Therapist stance in role playing

[MatrixGamer]

I offer a made up verbatim report of a role play used in a counseling session.

Identifying Information: Tom is a 19 year old white single male who came to counseling due to depression following a fight with his girlfriend. He has agreed to come to counseling to reduce depression and learn how to communicate with his girl friend more effectively.

Progress so far: Lets say that Tom has come to a few sessions and the therapist has established raport. He has told his story but continues to fell all his symptoms as he did prior to coming to counseling.

At the start of the next session, the therapist starts by makeing small talk (how are you? What have you been up to? etc.) This establishes the social scene that the theraputic intervention will happen in. The therapist notes that Tom remains vissibly tense. From past experience he sumizes that the session will follow the same past as the last ones, which as noted did not help.

C: Tom, I want to try something different. I've noticed that when we talk about here now stuff it seems to work you up more and not relieve you. We know that you have some issues with your girlfriend. Lets imagine for a moment that she is in the chair over there.

T: But she's not there.

C: Exactly! This will make it a lot easier do because the emotions will be so much less. Imagine that she is listening intently to you and is understanding everything you say. She can't read you mind so you need to say what you want her to hear.

T: (Looking a little embarrassed) Well I want her to know that I'm really tired.

C: Good. (He looks over at the empty chair.) Tell her more about your fatigue.

T: Well, it seems like I can't do anything right. I should be able to do this but I just can't.

C: It's a good thing she's listening to all of this. Tell her what it's like when you feel like this.

T: I get mad.

C: Does she think you're getting mad at her?

T: Yeah.

C: You may be getting a little angry at her. Are you angry at anything else.

T: I'm really mad at my self.

At this point the role play ends and the session moves on to having Tom explore the nature of his self hatred.

Role play was just a technique to help Tom get beyond his internal defenses that stop him from admitting self hate. Therapists have noted from decades that sometimes, when the right words are spoken, people unlock a lot of pent up emotions that then come spilling out. That is not the end of the therapy - it is the beginning. The next task is to bring those emotions into the here and now and help the person find a way to cope with them. This may be an existential change of perspective, a behavior change that changes stress, a change in cognitions, or a referral to a doctor for medication.

Alright. There is some ephemera with explanation of the therapists thinking.

I don't see Tom as a simulationist because he does not want to fully put himself into the role. He is trying to not do it (I failed to mention that Tom seldom if ever looked at the empty chair.) The therapist is also helping him not dive in the role by admitting that the chair is empty and that his girlfriend just listens (which given the nature of the referral is unlikely to be the case.) In a way it is almost gamist on the part of the therapist. He is playing with words to find a way to open Tom up but he is not power playing a world wrecking because he is also helping Tom keep emtional safty by not letting him go too far into it.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[groundhog]

Chris,

I think you're shying away from therapeutic roleplay, and the session you quote specifically, from being simulationism because the participants do not want to recreate what is actually going on in their lives. It's clear, though, that the participants are not there to gain something material nor to tell the best story.

Sim can be done in worlds where the sky is green, the player characters are all androids, and sea sponges have become sentient and try to take over the world. The important thing isn't that the player simulate their own lives, just that they simulate the lives of their android player characters as they would happen in that world. Similarly, I think distancing one's self from the character played in therapeutic roleplay doesn't mean you're not exploring the realistic thoughts and feelings of that character in the real world. As I've stated on the Forge before, I think therapeutic roleplay is usually very much Sim.

In fact, I'm not sure how much good gamist play would be in therapy. Narrativism makes sense in that if used properly it could point out the contrast between good resolutions to conflicts and bad. Sim still makes more sense in role-reversal and empty chair types of roleplay. I don't see much benefit to just picking a good story path when addressing someone who's not really there. Exploring the feelings and thoughts of the characters in turn explores veiled thoughts and feelings of the players. The distance provided by playing a role is a safety net, not an obstruction. If you want to get to attitudes about situations, then Nar works well in gaming and I think would work in therapy too. If you want to get to the internal feelings and thoughts of people in those situations, I think Sim in its exploration of character flavor is the way to go.

[MatrixGamer]

The important thing isn't that the player simulate their own lives, just that they simulate the lives of their android player characters as they would happen in that world.

