TV Can Be a Healing Tool

HEALING & RECOVERY • February 06, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

The Moment It Hit Her

It’s a Tuesday night. Camille is forty minutes into an episode of This Is Us she’s seen before — she knows exactly what’s coming — and still, when Jack Pearson kneels down to tell his daughter that she’s perfect, that he’d never trade one single thing about her, Camille’s chest cracks open.

She isn’t crying about Kate. She knows that. But she can’t stop.

She pauses the episode, sets her phone face-down on the couch cushion beside her, and sits with the feeling she can’t quite name. It’s grief, partly. And something like longing. And underneath both of those: something quietly important is happening — something her nervous system has been waiting years for the right container to hold.

She picks up her phone and texts her best friend: I just ugly-cried at This Is Us again and I think my therapist would say it’s not actually about the show.

Her friend writes back: It never is.

If you’ve had a moment like Camille’s — crying over a storyline that isn’t your story, feeling inexplicably moved by a fictional relationship, finding yourself drawn back to the same show the way you’d return to a place that once made you feel safe — this post is for you. Not to analyze you. Not to tell you to watch more carefully or more moderately. But to say: there’s something real happening in those moments, and it matters more than our culture gives it credit for.

What We Mean When We Say TV Can Be a Healing Tool

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that watching TV replaces therapy, or that more screen time is always better, or that any show consumed in any quantity constitutes healing work. I’m not saying that if you’re binge-watching for six hours to avoid a difficult conversation, that’s growth.

What I am saying is more specific and more interesting than that.

I’m saying that human beings have always used narrative — story, myth, oral tradition, poetry, theater — as a primary technology for emotional processing. This isn’t a new insight. It’s as old as we are. What’s changed is the delivery system: instead of gathering around a fire to hear a shaman’s tale, we gather around the glow of our screens.

And I’m saying that when you use that technology with even a small measure of intention — choosing what you watch, noticing what it stirs, letting the feeling land rather than fast-forwarding past it — you’re doing something that has genuine therapeutic value. There’s a clinical framework for this. There’s neuroscience behind it. And there are real women in my practice for whom a carefully chosen show has functioned as a bridge to emotional territory they couldn’t access any other way.

That’s what I mean when I say TV can be a healing tool.

The Science: Narrative Processing, Mirror Neurons, and Parasocial Bonds

The reason story affects us so deeply isn’t accidental — it’s structural. There are at least three distinct neurological mechanisms at work when we engage with narrative media, and understanding them reframes what’s happening during that “I’m crying and it’s not even about me” moment.

Narrative and Trauma Processing: What Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Tells Us

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University School of Medicine, and author of the landmark The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades studying how the brain processes and fails to process traumatic experience. One of his central findings is that trauma isn’t stored the way ordinary memory is — it doesn’t get filed away as “something that happened in the past.” Instead, it lives in the body, in the nervous system, surfacing as sensation and response in the present. (PMID: 33972795)

One of the reasons trauma is so resistant to ordinary “talking about it” is that the parts of the brain activated during traumatic experience — particularly the amygdala and the subcortical structures responsible for emotional and survival responses — don’t communicate well with the prefrontal cortex, the seat of language and narrative meaning-making. The body is reliving; the verbal mind is trying to explain. They’re not in conversation.

What Dr. van der Kolk found is that narrative — specifically, story that moves through beginning, conflict, and resolution — can serve as a bridge between these systems. When we watch a character move through something that echoes our own experience, process emotions we recognize, and find a way through, our nervous system doesn’t simply observe that arc: it participates in it. We’re not watching someone else’s story. We’re co-experiencing it.

This is why the women in my practice who come from relational trauma backgrounds — women who grew up in households where big feelings weren’t safe, where vulnerability was punished or mocked — often find that the first time they can cry about what happened to them isn’t in a therapy session. It’s watching a show.

Limbic Resonance: What Thomas Lewis, MD, Explains

Thomas Lewis, MD, psychiatrist and co-author of A General Theory of Love (written with Fari Amini, MD, and Richard Lannon, MD), introduced the concept of limbic resonance — the capacity of one nervous system to attune to and actually influence the internal state of another. It’s the mechanism beneath every moment of genuine human connection: the reason a calm presence can calm us, the reason a grieving person’s tears can move us to tears, the reason we feel, in our bodies, the warmth of being truly seen.

What’s remarkable — and directly relevant here — is that limbic resonance doesn’t require a live, present, real person to activate it. The limbic system responds to emotionally coherent experience. Which means it responds to story. It responds to a well-written, well-acted scene with the same circuitry it uses to respond to the actual human sitting across from us.

