How Your Favorite Characters Can Heal Relationship Patterns
When the film adaptation of Wicked shattered records this year, something profound was happening beyond mere entertainment. When a single narrative can generate billions in revenue while captivating audiences for over a century, it signals a deep hunger for stories of belonging, rebellion, and ultimately, reclaiming personal power. Audiences weren’t just watching a movie—they were experiencing a collective therapeutic journey. Think of the visceral impact: millions of voices belting out “Defying Gravity,” regardless of vocal talent, unwittingly engaging in embodied rehearsal of empowerment. With Wicked: For Good set to release this November, the cultural anticipation—and therefore therapeutic opportunity—is only intensifying.
The cultural phenomenon around the world of Oz offers a powerful illustration of relational neuroscience and the modern attachment spectrum in action. As Dr. Ann Kelley and I explored in our recent Psychotherapy Networker article, traditional attachment categories represent research terms created over 50 years ago and were not designed to be clinical tools. The Modern Attachment-Regulation Spectrum (MARS) highlights the fluid, contextual nature of unconscious defensive patterns—what we traditionally call attachment styles.
This is where the stories that shaped us growing up—our childhood heroes, villains, and epic quests—transform into something much more powerful: reflections of and portals to the defenses and longings we carry into adulthood.
Fiction as Therapeutic Ally
What might initially seem like escapism—our deep connections to fictional characters—actually represents a sophisticated psychological process. These parasocial relationships, the one-sided emotional bonds we form with characters from Dorothy to Walter White, create safe rehearsal spaces for emotional exploration. Unlike live human relating, fictional attachments allow us to experience intense emotions, practice new responses, and explore different ways of being without immediate consequences or reciprocal demands.
In therapy, beloved stories function as healing containers—familiar narrative territories where clients can examine their own patterns through the comfortable distance of character analysis. Movies and familiar stories offer cultural touchstones that both therapist and client share, creating immediate common ground and reducing the clinical sterility that can sometimes inhibit therapeutic exploration.
When we’re transported into a beloved narrative, we’re not just thinking about change; we’re feeling our way into new relational experiences with characters we know and love. Exploring beloved figures such as Elphaba and Glinda becomes a neurobiologically sophisticated entry point into embodied learning.
Bypassing Natural Resistance
Clients are typically eager to learn and nod approvingly when we explain polyvagal theory or trauma-based defensive relationship patterns. However, clinical concepts tend to stay in the top left, intellectual part of the brain and rarely generate the visceral right-brain experiential understanding that drives real transformation.
Mention Glinda the Good, though, and watch that soft smile emerge—a hint of immediate state shift. We’re suddenly talking about someone they’ve known since childhood, making analysis feel fun and safe. This is what researchers call “transportation”—when our critical faculties relax and we stop analyzing and start experiencing alongside beloved characters. When someone is emotionally invested in the Tin Man’s struggle with vulnerability, they’re not simultaneously protecting themselves from insights about their own emotional shutdown patterns. The beloved story becomes a therapeutic Trojan horse, sneaking past resistance through emotional engagement rather than direct confrontation.
The Glinda Gateway
Consider how rich this character becomes under therapeutic examination. She transforms from the perpetually smiling helper who wields enormous power into a woman potentially stuck in a role who, despite her influence, must avoid directness. She couldn’t be more “perfect” in her embodiment of white female goodness, yet she’s arguably the loneliest character in all of Oz.
This opens fascinating therapeutic territory: Why did Glinda make Dorothy complete the entire quest when she knew the ruby slippers could deliver what Dorothy wanted immediately? Notice how she provided the solution only after her two rivals—the Witches of the East and West—were conveniently eliminated. This creates an opening to explore how Glinda’s niceness may mask richer feelings she’s been trained to ignore, giving clients that crucial “aha” moment of recognition as they safely project themselves into the story.
Clinical Application
One client used her Glinda “aha” moment to release shame around what she’d labeled her “weakness.” She solidified her awareness that preoccupation wasn’t her identity, but a natural protective state (a floating bubble) she slides into when belonging feels at risk.
This playful exploration opened her to direct somatic work, exploring her own performative expressiveness by recognizing body-based markers that signaled when she was shifting into “please and appease” Good Witch activation. For example, she began to explore her sense of performative versus real voice and smile. Instead of shame when her voice pitched up, she became competitive with herself catching and correcting back to her natural tone. We co-analyzed Glinda to help her integrate her split off aggression and find her own embodied, real voice, having fun figuring out what she’d really say if she could. At the end of that session we delighted in co-imagining Glinda lounging in jeans, hair tousled, having just disappointed someone and trusting it would all be okay.
