geek therapy

New Year’s Resolutions: The Therapeutic Code Way

December 30, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

With New Year’s comes New Year’s resolutions that are doomed to fail. Why? Because we choose huge goals that are difficult to take on. Goals like “lose weight”, “spend more time with family and friends”, and “stop spending so much money”.

We set these types of goals and forget about them, because on the surface, they look great. After a while, we lose our investment in them and just kind of…let them go. My suggestion for you this year is to break these goals down into smaller, achievable tasks…and put a twist on them to help keep your attention.

Here are some achievable alternative options to the cliche resolutions for 2014 that may improve your mental health:

1. Try a new genre of video game this year.
If you’re already comfortable with video games, then trying a new genre may help you expand your horizons in a safe space.

2. Set a budget during Steam sales.
Setting a budget may help you learn to manage your anxiety, impulsiveness and save you money too! (I know I need to work on this one, looking at my recent winter sale purchases.)

3. Play Kinect games 3 times a week.
Physical health is many times tied to mental health. Stay active doing something you enjoy.

(Image via GamerHub)

4. Have a movie night with family or friends once a month.
Staying social and sharing your interests with others can help keep anxiety/depression at bay.

5. Use your holiday money to buy a big LEGO set and finish it this year. (I suggest the Millennium Falcon.)
Building with your hands can keep you mentally active, help with memory, and give you a sense of accomplishment. Plus you can play with it when you’re done.

6. Play a board game with friends every month.
Board games, by their nature, are social experiences. Keep yourself social and have fun doing it.

7. Read a book (or a comic book series) you always wanted to try, but never did.
Reading can help relieve stress and improve your imagination.

(Image via Wired)

8. Listen to the Geek Therapy Podcast.
Because you can learn a lot about geek culture in therapy. And because it’s awesome.

I hope one or more of these are useful to you. I’m still trying to decide on mine. If you come up with a good one of your own, leave a comment! Or tweet it at @therapeuticcode.

Happy New Year everyone! Live long and prosper.

That’s Not Therapy!: When Others Don’t Understand

December 26, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

I hope everyone’s recovered from the holiday. Personally, I’m still recuperating. Between writing this on my phone due to not having an internet connection, and Steam being down (while Left 4 Dead 2 was free, I might add), I have plenty of built up tension.

But worry not! Today is a new day in which to play our new games, return stuff we don’t want for things we do, find places to display our new action figures, and discuss another geeky therapeutic issue.

Before all of the craziness of the holidays, I was supposed to take my client to see The Desolation of Smaug (sweet day at work, right?)…but it didn’t happen.

Promo Poster for the film 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'. Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

(Image via FanSided)

He was told by his caregivers that he couldn’t go, and that he needed to go on the regularly scheduled outing that day.

Now, many of you might think that it’s not such a big deal. Here’s why (to me) it’s important. My client is having a hard time coping with the stress of the holidays. He lives in a group home, away from his family. His mom also passed away a few years ago and the holidays are a strong reminder of that. That would be hard to cope with for anyone, right?

The movie was supposed to be our last session before I left on a 2 week vacation. He’s having a hard time with me leaving, and I wanted to give him an enjoyable experience before I left. This movie is all he’s been talking about for a month.

The problem is that the staff at the group home weren’t able to really see the therapeutic qualities of taking him to the movie. They see movies as rewards, and his behavior at the time didn’t warrant a trip to a movie.

Here’s the thing…I was going to use it as a tool to help him open up about his feelings surrounding the holidays, not a reward. Teenagers are much more likely to talk about things while they are engaged in an activity that they find enjoyable. They relax and are able to set down of some of the emotional baggage they’ve been carrying around.

It’s much easier to open up the baggage and take a look at what you have packed in there once you put it down.

Because of the staff’s inability to wrap their heads around the idea of a fun outing being something other than something to be earned for good behavior, my client shut down. Not only was my attempt to effect change not successful, it caused my client distress because he saw it as being taken away from him.