When Camille watches Jack Pearson kneel down and tell his daughter she’s perfect, her limbic system isn’t registering “this is fiction.” It’s registering “a father is offering unconditional love to a child.” Her nervous system is receiving that — perhaps for the first time. Not as information, but as felt experience.

This is what makes parasocial bonds — the connections we form with fictional characters or public figures we’ve never met — neurologically legitimate rather than embarrassing. They may not involve a real person. But they involve a real nervous system response. And for someone who grew up without safe attachment, a parasocial bond with a fictional character who embodies what safe attachment looks like isn’t a symptom of isolation. It may be a doorway back into the possibility of it.

Mirror Neurons and Vicarious Experience

The third piece of the science is mirror neurons — the neural circuitry that fires both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing it. The same is true, in a modified sense, for emotional states: watching someone experience fear, joy, grief, or relief activates similar processing in our own brains.

When we watch a character navigate a difficult conversation with a parent who never quite understood her, or hold herself together during a professional crisis, or allow herself to be genuinely vulnerable with a partner — our brains are, in a functional sense, doing some version of that too. We’re practicing. We’re building familiarity with emotional territory we may have never had permission to enter directly.

For women who grew up in households where certain emotions were forbidden — where crying was “too much,” where anger was dangerous, where need was embarrassing — this vicarious practice isn’t trivial. It’s often the first exposure to what it feels like to have that emotion and survive it.

There’s one more mechanism worth naming, and it’s the one that most directly explains why comfort TV reliably brings down physiological arousal. Stephen Porges, PhD, professor of psychiatry at Indiana University School of Medicine and developer of Polyvagal Theory, identified the ventral vagal complex as the branch of the autonomic nervous system responsible for the felt sense of safety and social connection. When we’re activated — anxious, hypervigilant, scanning — the ventral vagal system is offline. We can’t genuinely rest because our nervous system is still on guard. (PMID: 17049418)

What co-regulation offers — the experience of feeling another regulated nervous system near ours — is a pathway back into ventral vagal activation. We settle. We soften. And crucially: that co-regulation doesn’t require a person to be in the room. A familiar show, with characters whose voices and patterns of interaction we know well, can produce the same parasympathetic shift. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between physical presence and emotionally coherent narrative nearly as cleanly as our rational minds assume it does. This is why rewatching a beloved series after a hard day isn’t weakness or regression. For many women, it’s one of the most efficient forms of nervous system regulation available.

How This Shows Up for Driven Women

I work almost exclusively with driven women — women who are professionally accomplished, socially capable, and often carrying enormous amounts of unresolved emotional weight beneath the surface. And one thing I see consistently in this population is a particular relationship with rest: it doesn’t come naturally. It has to be justified.

For many of these women, TV occupies a complicated middle ground. It’s one of the only activities they can engage in without it needing to produce something. You can’t perform your way through a good show. You just have to sit with it. And for someone who grew up learning that their value was conditional on output, that’s not as simple as it sounds. Sitting still, doing “nothing,” allowing themselves to simply receive — that’s actually emotionally demanding work in disguise.

Leila is a corporate attorney, thirty-eight, mother of two, the person her firm calls when a deal is threatening to fall apart at midnight. She is, by any external measure, someone who has it together. She also has a ritual: every Sunday evening, after her kids are in bed and before the week begins again, she puts on the same three episodes of Schitt’s Creek she’s seen a dozen times. She doesn’t need to follow the plot. She knows every line. What she needs is to be in a room — even a fictional room — where the relationships are warm, the humor is gentle, and no one needs anything from her. For ninety minutes, her nervous system can stop bracing. Her husband has learned not to interrupt those hours. He understands, even if he can’t fully articulate it, that this is her maintenance window.

What Leila is doing isn’t avoidance. She’s not using those episodes to escape a difficult conversation she’s been putting off, or to numb a feeling she doesn’t want to examine. She’s using them the way a person might use a walk outside or a long bath — as a reliable, repeatable pathway back to a regulated state. The fact that it involves a screen doesn’t make it less legitimate. The fact that it’s familiar — that she already knows what happens — is precisely the point.

Predictability is co-regulation. Familiarity is safety. And safety is where healing happens.

The shame that driven women feel about this kind of watching — the sense that they should be reading something more edifying, or spending that time on self-improvement — is worth examining directly. That shame is often inherited. It’s the internalized voice of a parent who equated rest with laziness, or a culture that has decided that only certain forms of recovery count. Yoga counts. Meditation counts. TV doesn’t. I’d argue that’s not a clinical distinction. It’s a class and cultural distinction masquerading as one.

