Below is a detailed list of my appearances, syndications, and publications over the last few years. If you are looking for a guest article or speaker, my clinical expertise is the effects of childhood trauma as they persist into adulthood.
Get in Touch
If your organization would like me to speak about this and any other topic I’ve written about below or in my Moving Forward Blog posts, or if you need an expert opinion, please call 310-273-4827 or email me at sandracohenphd@gmail.com.
I’m happy to discuss your interests and requests.
Appearances
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Rage: The Trauma of Having No Voice
Written for and read as a part of Library Girl’s series, “The Band song, Tears of Rage,” posted on Library Girl’s Facebook Page, November, 12, 2020.
Rage is necessary. Grief alone cannot heal what silence has buried. When there’s no voice against abuse or repression, the pain turns inward, trapped in symptoms that mask the truth. Rage can free creativity from its prison of numbness. It transforms powerlessness into expression, turning what’s hidden into what’s heard. To find healing, we must first find our rage—and let it speak.
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Phantom Thread: What Is Reynolds & Alma’s Perverse Feeding Game Really All About?
Discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2018 film, at The Psychoanalytic Center of California’s Third Annual Saturday Cinema, May 18, 2019.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread explores the strange power dynamic between Reynolds Woodcock and Alma. Their ritualized acts of control and surrender reveal how dependency can disguise itself as devotion. Beneath the elegance lies obsession, need, and fear of abandonment. Anderson exposes the way love becomes a game of appetite and deprivation—one feeding on the other’s weakness to stay alive.
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Lady Bird: Critical Mothers & Provocative Daughters How History Plays Its Part in Problems Loving & Letting Go
Discussion of Greta Gerwig’s film at The Psychoanalytic Center of California’s Second Annual Saturday Cinema, March 3, 2018.
Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird captures the tension between mothers and daughters bound by love yet shaped by history. Behind the humor and warmth are old wounds—expectations, disappointments, the ache of wanting to be seen. Gerwig’s film invites us to notice how maternal criticism hides fear, and how growing up means forgiving the imperfect love that made us who we are.
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Elle: What Does Triumph Have to Do with It?
Discussion of Paul Verhoeven’s film at The Psychoanalytic Center of California’s First Saturday Cinema, April 18, 2017.
Paul Verhoeven’s Elle thrusts us into trauma’s aftermath—where survival blurs moral boundaries. Michèle’s refusal to be defined by her assault unsettles us; she reclaims agency through defiance rather than pity. Verhoeven crafts a psychological labyrinth where denial, desire, and revenge coexist. What emerges isn’t resolution, but the unsettling truth that power after trauma often wears an ambiguous face.
Syndications
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The Dangers Of Revenge Obsession In ‘Promising Young Woman.’
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, June 5, 2021.
Where does revenge obsession take you? In Emerald Fennell’s brilliantly disturbing and evocative Promising Young Woman, Cassie (played by Carey Mulligan) lost Nina, her very best friend — and only true soulmate — to suicide. Why? A violent and repeated rape seriously traumatized Nina and she couldn’t go on. And no one listened.
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How Silence Stops A Man From Running In ‘Sound Of Metal.’
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, May 17, 2021.
In Sound of Metal, Ruben has been on the run for a long time. No one becomes a heroin addict unless there’s something too painful inside him to stop for even a moment to hear or feel. So, Ruben runs — with drugs, frantic hard metal drumming, and his desperate love for his singer-girlfriend, Lou (played by Olivia Cooke).
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Dementia & The Fight To Hold Onto Who He Was In The Film ‘The Father.’
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, May 11, 2021.
The brilliance — and terror — of Florian Zeller’s The Father is that we’re living inside the mind of an aging man losing his identity to dementia. To watch it from the outside is bad enough. I know. I was that daughter, too.
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From ‘The Trial Of The Chicago 7,’ Lessons On Speaking Out — No Matter What
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, May 2, 2021.
The horror of Bobby Seale’s gagging by Judge Julius Hoffman in Aaron Sorkin’s timely and Oscar-nominated film, The Trial of the Chicago 7, is an image of what Black Lives Matter is fighting against. It’s an image of how being silenced provokes rage. The history and trial speak for themselves.
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How A Lonely ‘Nomad’ Gets By In The Land Of Loss, From The Oscar-Winning ‘Nomadland.’
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, April 29, 2021.
Loss can feel like a nowhereland of moving aimlessly from feeling to feeling, place to place, inside your mind. You’ve lost the home you know, with a person that you love.
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What Makes A Talented Man Drink Himself To Death? The Film ‘Mank’ Examines Addiction & Self-Hate
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, April 27, 2021.
Herman Mankiewicz was a tragic figure — in 1940s Hollywood and in David Fincher’s Oscar-winning film for Best Cinematography and Production Design, Mank. Sure, Mank stood up for what was right and against what was wrong at MGM and in the political world of the times.
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Why Do Girls Like Bad Boys? 6 Truths About This Trope from Classic Film ‘A Face in The Crowd.’
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, January 17, 2021.
Have you ever fallen in love with the narcissistic “bad boy”? Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith), a brash, charming drunken drifter, is turned into a radio personality by Marcia Jeffries (played by Patricia Neal) in Elia Kazan’s 1957 classic, A Face in The Crowd.
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‘My Octopus Teacher’ & Why Healing Means Returning to The Same Place
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, December 30, 2020.
