If so, that’s perfectly okay! Far from any of this being a so-called “bad thing,” I want to share my perspective as a psychotherapist with you about why your deep love of certain shows and movies can actually be a perfectly legitimate tool for personal growth plus share some inquiries and resources with you that will help make your next round of movie or TV watching a little more therapeutic (yes, really!). 

In Praise of The Digital Campfire.

Since time immemorial we humans have had a need to learn how the world works. What our place in it is. And how to navigate all the stuff of life.

As psychotherapist Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD talks about across her breadth of work, much of this life instruction was imparted through oral storytelling, local wisdom sharing, and swapped tales passed down through the generations. Today in our modern world, the act of gathering around a campfire to learn about life from an elder seems to have all but disappeared and, instead, I would argue, most of us now gather around a proverbial digital campfire consciously or unconsciously to seek out the same thing.

Yep, that’s right: the glow of our computer screens, tablets, and big screen TV’s comprise today’s modern digital campfire and the stories and plot lines throughout much of what we watch have become a kind of life instruction and inspiration instead.

So is this really such a bad thing? Not necessarily.

While I think there are legitimate and pressing concerns about the type and amount of media that we collectively consume (and allow our children to consume), I don’t believe in pathologizing watching movies and TV shows as “all bad”. I truly believe that there’s a way in which this can be a very useful tool for our personal growth. All thanks to the modeling and instructing, accessing and processing, and calming and containment movies and TV can provide for us.

Modeling & Instructing.

In a very legitimate way, movies and TV shows can help meet that basic need we all have. To understand how this whole human life thing works. Shows and movies can model for us how to be in relationship. Or how to chase our dreams. Or what other lives and options for us might be possible. Ad it can passively and actively teach us about so many other elements of life.

For example, a young woman once shared with me that while she was growing up (largely emotionally neglected by her parents in childhood), it was thanks to watching Full House that she learned what might be possible between parents and kids, that warmth and concern and curiosity could exist, and that children could be deeply loved by the adults in their lives. To this day, Full House serves as an inspiration for her in parenting her own children. And in parenting the “little girl inside of her.”