How to Watch Intentionally: A Practical Guide

There’s a meaningful difference between intentional media use and dissociative bingeing — and it’s not primarily about time. It’s about the quality of your relationship to what you’re watching, before, during, and after.

Here’s a framework I use with clients who are working on reclaiming TV as a tool rather than a refuge from themselves.

Before You Watch: Set a Container

Intentional watching begins before you press play. That doesn’t mean you need a formal ritual, but it does mean making a choice rather than defaulting. Ask yourself: What does my nervous system need right now? The answer guides what you reach for. If you’re activated and anxious, a familiar comfort rewatch is a better choice than something with an unpredictable plot or high emotional intensity. If you’re feeling emotionally numb and disconnected, something with genuine relational depth — a show that moves you — might be the doorway in. If you’re exhausted but wound up, something slow-paced and low-stakes can help your body remember how to settle.

Decide, loosely, how long you’re going to watch. Not as a rule to police yourself, but as an act of self-respect — the same way you might decide to take a thirty-minute walk rather than wandering indefinitely. A loose container is part of what separates intentional rest from dissociation.

During: Stay in Contact with Yourself

Intentional watching doesn’t mean analyzing the show or processing every emotional response in real time. It means keeping a low-level thread of awareness available. Notice if something lands. Notice if you find yourself reaching for your phone to escape what the show is stirring — that’s information. Notice if you feel your body releasing into the couch, or if you’re still braced. You don’t need to do anything with these observations. Just stay present enough to have them.

One practical marker: if you couldn’t tell someone what happened in the episode you just watched — not the plot, but what it felt like to watch — that’s often a sign you were using it to check out rather than check in. That’s not a moral failing. It’s just data about what state you were in and what you might actually need.

After: A Brief Landing

This is the step most people skip, and it’s the one that can shift TV-watching from passive consumption to something closer to active recovery. When the episode ends, before you immediately queue the next one or pick up your phone, take sixty seconds. Just sixty. Notice how you feel. Are you more settled than when you started? Lighter? Has something loosened? Or do you feel a pull to keep watching that has a slightly anxious quality — not because you’re genuinely enjoying yourself, but because stopping would mean returning to something you’re not ready to face?

There’s no judgment in either answer. But knowing which one is true for you in a given moment is the difference between using TV as a tool and being used by it.

The Dissociation Signal vs. The Regulation Signal

Dissociative bingeing has a particular texture that’s worth learning to recognize in yourself. It often starts with a low-grade sense of dread or overwhelm — something you don’t want to feel — and the show becomes a way of staying just above that feeling without actually processing it. Time passes without your noticing. You may feel vaguely guilty while you’re watching, but not guilty enough to stop. When you do stop, you feel worse: heavier, more behind, further from yourself.

Regulatory watching has a different quality. There’s genuine pleasure in it, or genuine rest. You might get moved, even cry — and the tears feel releasing rather than destabilizing. When you stop, you feel more like yourself. Your nervous system got something it needed.

Both can happen in the same sitting, in the same show. The point isn’t to eliminate all dissociative watching — sometimes your system needs to go offline entirely and that’s legitimate too. The point is to develop enough self-awareness to know the difference, and to use that knowledge to choose more deliberately over time.

Both/And: Watching TV Can Be Avoidance AND It Can Be Genuine Healing

Here’s something important to hold simultaneously: TV can function as genuine nervous system regulation, and it can also be a way of avoiding your life. These aren’t mutually exclusive. The same behavior can serve different functions at different times — and sometimes within the same evening.

I raise this not to undermine everything I’ve just argued, but because the both/and framing is exactly the kind of nuance that driven women with relational trauma backgrounds tend to struggle with. We want the clean answer. We want to know if TV is good or bad, helpful or harmful, healing or numbing. And the real answer — that it depends, that it can be both, that the work is learning to tell the difference — can feel unsatisfying. But it’s the truth.

The both/and here has specific clinical implications. Because TV is a legitimate regulation tool doesn’t mean it’s the only regulation tool you need, or that it can substitute for the deeper work. Your nervous system may genuinely settle watching a familiar show — and you may still be carrying unprocessed grief, unexamined relational patterns, or a chronic hypervigilance that needs therapeutic attention, not just management. TV can get you regulated enough to be present. It cannot do the integration work that eventually frees you.

Think of it this way: a cast is a legitimate medical tool. It protects a broken bone while it heals. But a cast alone doesn’t heal the bone — biology does that, time does that, and eventually, physical therapy does that. TV, at its best, is the cast. It creates conditions that allow your nervous system to come out of survival mode long enough to be available for real connection, for processing, for growth. It isn’t the healing itself.