(Image via All That’s Epic)

When I showed up to meet with him, he was upset about not seeing the movie. He was also not in a space to open up about, well, anything.

It was incredibly frustrating, for both me and my client, and his reaction definitely pulled on my heart strings. I felt bad that I had made an offer that couldn’t be followed through on. The session wasn’t all bad, though. He did talk…just mostly about surface stuff like what he wants for Christmas. Anything deeper would have been too much for him to handle.

The frustration over not going to the movie and not having one-on-one time with me, added on top of his anxiety/depression about not being home with his family and missing his mother, overloaded his circuits. We worked some to get the feelings under control, but I feel as though I only got him back to where he was before we started the day, whereas my goal had been to put him in a better place than he was when he had woken up.

To the staff’s credit, I didn’t make a further argument to take him to the movie. I could have explained that it was not a reward, but a therapeutic tool. In the moment it was easier to leave things at that and help my client cope with not going to the movie.

In the future, I know it would better serve him to explain how it will be helpful to him and help the others on his treatment team understand how I work with clients and the tools that I use.

I suppose that’s all part of being a student and intern; learning from what we do to better our practice in the future.

Breaking the Depression Cycle One Turn at a Time

December 23, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

Time for a little bit of self-disclosure. I know, I know, in the therapy world self-disclosure is something that is looked down upon in many circles. It’s ok though! None of you reading this are my clients, and if any of my clients, or future clients, care enough to hunt me down on the internet, I hope whatever they find is useful to them. Personally, I find a little bit of self-disclosure comforting and healing.

My intent here is to be real, honest, and helpful. Not to damage any potential therapeutic relationships.

Now that I have properly disclaimer-ed myself…on to the real topic:

Depression can be debilitating at times. You feel like the world is a bad place, you’re a bad person, nothing will change it, and you just want to lay in bed and do nothing. So you do.

Throw anxiety into the mix and then you’re worried about the fact that you should be doing something, that something bad is going to happen because you aren’t doing something, and the overwhelming sense of doom immobilizes you even more.

Then the depression reminds you how bad of a person you are for not doing anything.

Your mind forces you into lockdown.

(Image by Allie Brosh via Hyperbole and a Half)

I know this, because from time to time, I find myself in a place just like that. Incidents like this are much fewer and far between, but they do happen still. All those awesome things I get excited about? Yeah…they get pushed out of view until the depression/anxiety cycle ends.

That cycle can go on for a long time (or for what seems like forever), unless something derails it.

For me, many of the times, it’s games that are the switch point.

Not necessarily video games (although, sometimes this is the case). Mostly, board games are what really help. In particular, the social component of board games are the key.

Here’s an example: I was in one of those debilitating, helplessness inducing funks a few months ago. I would not get off of the couch. Anything my fiance suggested would receive a grumbled “no” in response. And she suggested some awesome stuff…video games, movies, comics to read, going for a walk in the neighborhood. Nothing sounded enticing to me.

Finally, she forced me to text my friend to come over and play some board games we had just bought. I did, and he was at my place in less than half an hour (it takes little to convince him to come play games).

The amazing thing was, I pretty much instantly started to feel better. I was laughing, and smiling, and trying to win, whereas an hour earlier I couldn’t even picture those things happening. The games we played forced me to be social, and forced me out of the seemingly endless cycle of “I don’t want to be doing anything/You should be doing something/You’re bad for not doing anything”.

I have other friends with the same issues with depression. They use gaming (both video games and board games) to prevent the depression from sinking in, and also to fight their way out of it.

I think the main reason that this works (at least for me) is that it forces me to be social and converse about something that isn’t how miserable I feel. Much like a paramedic asking questions to distract their patient from the pain they’re feeling, having to explain a game or talk about setting up a game forces someone to ignore the depression and anxiety.

Once the distraction has set in, then the act of playing the game can help alleviate the emotional distress itself. Kind of like the pain killers given to the distracted patient in the earlier analogy.

