Sandra Cohen Ph.D.

Sandra Cohen Ph.D. Dr. Sandra Cohen is a certified Psychoanalyst and Trauma Informed Specialist focused on childhood trauma and its aftereffects. Speaker. Author. Educator. We see.

My name is Dr. Sandra Cohen and I am a certified psychoanalyst and licensed clinical psychologist with a practice in Beverly Hills, California. Each time I watch a film, TV show or read a book, my psychoanalyst’s mind begins to construct the same kind of understandings I might give to my patients. Pop culture often depicts real human problems with startling accuracy. Why is this so? Fictional characters are informed by their writer’s experiences and made more convincing by what we bring as we watch or read. Our unconscious minds unite with the writer’s. Personal experience is made public. We relate. We know. The early memories and unconscious struggles of these characters show us what we can’t so easily know about other people or ourselves. My musings at Characters on the Couch give me a chance to tell you what I see in ways similar to how I talk with my patients.

04/14/2026

Love doesn’t always feel good. Not when it hasn’t felt safe before.

In Die My Love, Grace is living with something that started long before the baby. A voice that says: don’t need anyone. don’t get attached.

So when closeness shows up - real closeness - it doesn’t feel comforting. It feels dangerous.

If you’ve ever pulled away from something you actually want… there’s a reason for that.

In Ari Aster’s MIDSOMMAR, Dani loses everything—her parents, her sister, her sense of home. When trauma is that overwhel...
04/07/2026

In Ari Aster’s MIDSOMMAR, Dani loses everything—her parents, her sister, her sense of home. When trauma is that overwhelming, you can’t always feel it. So you go numb. You tell yourself you’re “too much.” You lean on someone who can’t hold you. You start to believe your needs are the problem.

But the need doesn’t go away. It turns into hunger. Hunger for love, for family, for someone to be there. And when that hunger is strong enough, you can be pulled into places that seem to offer what you’ve lost... places that say “you’re home now,” that surround you, mirror you, make you feel held.

But not all holding is real. If no one can truly see your pain, if no one can respond to it, if your feelings are swallowed up instead of understood, that’s not healing.

You can’t replace what you lost. But you can find real empathy. You can find someone who helps you feel. That’s where healing begins.

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the problem. It’s the solution.When you grow up in ...
03/31/2026

In M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Dissociative Identity Disorder is not the problem. It’s the solution.

When you grow up in a terrifying world—where the people you need most are the ones who hurt you—you have to find a way to survive. You split. Parts of you carry what you cannot. The fear. The rage. The shame. The need.

You learn early that no one is safe.

So when someone asks you to trust, you can’t. Not yet. Trust has been shattered. It takes time. Real understanding. Patience. Without that, help can feel like another threat.

And when you have no power as a child, you create it wherever you can. That’s where The Beast comes in. Not madness. Protection. Strength in a world where you were helpless.

Casey knows this too. She survives by watching, by staying quiet, by not getting close. Because getting close can get you hurt.

Distrust and the need for power can’t be underestimated.
They are what kept you alive.

But they’re also what make healing so hard.

In Lynn Ramsey’s Die My Love, Grace wants love. A partner. A baby. A life.But when you’ve been traumatized early, love d...
03/27/2026

In Lynn Ramsey’s Die My Love, Grace wants love. A partner. A baby. A life.

But when you’ve been traumatized early, love doesn’t feel safe. A voice takes shape inside you: don’t love. don’t get attached.

Having a baby can stir everything that was never resolved. Your need. Your fear. The terror of being left again. And instead of feeling it, you fight it. Push people away. Try to control it. Try to shut it down. Because needing someone can feel like it will destroy you.

Help doesn’t always reach you in time. Or in the way you need. It can feel like judgment. Like something is wrong with you. So you close down even more.

But it doesn’t have to end this way. When you can feel safe enough to trust, love doesn’t have to die.

They can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them.”Owen first hears this line in a commercial for The Pink Opaque—a fict...
03/26/2026

They can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them.”

Owen first hears this line in a commercial for The Pink Opaque—a fictional TV show about two girls fighting monsters from afar. It’s meant to sound like a kind of protection. A rule for survival.

But from the start, the film tells us exactly what kind of survival this is. In I Saw the TV Glow, “not thinking about it” isn’t relief, it’s a defense against feelings that are just too much. As Jane Schoenbrun puts it, repression is a survival mechanism. And Owen learns it early.

He learns how to survive by not looking: at his sadness, at his identity, at what it might mean to really know himself. The show pulls him in, but the message underneath it pushes him back—don’t think about it. Don’t feel it. Don’t go there.

And for a while, that works. Or at least, it numbs. But numbness isn’t the same as safety. It’s Mr. Melancholy’s trick: not healing, just “going dead.”

There’s a cruel logic to it.

If you don’t think about it, you don’t have to feel it. If you don’t feel it, you don’t have to face it.

And for someone on the edge of realizing who they are—when that realization feels unbearable—that logic can feel like the only way to stay alive. But what you’re really avoiding… is yourself.

The film understands something devastating: repression can feel like comfort. Like staying is safer than becoming. Like forgetting is easier than risking the pain of knowing.

Ruben has been running for a very long time.With drugs. With music. Even with love.Because when something inside feels t...
03/23/2026

Ruben has been running for a very long time.

With drugs. With music. Even with love.

Because when something inside feels too painful to hear, you find ways not to listen.

