What Can I Do? On Optimism, Survival, and Building Film/Video-Based Therapy
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Dr. Joshua L. Cohen.
This essay reflects on my published Bold Journey interview, “Meet Joshua Cohen,” published March 19, 2026. I’m expanding on answers I gave there, not reproducing the interview. One question continues to shape how I think about survival, creative work, and the responsibilities that come with making images: What can I do?
Optimism without a promise
After my divorce, I was facing bankruptcy and trying to survive. My family could not help as much as I had hoped. I lived in board-and-care homes, had no money, and found that many friends were no longer available to me. In that period, optimism did not mean that I felt confident about how things would turn out. It began with my spiritual beliefs and, practically, with a question: What can I do now?
I compared that approach in the interview to The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s novel and directed by Ridley Scott: address the problem in front of you, then work on the next one. That comparison is about a way of thinking, not a promise that every crisis has a simple solution, or that anyone should have to face one alone.
In the same interview, I described rebuilding my life through extraordinary adversity. I published two more academic books, found housing, survived COVID-19, and survived two violent assaults that threatened my life. I also began driving Uber to support myself financially. Despite these experiences, I continued looking for opportunities to rebuild my life. One opportunity led to another: a scholarship to return to school, followed by graduate study, where I am now completing my Master of Social Work at Arizona State University.
The two assaults were separate events. During the first, I was attacked with a baseball bat, sustaining an injury that tore my spleen. I relied on my martial arts training to defend myself and drive the attacker away. Looking back, I believe the heightened confidence I experienced during a manic episode also influenced how I responded to the danger.
In the second incident, I was attacked after stepping off a train. The individual was subsequently arrested and tried for the attempted murders of both me and another person.
Surviving these experiences did not make the violence meaningful or necessary. What mattered was how I continued living afterward and how I gradually found ways to rebuild my life.
These are events I shared in the interview, not a formula for what another person’s life will look like.
I didn’t erase my history. I changed what I made it mean.
For me, that is different from saying that hardship is useful or that a positive attitude guarantees an outcome. It is a way to describe how I began responding to what was actually in front of me. The question “What can I do?” did not remove the circumstances. It gave me a place to begin thinking within them.
Never Give Up! — a video by Dr. Joshua L. Cohen.
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Dr. Joshua L. Cohen.
Technology, storytelling, and care with difficult material
Technology is not neutral simply because it is a tool. Cameras, editing systems, virtual environments, and AI can shape what people see, what they choose to record, and how a story is framed or shared. These questions matter in filmmaking generally, and they require particular care when a story touches trauma.
When a filmmaker brings personal or sensitive material into a project, what might the camera invite them to disclose? Who will control the footage? How might an edit change the meaning of a person’s words? What could happen when an image leaves the room in which it was made? Those are questions worth considering; the answers depend on the people, project, context, and professional boundaries involved.
I am a media psychologist, clinically trained researcher, author/editor, educator, and storytelling/filmmaking coach. My work draws on scholarship at the intersection of clinical questions and the creative arts. I am also the originator of my named FILM/VIDEO-BASED THERAPY® framework. That name does not mean a camera, film, VR experience, AI system, or act of storytelling is therapy by itself.
The medium itself is not the therapist. The relationship, consent, safety, collaboration, context, and appropriately qualified professional practice matter. My academic and educational work examines how creative media may be considered within those larger human and professional contexts; it does not establish that a particular technology or filmmaking activity will produce a clinical outcome.
We can make filmmaking more therapeutic without turning filmmaking into therapy.
AI-generated editorial illustration for YDSP; not a documentary image of Dr. Joshua L. Cohen.
What a book can make possible
In the interview, I talked about Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice, the 2015 Routledge volume I co-edited. As I recalled there, about eighteen contributors collaborated on the book. It brought together research and practice around filmmaking and expressive arts, and helped create space for more evidence-focused discussion of film and psychotherapy.
The book matters to me not as proof that film itself treats trauma, but as part of a larger effort to ask careful questions about how creative work is used and understood. Scholarship, clinical application, storytelling, and advocacy are related conversations, but they are not interchangeable. A research finding does not automatically establish what will happen in an individual clinical relationship; an expressive project is not, by itself, clinical treatment; and an advocacy story should not be mistaken for clinical evidence.
I want that distinction to remain visible as media technologies change. A new tool may open new artistic possibilities, and it may also raise new questions about consent, control, representation, and interpretation. The work is not to promise what a medium can do. It is to examine what people are doing with it, under what conditions, and with what responsibilities.
My interest is in how meaning is made, and in how carefully we should treat the meanings people make for themselves.
Creative thinking under pressure
When Bold Journey asked which qualities mattered to me, I named persistence, looking for opportunities, and creating opportunities when none are apparent. I also described creative thinking as valuable under pressure: being playful enough to consider a different route when the expected one is not available.
I don’t offer that as a universal instruction or a guarantee. The point is smaller: sometimes the next useful question is not “How do I solve everything?” but “What can I do next?” Other people may need support, time, or a different kind of help before that question is answerable.
That distinction matters in creative work too. A filmmaker may be close to a project and still have questions about how its choices will land, with collaborators, audiences, or people whose lives are represented. I bring an interdisciplinary perspective shaped by filmmaking, psychology, storytelling, emerging technology, and post-traumatic growth scholarship, as well as my authorship of FILM/VIDEO-BASED THERAPY®. From outside a project, I may be able to help identify questions or possibilities that are difficult to see from inside it. The particular answers belong to the filmmaker and their project.
Bring your project. Ask better questions. Create with purpose.
If you want to explore the questions your own project raises alongside others doing similar work, the Post-Traumatic Growth & FVBT™ community is where that conversation continues — the free trial includes an individual coaching session, and continued membership includes one session per month. If you prefer to begin with a direct conversation, I offer coaching at $150/hour for filmmakers who want to examine their own projects with an interdisciplinary perspective.
Your story matters, too. I can describe what a question helped me do; I cannot determine what another person’s story means for them.
Tell Your Story coaching is creative education and Jungian-informed coaching, not clinical care. Dr. Cohen's current coaching, consulting, and educational services are nonclinical and do not constitute psychotherapy, psychological treatment, or a substitute for care from a licensed mental-health professional.