Beyond Categories: Mapping the Attachment Spectrum
Traditional attachment categories were research tools created over 50 years ago, never designed for clinical application. Our Modern Attachment-Regulation Spectrum (MARS) framework recognizes that what we call “attachment styles” are actually fluid, contextual defensive patterns—temporary activation states rather than fixed identities.
This is where Oz becomes therapeutically brilliant. We can vividly illustrate different defensive states we cycle through on the attachment spectrum (Marriott & Kelley, 2024). The Tin Man’s emotional shutdown embodies the shift in activation aimed at reducing vulnerability—what we refer to as the cooler, blue side of the attachment spectrum (dismissing state of mind). The Scarecrow represents hyperactivation of the attachment system: the uncertain, anxious, outside-in awareness that creates a “floppy” sense of self as others’ reactions are prioritized (the red range of the attachment spectrum).
The Lion’s hypervigilance and false bravado represent what we call the “tie-dye experience”—pockets of dysregulation where multiple strategies activate simultaneously to gain safety, particularly common in trauma-based responses. Even Toto becomes therapeutically relevant, representing our neuroceptive sonar system—perpetually scanning for threats to keep us safe, yet sometimes hijacked by flying monkeys that seem to appear from nowhere. What flying monkeys hijack your sense of security?
This natural creativity involved in collaborative story retelling helps clients internalize that defensive patterns are real and natural, yet simply temporary activation states they can master and work with rather than fixed identities.
The Emerald City: When Systems Maintain Insecurity
This framework naturally opens space for exploring how systems actively shape insecurity. The Wizard’s false authority becomes a perfect metaphor for institutional dynamics that benefit from keeping certain people small and compliant—and Elphaba’s story reveals exactly how this works.
Think about it: Elphaba is born different, punished for her green skin from birth. She’s brilliant, passionate, and fights for justice—yet gets labeled “wicked” by the very system she’s trying to reform. The Wizard literally scapegoats her to maintain his power, turning the population against her while he continues his oppression of the Animals. Sound familiar?
How many clients have internalized the Wizard’s voice telling them they’re “too much”—too angry, too sensitive, too different? The woman who apologizes for her “tone” when calling out sexism. The Black employee labeled “aggressive” for the same directness that makes white colleagues “executive material.” The queer person told their identity is “fine” but could they just be “less obvious about it”? The neurodivergent child punished for stimming, then blamed for their resulting anxiety.
These systems are masterful: they create the wound, then pathologize the bleeding. They demand you shrink to fit their containers, then sell you therapy to fix your “low self-esteem.” They teach you to monitor your voice, your body, your very existence for signs you might be taking up too much space—then wonder why you struggle with “people-pleasing” and “perfectionism.”
The system that created the problem positions itself as the solution, promising acceptance through compliance while systematically punishing those who, like Elphaba, refuse to shrink. It’s not your imagination. You’re not “too sensitive.” The cage is real, and your impulse to break free isn’t pathology—it’s sanity.
This is where Elphaba’s full story becomes essential. Because the fairy tale version—pure good versus evil—is another lie systems use to keep us trapped.
Elphaba starts morally pure, but with enough systemic abuse, she begins to degrade and use her powers for her own benefit. There is no pure “good” or “wicked”—we are all a complex mix of light and shadow. The more we work with those disowned parts rather than projecting them onto others, the better integrated we become. And integration is what allows us to truly soar.
The therapeutic breakthrough comes when clients stop trying to be “good enough” for corrupt systems and start asking the dangerous questions: “Who is the Wizard in my life—and where might I be becoming one myself? What if what they’re calling my ‘problem’ is actually my power? What if my refusal to stay small isn’t pathology but necessary rebellion?”
Like Elphaba discovering she no longer cares what others think, clients learn that the path to authentic power means embracing their full complexity—their anger, their difference, their refusal to comply. This is the moment of therapeutic flight: when someone stops performing goodness for systems that were never designed for their liberation and starts trusting their own wings.
Defying Therapeutic Gravity
This approach supports what we refer to as secure relating—growing our window of capacity to hold our big feelings without shame and to stay engaged. But it’s more than individual healing. When we help clients embrace their full complexity, we’re participating in a larger cultural awakening.
Our role as therapists isn’t to be the Wizard holding power and providing answers, but to help clients recognize the secure power they already possess.
When millions of voices refuse to accept limits—whether in theaters or therapy rooms—we’re witnessing something revolutionary. The yellow brick road doesn’t lead to the Emerald City; it leads us home to ourselves, wings spread, gravity defied.