's deepest struggle is not crime, corruption, or even evil. It is the painful discovery that responsibility and agency are not the same thing.
For many readers, Daredevil is not simply a superhero.
He is a mythological figure wrestling with the limits of what a human being can actually accomplish.
Full article in comments.

Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD, Owner, Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC "We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

06/07/2026

Pope Leo XIV recently quoted Gandalf.

That sentence alone probably surprised a lot of people.

What many readers may not realize is that J. R. R. Tolkien was not only the creator of Middle-earth, but also a deeply committed Catholic and a veteran of the First World War. His stories emerged from a life shaped by faith, service, loss, and perseverance.

The quote cited by the Pope captures something that Heroic Growth encounters repeatedly in psychotherapy: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set…”

Many people enter therapy believing they must somehow fix everything, save everyone, or resolve every painful chapter of their lives. Over time, the work often becomes something different. It becomes learning to live faithfully to one’s values despite uncertainty, limitation, loss, or suffering.

For many clients—including many police officers and first responders—faith traditions help provide that framework. Research has linked religious practice with greater hope, meaning, purpose, coping, and psychological well-being during difficult life circumstances.

Tolkien understood that hope is not optimism. Hope is continuing forward when certainty is unavailable. That may be one reason his stories continue to speak so powerfully to people facing difficult journeys of their own.

A Lord of the Rings reference in the last papal encyclical has sparked a great deal of commentary. While it can be read as a response to the way Silicon Valley libertarians have appropriated Tolkien's writing, it also highlights the English author's religious convictions.

06/04/2026

The Iconic Issues series explores how comic studies, graphic medicine, and contemporary mythology illuminate enduring psychological themes through the language of comics.

The Incredible Hulk #324 is often remembered as the return of the Grey Hulk. But structurally, the issue revolves around a recurring question that appears throughout comics history:

Can what has been repressed ever truly stay buried?

Bruce Banner repeatedly attempts to separate himself from Hulk, contain Hulk, control Hulk, or eliminate Hulk. Yet Hulk persists. The character continually returns because the conflict is not external. It is built into the structure of the narrative itself.

This is one reason Hulk remains such a compelling figure within comics studies. Hulk dramatizes tensions between identity and disavowal, consciousness and autonomy, control and return. The recurring appearance of the character is not merely a plot device. It is the mechanism through which these tensions remain visible.

What is buried survives, and what survives returns.

06/01/2026

Yggi Says: Happy Monday!

05/30/2026

I am excited to share that my article, *Yggdrasil: An Image of Psychic Structure*, has been accepted for publication in *Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche*.

At first glance, a paper about the Norse World Tree may seem far removed from psychotherapy with police officers and first responders. For me, however, the connection emerged directly from clinical work. Over years of sitting with officers struggling with trauma, burnout, moral conflict, grief, cynicism, identity disruption, and competing loyalties, I became increasingly interested in a simple question:

How does a psyche remain organized when it is asked to bear contradictions that cannot be resolved?

Yggdrasil offered an unexpected answer.

The World Tree is not a symbol of perfection. It is constantly under strain. It is wounded, gnawed upon, weathered, and burdened. Yet it endures. It continues to hold opposing forces in relationship without collapsing into fragmentation.

That image resonated deeply with what I have witnessed in psychotherapy.

Within Heroic Growth, we often speak about healing not as the elimination of conflict but as the development of a larger structure capable of bearing it. The goal is not to become free of tension. The goal is to become capable of holding it.

In that sense, Yggdrasil became far more than an image from Norse mythology. It became a symbolic representation of resilience, containment, continuity, and psychological endurance.

My sincere thanks to the editorial team at *Jung Journal*, and especially Ann Strack, whose thoughtful engagement with the manuscript helped it become far stronger than its earlier forms.

Stay Mythic.

05/29/2026

Stay Mythic.

05/27/2026

What if Watchmen #1 did not merely change superhero comics — but changed the way we think about psychological experience inside modern mythology itself?
There is a reason Watchmen still feels unsettling nearly four decades later. It is not simply because the book is “dark” or violent. It is because Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons fundamentally altered the symbolic architecture of superhero storytelling. Before Watchmen, most superhero narratives operated through cyclical mythic restoration. Heroes suffered, but continuity absorbed the damage. The world reset. Identity remained structurally stable.
Watchmen broke that structure.
History leaves residue in Watchmen. Violence changes people permanently. Hypervigilance becomes identity. Isolation calcifies into worldview. Psychological adaptation slowly becomes psychological imprisonment. That shift helped transform the entire comics field and remains one of the reasons Watchmen is still central to comics studies scholarship today.
Rorschach matters deeply in this conversation because he represents more than a noir detective or antihero vigilante. He represents the endpoint of uncompromising symbolic rigidity. Chronic exposure to violence, betrayal, secrecy, and moral collapse reorganizes his perception until ambiguity itself becomes intolerable. The world narrows into threat, pattern, inevitability, and absolutism.
That has profound relevance in police depth psychotherapy.
Many officers spend years functioning inside environments that reward hypervigilance, rapid threat assessment, emotional compression, and operational certainty. Those adaptations can become psychologically costly over time. The individual may gradually lose access to restorative symbolic flexibility and begin experiencing the world almost entirely through anticipation and scanning.
Graphic medicine becomes valuable here because comics externalize internal states visually and symbolically. A comic panel can sometimes hold experiences that are too defended, too painful, or too identity-bound to discuss directly. The mirrored architecture of Iconic Issues #8 intentionally channels that idea. The skyline itself behaves like a Rorschach blot because perception itself has become psychologically reorganized.
This is one reason contemporary mythology matters clinically. Comics do not merely entertain. At their best, they become symbolic maps of psychic life under pressure.
Thomas Coghlan
Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

05/27/2026

Following peer review, the Heroic Growth approach to psychotherapy has been accepted for publication in Graphic Medicine Review in the article:

“Comics, Narrative Structure, and Meaning-Making in Psychotherapy”
Thomas Coghlan, PsyD

DOI: 10.7191/gmr.1235

The article explores how comic book and superhero narratives may function within psychotherapy not simply as stories or metaphors, but as structured narrative environments through which individuals reconsider identity, responsibility, unresolved harm, continuity, and meaning over time.

Drawing from psychotherapy practice, the paper examines how clients engaged with comic narratives through journaling, visual annotation, narrative reconstruction, and guided reflection. The work is influenced by graphic medicine, narrative psychotherapy, comics studies, depth psychology, archetypal psychology, and mythic frameworks including the Campbellian monomyth — not as rigid templates imposed onto experience, but as heuristic structures through which individuals may recognize recurring narrative patterns within their own lives.

Much of Heroic Growth has always rested on the idea that comics and superheroes are not trivial cultural artifacts, but contemporary mythic structures through which many people first encounter questions of identity, sacrifice, justice, suffering, transformation, and meaning.

I’m deeply grateful to the reviewers and editors at Graphic Medicine Review for their thoughtful engagement with the manuscript and for helping strengthen the work substantially through peer review.