Why Counseling Became Normal

Why is it that therapy feels as normal today as visiting the dentist? It has not always been so. For most of history, people carried their burdens within family, village, and church, and grief was shared through rituals of mourning, prayer, and confession. Today, however, counseling has almost become a cultural necessity — a rite of passage for college students, an expectation for professionals, and a lifeline for many in a world of constant anxiety.

This shift cannot be explained by psychology alone. The normalization of counseling correlates with the rise of technologies that overwhelmed us with global suffering. The crucial turning point came not with the internet or even television, but much earlier — with the telegraph. For the first time, human beings could know of calamities thousands of miles away almost instantly, but could do little about them. That gap — between knowledge and agency — produced an unbearable psychic burden. Counseling, in this view, is the social technology we cultivated to survive the information technologies we built.

The World Before the Telegraph: Local Grief, Local Care

Before the nineteenth century, news traveled at the speed of the horse or the ship. One might hear of a famine in a neighboring region or the death of a local soldier months after the event. Even wars were often distant rumors. The human nervous system was buffered by slowness.

In such a world, pastoral and communal structures bore most of the weight of care. Families mourned together. Villages gathered around funerals. Churches provided ritual and language to interpret suffering. John Durham Peters puts it well: pre-modern communication was “situated and embodied.”¹ One only bore the griefs one could touch.

The Telegraph and the Collapse of Space-Time

Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph in the 1840s changed this forever. Suddenly, distance collapsed: a death in Chicago could be reported in New York within hours, a war in Europe could be transmitted across the Atlantic before it was over.

Neil Postman described this as the invention of “the peek-a-boo world.”² The telegraph produced a flood of “news from nowhere, addressed to no one in particular, for no reason.”³ Information became detached from context. A local newspaper reader could now be daily confronted with tragedies they could neither avert nor alleviate.

The result was a new kind of anxiety: the burden of awareness without agency. To know of suffering but be unable to respond is to feel the weight of helplessness. In this sense, the telegraph inaugurated the psychic conditions of the modern therapeutic age.

From Telegraph to Television: Intensified Exposure

If the telegraph shrank the world, radio and television immersed us in it. The Second World War was narrated in radio bulletins that reached millions simultaneously. The Vietnam War was fought in American living rooms through nightly broadcasts. Marshall McLuhan’s maxim that “the medium is the message”⁴ rang true: television didn’t just report suffering, it transmitted emotion.

Daniel Boorstin warned in The Image that mass media created “pseudo-events” — spectacles that demanded attention without demanding action.⁵ Each medium intensified exposure, further straining the soul’s capacity to bear grief. By the mid-twentieth century, the average person was not simply a member of a community; they were a spectator to the world’s traumas. This spectator role came with no matching expansion of agency. Again, therapy stepped into the gap.

The Internet and the Smartphone: Permanent Global Trauma

If the telegraph brought distant grief into the newspaper, and television brought it into the living room, the smartphone brought it into the palm of the hand — and with it, into the bedroom, the dinner table, the morning commute, and the nightstand.

The internet transformed information into a constant stream, and smartphones made it inescapable. A war in Ukraine, a wildfire in California, a famine in Sudan — each appears on the same screen as your sister’s wedding photos or your child’s soccer highlights. The world’s crises are collapsed into a single feed, integrated into the same emotional register.

Sherry Turkle, in Alone Together, describes this paradox: we are hyper-connected, yet lonelier than ever.⁶ The cost of instant access is emotional exhaustion. Jean Twenge’s iGen goes further, showing a direct correlation between smartphone use and rising rates of anxiety and depression, particularly among teens.⁷

The logic of the telegraph has reached its culmination. We not only know of distant grief, we live inside a world where grief is always “breaking.” The psychological result is an ambient anxiety that never resolves. In this climate, counseling ceases to be optional — it becomes a lifeline.

Counseling as Surrogate for Human Limits

What pastoral care once bore in local settings, counseling now bears for the globalized soul. Historically, the church provided the language, ritual, and communal solidarity to process suffering. But the church was never designed to carry the full freight of the globe’s pain — nor were families, nor villages.

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, argues that modern life has produced a “buffered self” — an individual sealed off from cosmic and communal meaning, who must navigate crises largely alone.⁸ In that vacuum, therapy becomes not simply a treatment for mental distress, but a cultural infrastructure for survival.

Therapy offers what traditional communal structures once did: a place to speak grief aloud, to make meaning out of suffering, and to be told that one is not alone. In a sense, the counseling office has become a secularized confessional booth, a ritual of unburdening in a world that has lost its rituals. This does not mean therapy is fraudulent. It means that therapy arose to meet a very real need: the human attempt to metabolize griefs we were never designed to carry.

Conclusion: The Telegraph’s Legacy and the Future of Care

The rise of therapeutic counseling is not an accident of psychology but a consequence of technology. From the telegraph to the smartphone, each communication revolution has widened the gap between knowledge and agency, between exposure and capacity. Humans are now spectators to the world’s traumas — a role for which we are not equipped–and never will be.

Normative counseling has become normative because it helps us survive in this unnatural role. But its very necessity should alert us to the deeper truth: our technologies have expanded our horizons beyond our limits. If the church does not recover communal forms of care, therapy will remain the default surrogate. The church community must return to a place of priority in the Christian psyche.

As new technologies emerge — artificial intelligence, virtual reality, immersive media — the human soul will be pressed even further. The question is not whether counseling will remain, but whether it will be enough. Or, perhaps, whether we might yet recover older forms of bearing grief together, refusing the illusion that we must know and feel everything all at once.

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1. Peters, John Durham, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1-20, 33-62. ↩︎
2. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, (1985), 63-83. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 67 ↩︎
4. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 7-21. ↩︎
5. Boorstin, Daniel J, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 3-12, 35-65. ↩︎
6. See Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, (New York: Basic Books, 2011), esp. 152-179. ↩︎
7. Twenge, Jean M., iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, (New York: Atria Books, 2017), 93-118. ↩︎
8. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 539-593. ↩︎