Psychology of TV Shows

A psychologist explores The Bear: generalized anxiety, parentification, suicide bereavement, repetition compulsion in the workplace, and the slow work of real recovery.

1 min read

A psychologist explores Severance: the compartmentalized self, dissociation, trauma avoidance, the work-life split, and the real cost of dividing ourselves to survive what feels unbearable.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Ted Lasso: healthy masculinity, kindness as strength, the panic and grief beneath a cheerful exterior, and how seeking help is not weakness.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Shrinking: sudden widowhood and the year after loss, the forgotten grieving child, therapist boundaries and ethics, friendship as a form of support, and the slow work of repair.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Succession: narcissistic family systems, intermittent reinforcement, assigned sibling roles, complicated grief, and the work of healing from a parent who could not love.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Netflix's Adolescence: how ordinary boys are drawn into online radicalization and the manosphere, the warning signs parents miss, and the protective factors that help.

A psychologist explores The Last of Us: parental grief that does not end, emotional numbing, the attachment that forms after loss, found family, and the moral weight of what we do to protect those we love.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Breaking Bad: malignant narcissism, wounded pride and resentment driving moral decline, rationalization, and the self-justifying ego behind the man who said he did it for his family.

2 min read

A psychologist explores Stranger Things: how the Upside Down pictures trauma, the wounds of childhood, grief and being disbelieved, and the friendship and found family that help us survive.

A psychologist explores The Sopranos: how therapy works and where it stops, the gap between insight and real change, the shadow of a damaging mother, and how patterns pass down the generations.

Why a show about nothing was really about the invisible rules that structure every social life, and what its characters who never grow reveal about change.

The need to belong, how a group of friends becomes a chosen family, and why the parasocial bond viewers formed with them was itself a kind of belonging.

What happens when cooperation is required to advance but self-interest is required to win, and how alliances form, hold, and break under that pressure.

Maslach's three dimensions of burnout, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma, seen through the people who tend the sick and dying for a living.

The developmental work of later life, why friendship matters more with age, and a vision of old age that refuses diminishment.