Regardless of how it works, it works. I may need a little nudging to get me moving toward having friends over for games, but it definitely makes it easier to work through the depression and anxiety.

People who suffer from depression often times don’t find their normal interests enjoyable. As clinicians, perhaps we should be trying to find ways to make those interests more palatable during a depressive episode. Because often times a person’s interests can help them feel better, if they can get past the feelings of stagnation and disinterest.

Perhaps even playing games with a client during a session might help them pull out of a funk.

So the next time your client (or you, yourself) are feeling down…if gaming is usually something they find enjoyable, pull out a copy of a game they like and see if it helps. It can’t hurt…and it’ll probably be fun.

I bet it’ll make a difference, too.

Big Changes Coming This Way!

December 12, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

Change is comin’! I’m excited. You should be excited. Everyone should be excited.

(Image via Sodahead)

I just wanted to bring you all a quick update of things that are in the works for Therapeutic Code.

First off, I’ve added an About and Contact page. Now you can find out everything you could ever want to know about me (that I’ve offered up)! Also, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions, I love talking about geekiness and therapy. The pages are basic…but they’ll do for now.

That brings me to the next big announcement. Sometime around the end of the year, I’m expecting Therapeutic Code to have a brand new look. I’m looking into new designs and trying to figure out how to tweak the ones I like to make them work for my purposes. I’m getting close…but not quite there yet.

My last major announcement is probably my favorite.

Josué Cardona of the Geek Therapy Podcast and Blog has asked me to come on board as a contributing editor!

I’ll still be writing here, so Therapeutic Code will be going strong. I just wanted you all to know that you should check me out over there as well. I’m looking forward to working with Josué and helping to expand Geek Therapy. It’s so much easier to write sometimes when you have colleagues to collaborate with and bounce ideas off of.

Maybe you’ll even catch me on the podcast.

To wrap it up…Therapeutic Code is awesome and will be looking more awesome soon. You can find out about me and contact me with questions. And you can also check out my work at GeekTherapy.com soon!

Thank you all for sticking with me, it’s great to watch this site (and the page views) grow.

….And I completely forgot! I just turned in my press application for San Diego Comic Con. Things just got real. Here’s hoping they accept my application!

Geek Culturally Competent

December 9, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

The semester is over! And that means…no papers to write, no reading to do, and more time for thinking out blog posts! Hooray!

During the semester, there was a lot of talk about culture and cultural competency. In general, when we hear the word culture, we think of ethnicity or country of origin. In actuality, there are many other kinds of culture.

Culture can be found anywhere groups of people get together. We have office culture, queer culture, start-up culture, academic culture…and most definitely geek culture.

Some of you might be asking, how in the heck in geek culture a real culture?

Well, let’s take a look at some of the things that make up a culture.

Multiracial Hands Making a Circle Image

(Image via RHEY)

Social Organization

Social organization refers to the subgroups in a culture. The social classes, the way groups categorize each other, and the way they identify themselves.

Geek culture is easily split up into subgroups. We have Trekkies, Whovians, Bronies, and Browncoats. If there is a franchise, there is a subgroup that follows it: Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Batman..etc…etc…etc.

On top of that, there are subgroups of geeks by what interests them in general: comic books, video games, computers, sci-fi, fantasy, steam punk…if I left any out, let me know. I could probably be here all day listing the groups out if I wanted to.

In general, these groups may overlap and one geek may identify with 1 or 2 or 10. Sometimes, though, individuals in a group may see themselves as higher up in the food chain than others…and that is where the social classes come in. There may be no real ranking…but each group may see their social position differently.

56 Geeks

(Image by Scott Johnson)

Art and Literature

I shouldn’t even have to point out the art and literature piece. Geek culture is built on art and literature. Comics are the bridge between art and literature, being the best of both worlds. Video games are an art form unto themselves. Geeks everywhere have shelves filled with sci-fi novels, fantasy novels, video game playing guides, and coding and computer manuals. We’ve got this element of culture covered!