What I see in my practice is that the women who use TV most effectively aren’t the ones who watch the least. They’re the ones who’ve developed a genuine relationship with the tool — who know what they reach for it and why, who notice when it stops working for them, and who have other practices alongside it. Therapy. Movement. Creative expression. Relationships where they’re actually known. The TV isn’t doing all the work. It’s one thread in a larger fabric.

So yes: give yourself permission to watch. And also: stay curious about whether you’re watching toward something or away from it. Both can be true on the same night, in the same body, in the same woman. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the human condition.

The Systemic Lens: Who Gets to Decide What “Counts” as Healing?

I want to say something about the cultural shame that surrounds TV-watching, because it isn’t accidental, and it isn’t neutral.

When we look at the activities our culture designates as “legitimate self-care,” a pattern emerges: they tend to be expensive (therapy, spa days, retreat centers), physically demanding (yoga, running, intensive fitness), or productivity-adjacent (journaling, reading non-fiction, learning something). Television is almost universally treated as the consolation prize — what you do when you haven’t had the discipline to do something better.

This framing carries significant class and cultural weight. The implicit message is that healing should cost something, either money, effort, or virtue. Rest that’s accessible — rest that anyone with a screen can access — doesn’t quite count. There’s something suspicious about it, something low-status. And I think that suspicion is worth naming, because it shapes how many women experience their own down time, including the women I work with, who are often the first people in their families to have access to therapy and who carry significant ambivalence about being the kind of person who “needs” to heal.

There’s also a gendered dimension here. Television has historically been coded as a feminine medium — daytime soap operas, primetime dramas, the shows mothers and daughters watch together — and that coding has contributed to its cultural devaluation. What women predominantly consume is rarely taken seriously as culturally or therapeutically significant, until it’s repackaged and legitimized by academic study or male cultural critics. The women who’ve been using TV to feel less alone, to process impossible feelings, to rehearse emotions they weren’t allowed to have — they’ve known something real for a long time. The research is now catching up.

None of this means that all television consumption is equally valuable, or that the medium has no shadow side. It does. Constant content designed to stimulate without satisfying, algorithmic feeds that exploit the nervous system’s threat-detection circuitry, passive consumption that becomes dissociation by default — these are real concerns, and they deserve serious attention. But the answer to those concerns isn’t to dismiss the tool entirely. It’s to reclaim agency over how we use it.

You get to decide what counts as healing in your own body. Not the productivity discourse. Not the wellness industry. Not the internalized voice that grades your recovery on the wrong rubric. You.

A Closing Note

Camille finished that episode. She cried through the last fifteen minutes, the kind of crying that leaves you wrung out and quietly lighter at the same time. She didn’t text her therapist that night. She didn’t journal. She sat with the feeling until it passed through her, and then she made tea and went to bed.

And then there’s Nadia. Nadia runs a tech startup, barely sleeps, and hasn’t taken a real vacation in three years. She’s in therapy, she meditates “when she remembers,” and she’s been in recovery from the particular kind of burnout that comes from decades of performing competence for an audience that never asked how she was doing. Her ritual is different from Camille’s. On the nights when she can feel the familiar dissociation starting — the flat affect, the checking out, the sense of watching herself from a slight distance — she puts on The Great British Bake Off. Not for the content. For the tone: warm, gentle, rooting for everyone, nobody losing in any catastrophic way. Her nervous system uses it like a tuning fork. Twenty minutes in, she’s usually back in her body. Then she can do the harder thing — call her sister, or sit with the feeling, or simply let herself sleep.

In session the following week, Camille mentioned the moment offhandedly — almost apologetically, the way women often mention the things that help them most. “I know it’s just TV,” she said.

It isn’t just TV.

It’s your nervous system finding the container it needs. It’s your psyche using fiction to approach what it isn’t yet safe to approach directly. It’s the ancient, unbroken human practice of gathering around a story and letting it do something the waking mind can’t quite manage alone.

Give yourself permission to use the tools that work. Notice how you feel before and after. Stay curious about what you’re moving toward and what you might be moving away from. And when someone — including the voice in your own head — tells you it doesn’t count, ask them to define their terms.

Because I think what they usually mean is: it doesn’t look like what they expected healing to look like. And that’s not a clinical judgment. That’s a failure of imagination.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Related Reading

• Childhood Emotional Neglect: What It Is, How It Shows Up, and How to Begin Healing
• Intergenerational Trauma: The Hidden Weight You May Be Carrying
• Betrayal Trauma: A Complete Guide for Driven Women
• Fixing the Foundations: Annie’s Signature Course for Relational Trauma Recovery

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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