Top Left: Viola Davis, Academy Award for Fences, Triple Crown of Acting winner-Oscar, Emmy, Tony Awards. Top Right: Alex Gregory, Co-Creator/Writer/Producer for hit shows: Veep, White House Plumber, and The Studio. Bottom Left: Gabe Rotter, Creator of the Netflix series, The Beast in Me and writer for Season2 of The Pitt. Bottom Right: Ava Ryan, plays Georgia, a target of cyberbullying, in Free Bert on Netflix

At the start of the new year, I had the honor as an author of participating in the DPA Pre-Golden Globe Gift Suite on January 10, 2026, during the week of the Golden Globes. I signed my book: Wrestling Through Adversity: Empowering Children, Teens, & Young Adults to Win in Life for many celebrities. These included actors, directors, writers, editors, composers, voice animators, and influencers—some of whom were award nominees for movies and TV, such as for Sinners, Weapons, K-POP Demon Hunters, and Nobody Wants This. The overall narrative of the Golden Globes this year celebrated stories centered on growing up and childhood challenges, making it a significant theme of the ceremony.

During the signings I had the opportunity not only to introduce my book, but to speak with both seasoned performers and teenagers who were aligned with my intent of writing it, that is, to promote mental health and resilience acquisition among our young people, so they can learn to bounce back from adversity. Some celebrities were parents and grandparents and spoke of the challenges they were having raising children. Others talked about the problems they faced during COVID-19 with the isolation of their teens, and parents of young children mentioned how they wanted to start early to prepare them to handle life’s challenges in today’s tumultuous world, but they needed advice and support.

For me as an author, it was the most rewarding day in my recent past to gift and sign my book for these celebrities who were grateful that I wrote it. For weeks before the event, I prepared myself by viewing nominated movies and TV series and by visiting Warner Bros. Studio upon arrival in California. During this time, I was pleasantly surprised as a peak performance coach who works with young people to see how many of them had the theme of children under duress as a major focus that I will discuss in this blog as follows:

The Lost Innocence of Childhood

Let’s start with the four-part series, Adolescence, which for me was hard to watch as a peak performance coach because of its serious content. The central plot involves a 13-year-old boy accused of the murder of a girl. The theme connected trauma and ‘incel culture’ (manosphere) prominent in the UK that highlights social isolation, the impact of bullying, online radicalization, toxic masculinity, male mental health struggles, intergenerational blind spots, and distorted views of gender relationships that is fueled by digital exposure. This cruel content on social media directed at young boys leads to feelings of abandonment and social injustice. It speaks of lost innocence from the ‘filth and debris’ laid in young people’s paths by adults, and a chaotic disconnect between parents and teens.

The movie, Weapons, a film that grew out of the director’s grief from the sudden death of a friend, explores the themes of generational trauma, the allegory of school shootings, innocence in childhood, and communal complicity, by using the mysterious disappearance of 17 classmates as a catalyst. These themes highlight how adults fail children and how trauma and abuse manifest as destructive forces that turn children into weapons through manipulation. This was particularly seen with the surviving child, Alex, whose long-lost aunt, Gladys, a witch, used him to suck out the lives of him and his classmates to save herself from death.

This horror film shows children used as sacrificial lambs, while the adults wrestled with personal demons, symbolizing inner corruption that poisons families and communities. It suggests a collective failure to see and address evil, making the adult community complicit in the horrors. The teacher is scapegoated as a witch, but in reality, she seems to be the only person to care, although she overdoes the empathy to make it feel pathological.

Stories of Childhood Abandonment

Jay Kelly, a movie whose actors, George Clooney, an aging movie star, Adam Sandler, a dedicated longtime manager, and Laura Dern, a publicist, all got caught up in losing themselves and their families  while they catered to Jay’s single-minded and selfish focus on his career. As his youngest daughter, Daisy, starts her impending departure from college and his older daughter tries to sort her trauma out with her dad and a psychologist, Jay begins to reassess his life to put it into perspective of how he abandoned his children while filming movies, much to his family’s detriment and to his staff.

The motion picture, Train Dreams is the story of Robert Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton, (a nominee for best actor) who was a traveling laborer and logger in the early 20^th century Pacific Northwest. Robert finds a sense of stability in his marriage as the country evolves around him. The trauma of his childhood is embodied in a portrait of internalized manhood built on his early history as an orphan, and with his itinerant “work” family.