Ruben loses his hearing. And suddenly, he can’t run the way he always has. The silence he’s avoided begins to close in.

At first, he wants to fix it. Get back to who he was. Back to Lou. Back to his life.

But what he’s really trying to escape isn’t deafness. It’s himself.

Stillness is terrifying when you’ve spent your life avoiding your feelings. Because in the quiet, they come back.

The fear of being alone. The belief that no one will be there. The pain that never had a place to go.

But something shifts when Ruben finally stops running. When he lets the silence be there. When he listens—not to the noise of the world, but to something deeper inside himself. That’s where something new begins.

This was a wonderful year for psychologically rich films.Many of this year’s stories invite us into the inner lives of t...
03/15/2026

This was a wonderful year for psychologically rich films.

Many of this year’s stories invite us into the inner lives of their characters. You see the ways childhood loss, longing, love, shame, and memory shape who people become and the choices they make.
I had the pleasure of exploring many of these characters in Characters on the Couch, including films across this year’s Oscar nominees, including nine of the ten Best Picture nominees, along with several other nominated films that stayed with me long after the credits rolled.

From Victor in Frankenstein, driven by a desperate need to conquer loss, to Robert Grainier in Train Dreams, who lives his life haunted by sudden childhood loss, to Vahid in It Was Just an Accident, wrestling with memory, trauma, and the pull of revenge, these films show how the past continues to live inside us.

You can read my full essays at the link in my bio!

Characters from this year’s Oscar-nominated films I’ve written about:

Victor Frankenstein & The Creature (Frankenstein)
Teddy Gatz (Bugonia)
Nora Borg (Sentimental Value)
Marty Ma**er (Marty Supreme)
Robert Grainier (Train Dreams)
Sammie (Sinners)
Perfidia & Bob Ferguson (One Battle After Another)
Agnes & Will Shakespeare (Hamnet)
Armando / Marcelo Alves (The Secret Agent)
Lorenz Hart (Blue Moon)
Man-su (No Other Choice)
Linda (If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You)
Vahid (It Was Just an Accident)
Claire Sardina (Song Sung Blue)
Man-Su (No Other Choice)

In The Secret Agent, a man is being hunted by an assassin. But that’s not the only thing chasing Armando (Marcel). It’s ...
03/15/2026

In The Secret Agent, a man is being hunted by an assassin. But that’s not the only thing chasing Armando (Marcel). It’s the losses he can’t bear to remember.

Armando has lost too much. His mother taken from him at birth, his wife’s death, the threat of losing his son.

When loss piles up like that, the mind finds ways to survive. Sometimes by shutting down feelings. Sometimes by forgetting.

His son Fernando grows up saying quietly: “I don’t remember.”

That’s what trauma does. To not feel the pain, it can make whole pieces of your life disappear.

But remembering matters. In The Secret Agent, recordings preserve the voices of those who were lost. Years later, Fernando holds his father’s voice in his hand. And something begins to return.

Painful as it is, remembering can start to put the pieces of you back together again.

Marty Ma**er wants to be the best. The world champion. The face of American table tennis. And he’ll do almost anything t...
03/11/2026

Marty Ma**er wants to be the best. The world champion. The face of American table tennis. And he’ll do almost anything to get there.

Marty hustles everyone around him—investors, friends, lovers. He steals, scams, and humiliates people to feel bigger than the small life he thinks he’s escaping. Underneath all that arrogance is something else: shame. The unbearable feeling of being nobody.

So Marty keeps climbing higher. Talking bigger. Risking more. Hurting the very people who believe in him most—Rachel, Wally, Dion.
But eventually the hustle runs out.

The real turning point in Marty’s story isn’t winning a match. It’s the moment he stops running from humiliation and faces himself. When he gives up the scam, plays the game honestly, and returns home—not as “Marty Supreme,” but as someone who might finally grow up.

Sometimes the biggest victory isn’t beating your opponent. It’s coming down to earth and seeing who you really are.

Read my full piece at the link in my bio!

Agnes was taught to live with her heart open. But when you lose a loving mother and grow up in cruelty, that kind of ope...
03/09/2026

Agnes was taught to live with her heart open. But when you lose a loving mother and grow up in cruelty, that kind of openness feels dangerous.

In Hamnet, Chloe Zhao gives us two people who learned early that love can be taken away. Agnes hides in the forest with her hawk. Will writes his way out of shame and his father’s harshness. They find each other. They risk it. They build a family.

And then they lose Hamnet.

Grief threatens to close Agnes’ heart for good. Will grieves differently—through distance, through words, through guilt. They wound each other in their pain. When you’ve already lost so much, another loss can make you want to shut everything down.

But remembering is not the same as reopening the wound. Through Hamlet, Will remembers his son back into presence. Agnes sees him. Reaches for him. Whistles for the hawk.

Grief doesn’t disappear. But it doesn’t have to end with a closed heart. To live with your heart open is to love anyway, even when you know what it costs.

03/05/2026

In Characters on the Couch, I look at film and TV through a psychoanalytic lens, exploring what characters reveal about trauma, relationships, and the inner life.

In If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, the real horror isn’t monsters. It’s bad therapy.

When a therapist shames, misunderstands, and rejects a traumatized patient, therapy can repeat the very wounds it’s supposed to heal. A good therapist helps you understand overwhelming feelings, never blames you for having them.

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