The psychologist Bianca Denny opens her column in the middle of the problem: a patient, “Jodie,” arrives weeks after the death of a well-known singer, unable to attend work, sleeping badly, thinking about him constantly. “It came as such a shock. I just can’t believe he’s gone.” Denny is used to seeing bereaved people. What she is not used to is bereavement for someone the patient had never met.
A parasocial relationship is a one-sided psychological connection with a public figure — the sense of friendship is felt intensely and sincerely, and the person it is directed at has no idea the admirer exists. Denny’s point is that this is not a pathology, it is furniture: most of us have some version of it, whether the object is an actor, a musician, an athlete or a fictional character.
The uncomfortable part, and the useful part
Where it works, it works as a small holiday from an ordinary life. The fantasy is usually of a life beyond one’s own, typically one of wealth and privilege, and for some people the daydreaming opens room for creativity and lateral thinking. Where it goes wrong, it produces over-involvement, boundary-crossing behaviour, and distress precisely at the moments when the celebrity dies or is engulfed in a controversy.
Denny is candid about the asymmetry that makes the whole arrangement strange: the people we are invested in are strangers, with no reciprocal care for us. She reserves the crude version of that observation — the plainly stated fact that Jodie and the singer had never met — and explains why. Saying it would have damaged the therapeutic relationship and probably driven Jodie further into the attachment. The loss was real to Jodie; the treatment had to start there.
The column traces where the attachment came from. Jodie had listened to the singer’s music heavily through a desolate period of her own life and credited the lyrics with “saving her” — the songs supplied company and comfort when little else did. His death re-opened the whole period. It also became clear that this was not her only parasocial tie: she spoke of famous people as though they were in her own social circle and took genuine delight in their achievements. Denny’s formulation is that Jodie lacked vitality in her own life and had filled the gap with other people’s.
Stabilise first, interpret later
The clinical sequence is the most instructive part of the piece. Denny did not begin with insight. She began with exposure: a blocking app to taper social-media scrolling and news consumption to twenty minutes a day, plus a walk twice a day. Cutting the supply of information about the death and the dead man reduced Jodie’s rumination and improved her sleep.
Only then did the therapy make room for the story — time to talk about both the connection to the singer and the difficult stretch of life it belonged to, which Denny credits with relieving the grief. And only then the third phase, which is the actual work: rebuilding the reciprocal relationships the parasocial one had been substituting for. Reconnecting with old friends. Hobbies where she might meet people with shared interests. Meet-up groups, local community events, the unglamorous machinery of ordinary contact.
Denny’s explanation of why the one-sided attachment had held so effectively is the piece’s real argument. It felt safe. There is no chance of rejection from someone viewed only from afar, and no need to work through the friction and disagreement that real relationships require. Both arrangements met Jodie’s need for affiliation. Only the reciprocal one came back — “people who Jodie cared about, who also cared about her.”
The piece closes with a disclosed limitation worth carrying: “All clients are fictional amalgams.” What follows from that is that this is practitioner description, not evidence — no measures, no follow-up, no attempt to distinguish ordinary fandom from consuming attachment. Read as a clinician’s account of what she does and why, it holds up. Read as a claim about parasocial relationships in general, it is one psychologist’s case material.