There is the realization for Robert that the natural world of trees not only gives him his livelihood but can take life from him when his family burned in a forest fire while he searched for them upon his return from a long absence. Robert has a recurring haunting nightmare that replays how while working in the forest he saw a Chinese laborer thrown off a cliff because of racial prejudice. Like the trees he cut down, the story finds its power in recognizing that no one exists in this world solely as an individual. It stresses how trees are a precious commodity in today’s world and not one to be squandered, which was contrary to the belief of the time.

The movie, One Battle After Another, explores themes of inherited trauma, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and of finding one’s identity among revolutionary turmoil. The character Willa serves as a central teen figure, daughter of Bob—not her birth dad—who navigates lies about her past to forge her own path to find her true meaning in life and to wrestle through adversity by moving  from being a victim to one of hope and of taking control in her life. She emerges while carrying her absent mother’s beliefs forward in a new way, and while bonding with her father to emerge as a powerful force for good and growth.

Coincidental or Serendipitous Events Took Place During Golden Globes Week?

There were events that took place during Golden Globes Week while I was signing books in the gifting room that I would like to mention here, starting from January 5, 2026, to January 11, 2026. They were related not only to the themes of the movies on the big screen in our imaginations but were in the current reality of everyday people’s lives.

• School Shootings: The police officer, Adrian Gonzales, stood trial on January 5, 2026, just days before the Golden Globes ceremony, for child endangerment for his response at the Robb Elementary shooting. It is the first trial over the police response or lack thereof to one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, as symbolized in the movie Weapons.
• Fires Raging: On January 7, 2025, 10 acres in southern California near the Palisades Drive on the coastal neighborhood’s western edge combined with the Eaton fires started to burn for 31 days. It was reported that 31 people died. Although there were fake reports that the Hollywood sign burned as well, it was AI generated. During the ceremony the first anniversary of the fire was being commemorated while many residents are still without homes in the region, like in the movie Train Dreams.
• Immigration Arrests: On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, was shot and killed by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent over immigration policies in a peaceful protest that continues today beyond Hollywood in Minnesota, as in One Battle After Another.

The Elephant in the Room during the Golden Globes Ceremony?

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to dig deeply into the psychological reasons why I say there was an “Elephant in the Room” during the Golden Globes ceremony. The host, comedienne Nikki Glaser, gave a heart-felt final tribute with a movie quote while sporting a Spinal Tap baseball cap in honor of the passing of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, killed in their home by their son, Nick, who committed matricide and patricide on December 14, 2025. Nick had been addicted to drugs since his teenage years and attended drug treatment centers without successful recovery. After the filming of a semi-autobiographical film he made with his dad about his life, it appeared that Nick had improved until these untimely murders that bring up questions about humanity and how everyday people are under siege.

Mental Health Care under Siege

Ironically, in The New Jersey Sierran, Vol. 55, No 1, January-March 2026, the editor, Tony Hagen, wrote a piece “The Human Mindscape Is Under Siege” in which he talked about how, although the Sierra Club focuses on preserving the environment, as touched on in Train Dreams, there is the inner environment to protect. Hagen writes about the fragile mental state of Americans who live under the worst conditions. He further explains that our digital devices, the portable environments of our vehicles, and our remote office spaces allow us to pretend that most people just don’t exist. At home, Hagen mentions that people tune others out and plug into video games and movies. We know that mental health treatment communities are overwhelmed by what is going on. In online forums anger and hostility are rampant, and people believe whatever they want but not necessarily what is really happening, stated Hagen, who laments that the guardrails are down, and there is no way to calm craziness or tempers.

Now, Hagen mentioned, millions of people live and work completely alone. He predicts that the AI/robot revolution will exacerbate that trend, while the gloom of it will impact us all. “Hatred and selfishness,“ Hagen believes, will tear our country apart because we believe we do not need one another.

Hagen suggests, as I do in my book, that we must work together in community to help our young people thrive. It takes much more than bigger houses, TVs, or private jets. We need to respect each other and reform our attitudes and our thoughts to reinforce a positive mental environment from our insides out by using the Mindful Toughness skill sets I teach to win in life.