Why return to the same place over and over? Because it can sometimes be healing. Documentary filmmaker, editor, and cameraman Craig Foster says it best in his moving, life-altering, love-story, My Octopus Teacher. “That’s when you see the subtle differences.
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5 Suggestions for Coping with Prolonged Pandemic Grief
Written for Moving Forward Blog on sandracohenphd.com and re-published on YourTango.com on December 28, 2020.
Does your sadness not stop? Do you feel trapped in a cycle of despair? You’re not alone. Almost one year of a global pandemic is enough to put anyone in a state of prolonged grief. But there are things you can do to cope. It might be hard to believe that.
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Lessons of Unspeakable Trauma from the film “Get Out"
Written for charactersonthecouch.com and re-published on YourTango.com, November 2, 2020.
Jordan Peele’s brilliantly conceived 2017 film, Get Out, does its job of shattering the myth that we are living in a post-racial America. My great uncle, Leo Hurwitz’s film, Strange Victory, tried to do the same in 1948, after we collectively won the war against Hitler but came home to racism here in the US.
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ow to Date in A Pandemic: Why Slow & Steady Is The ‘New Normal'
Written for Moving Forward Blog on sandracohenphd.com and re-published on YourTango.com, October 29, 2020.
“These times are unprecedented, and you’re likely wondering how to date in a pandemic when the end isn’t in sight. You might be asking yourself: “What can I do about it? How do I date safely?”
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If You Were A Victim of Child Sexual Abuse, You Need to Read This
Written for Moving Forward Blog on sandracohenphd.com and re-published on YourTango.com, October 28, 2020.
“The list of negative effects of child sexual abuse is long. But if you want to learn how to love yourself and build self-esteem after trauma, you certainly can. Sexual abuse is one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a child. If it happened to you, you live with one of its worst after-effects: low self-esteem.
Publications
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Marie H. Briehl and Rosetta Hurwitz: Pioneers in North American Child Psychoanalysis
Published in The Psychoanalytic Study of The Child 2021, Vol. 74, No. 1, 294–303.
Marie H. Briehl (1897–1993) and Rosetta Hurwitz (1895–1981) were child psychoanalysts and my great aunts. Although far too hidden, they were important figures in America’s history of child psychoanalysis … Not widely known are details of the pioneering efforts of some of the earliest child psychoanalysts in the United States, particularly those who traveled to Vienna in the 1920’s to study with Anna Freud. Many of these graduated analysts returned to North America and prepared to practice analysis with children.
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Lessons From ‘The Mandalorian’: When Childhood Attachments Go Wrong, Is Feeling Nothing, ‘The Way?’
Written for and published on YourTango.com, March 15, 2021.
When attachments go wrong in early life, you have to toughen up. But is feeling nothing “The Way?” If you thought it was, what does it take to break free and allow love? This was the question for Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars and it’s the question for Mando, The Mandalorian, who also lost his beloved parents when he was a small child: Is love safe? Love isn’t safe when your early attachments go wrong.
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‘The Queen’s Gambit’ — This Is How Traumatized Children Survive
Written for and published on YourTango.com, January 7, 2021.
When traumatized children try to survive adulthood, they may have questionable ways of coping. But there’s a difference in the ways traumatized children survive and the ways that actually help them. It’s important to know the difference. Beth Harmon from Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit learned how to cope. And no, drugs weren’t the answer. (A note to readers who haven’t finished the series yet: Spoilers are ahead.)
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4 Lessons in Love at Any Age From ‘The Kominsky Method.’
Written for and published on YourTango.com, December 15, 2020.
Are you having trouble making love work, or can’t seem to go with the flow in your relationships? Chuck Lorre’s two-season Netflix series The Kominsky Method has some lessons in love that can help. These love lessons have two basic rules: Being totally present and paying close attention to the person in front of you.
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The Trauma of Having No Voice: Response to Arlene Kramer Richards “Rage and Creativity."
In: The International Journal of Controversial Discussions: Psychoanalysis in the 21st Century, Issue 3, Arnold D. Richards, Editor in Chief, September 2020, pp. 36-42.
Being silenced is traumatic, whether by forces from without or within. Having no voice against abusers or repressors, no voice for anger, sadness, or for all of the things that have hurt. That is the most poisonous deterrent to creativity on all levels.
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3 Ways Love Makes You Bolder to Be Your Authentic Self from The Film ‘The Half of It'
Written for and Published on YourTango.com, October 4, 2020.
Do you feel scared to show the real you? Your authentic self? That can change. You can become bold(er). Alice Wu’s film The Half of It shows three ways that friendship can help you stop pretending and come out of hiding. You just have to be open to it. That’s the hard part.
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3 Types of Abusive Relationships to Watch Out For
Written for and Published on YourTango.com, October 2, 2020.
You didn’t see the signs of an abusive relationship. It’s taken you a while to realize your partner might be abusive. You still don’t want to believe it, and may even be wondering if what you’re experiencing is really a type of abuse. For a while, you shut down your feelings to it all — but now you can’t.
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4 Steps You Must Take Leaving an Abusive Relationship
Written for and Published on YourTango.com, September 30, 2020.
Living in an abusive relationship is soul-crushing. You feel terrible about yourself and are isolated from the world. You may be afraid to tell your friends, scared all the time, and constantly making excuses for him. Your only “protection” is shutting down your feelings and enduring it.