(Image via Brendandonnet by Roy Lichtenstein, Whaam, 1963)

Language

If you aren’t a geek and have been in a conversation with some people of the geeky variety, you may have found yourself feeling as though they were speaking another language.

That’s because they were.

Each game, comic, T.V. show, novel and genre have their own unique lingo. I couldn’t tell you what someone into steampunk culture was talking about if my life depended on it…but I could tell you a little about Romulans, Nazgul, Jedi, Hylians, and X-Men.

I could tell you a lot about tanks, DPS, heals, pulling aggro, loot, HoTs, DoTs, instances and hit caps. If you don’t know what I’m talking about…that’s ok. If you do, good for you!

I was using language that you hear a lot in WoW, and many other MMOs. Without that context, it may have sounded a lot like gibberish.

There are also geeks who go to school to learn Klingon and Elvish…I think we also have the language section in the bag.

(Image via Ted Ed)

Economic Systems

Cultures have their own economic systems to distribute goods and services. Geeks have plenty of their own. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Steam all have their own marketplaces to sell games. Some (like Nintendo) have their own currency (Nintendo Points).

In larger games like WoW, each server’s auction house has their own pricing, demand, supply, and inflation level. Swapping characters to a new server can make you change the way you approach the auction house.

Some people even sell in-game gold and characters for real life money.

(Image via Zeldapedia)

Customs and Traditions

One of the most important pieces of culture are their customs and traditions. This is how people act, what they wear, what they do, and their laws.

Geek culture (and its many subgroups) have many different varieties of customs and traditions. We all have our geeky T-Shirts…but some of us cosplay. We go to conventions (I’d consider San Diego Comic Con a rite of passage or a pilgrimage), play in tournaments, and go to midnight showings of movies.

I would love to go on about this piece of culture, but there are a billion subgroups, each with their own set of customs and traditions…and I’d like to have time to enjoy my semester break.

Sailor Moon Group Cosplay by CrimsonRoses

(Image via Crimson Rose)

All right…so we’ve established that geek culture is a culture in and of itself. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that if mental health professionals are ethically required to be culturally competent….why is geek culture not held up to the same standard as Queer culture, or Japanese culture, or Jewish culture?

Geek clients deserve the same respect as the rest of our clients and should not be ridiculed for their interests. Our clients should be comfortable discussing how they were left out of their raid on raid night and how it made them feel, or what an episode of Star Trek brought up for them emotionally.

If clinicians don’t make an effort to understand or be curious about their clients interests and who they are as a person…how can they be helpful?

Coping with Games?

December 5, 2013 · Discuss on the GT Forum

Ok…so this week is most definitely a shameless plug. The end of the semester is upon me, therefore…final projects are in season. And I have one I need some serious help with.

I know, I know…I suck you in with a title that makes you think I’m posting about a study I found…then I ask you for something. But here’s the fun part! I need help running a study on coping and video games!

(Image via The Telegraph)

It’s a simple 20 question survey for me to explore survey building and data analysis. It’s not a real research study…and its results won’t be published anywhere…other than maybe this blog. For my clinician readers…don’t judge my survey design skills. This is my first go around.

When I was given the assignment, I knew I wanted to create a survey having to do with geek therapy. I know I use video games to cope a lot, so I figured I would see how many others do too.

You can find my Qualtrics survey here. I would really appreciate some help with this project…it will only take you a few minutes, and you’d be helping out a stressed out grad student! I only need 10 responses, but more would be great!

I can’t promise how valid my results will be. Or that the survey doesn’t suck. Or that you won’t be eaten by zombies.

(Image via Trender Bender)

But I can promise that I will be grateful, and that I will have more time for better blog posts…that aren’t shameless plugs.

If you missed the link earlier, here’s the url: https://hnu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4NNsAAVPoCBfw8t

Thanks everyone!