Wouldn't the intent of the participants matter in what stance is taken? When I use a technique (like a simulation game - simulation here is more in line with the wargame take on the meaning) I'm in the here and now trying to effect an emotional change in the person in front of me - here and now. The game is a tool to bypass resistance. The person who is "playing" came into the office to solve a here and now problem. They are stuck. The game helps them by pass their resistance. It isn't about simulating life (robot or otherwise) it is enacting life right now.

Enacting is a lot more like LARPing. When you get a family into the room, you don't want to talk about having fun with one another, you want them to actually do it. The therapist then makes explicit what they did and points out that they can do it again, but it is inherently here and now.

The therapist is suppose to make something happen (at least in Structural Family therapy - my background). You're working with someone to increase competence, mobilize courage to create change. Different tools work better with different people. The counselor fishes around for what works (I'm also very much influence by Pragmatism Philosophy).

So if the stance is here and now focused how can that be a simulationist stance (which seems to focus on creating another world).

I like how you provided examples of why you feel it is simulationist. I am open to this being where it fits but I'm not yet convinced. Can other people point out there examples of why they think it is sim?


Chris Engle
Hamster Press

"Stance: The cognitive position of a person to a fictional character. Differences among Stances should not be confused with IC vs OOC narration. Originally coined in the RFGA on-line discussions; see John Kim?'s website for archives. Current usage modified in GNS and other matters of role-playing theory. See Author, Actor, and Director Stance.

[Blankshield]

The Big Model doesn't cover therapeutic games.  Full stop.

It talks about why people play games when fun is the desired outcome.  Therapy has, well, healing as the goal, not fun.  There are a lot of parallels between the two, but they are fundamentally different creatures.

It's like the fishing for sport or fishing for food.  It sounds the same but is actually very very different.

James

[MatrixGamer]

I'd buy this. The intent is very different. Can the Big Model be expanded to take therpay games into account? A general theory of role playing probably should.

In the "Recognizable Patterns - Simulation" thread I asked Ron Edwards about people like my wife who view games as a means to a social interaction rather than a end in themselves. I see therapy games falling more in here. The game is a means to a social end - not a game end (Gamist-winning, Narrativist-telling a good story, Simulationist-getting it right).

I see the effect of too many years of Matrix Gaming on my thinking. I see catagorical models as things to slip through. Elements of a Matrix Game matrix only hold useful meaning when they are viewed from a distance. Get too close and they lose it. They become vulnerable to the "So what?" charge - that challenges their relevance to what is happening here and now.

I see involuntary, or non game focused players as potential exceptions to the model because they are the most likely to say "So what?"

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Chris, I think you missed my post on the first page of this discussion. My point there was to expand the scope of the model, hypothetically, in exactly the way you describe.

And as I said, it's very simple: change the Social Contract, the "real world social goals," and everything else lines up from there.

Best,
Ron

[MatrixGamer]

Social contract would then talk about "Real Wrold Social Goals" which stand outside of the context of the game. This would include hitting on the one woman in the group for a date as much as it would working on relieving someone's depression.

Delving into the game (ie accepting the quest) and going into the model would then fall into any of the creative agenda's previously established. I can easily see using games as a simulation, to look at a narrative, or to just score points (The game "Talking Feeling Doing" is the game you play while you're doing something else (Note: TFD is a boardgame so don't take this analogy too far).

A therapist and client may delve into the Big Model for only a few minutes and then come back to the other social goal - therapy. It would not matter if they were resistant or not because if they refused to go into the game they would be non-players.

I can accept this logic. It provides a good answer to people bringing up resistant players, connects the Big Model to the wider world outside of gaming and suggests that even brief forrays into a game would fit the rest of the model. This nicely bridges the gap between the hobby (all us drooling fanboys and girls) and the rest of the world.

Cool! I think this thread might be over.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

PS: If any of you still want to go on. I'll keep providing first hand verbatim reports to crew on but my question is answered.

[groundhog]

Chris Engle said:

Wouldn't the intent of the participants matter in what stance is taken? When I use a technique (like a simulation game - simulation here is more in line with the wargame take on the meaning) I'm in the here and now trying to effect an emotional change in the person in front of me - here and now. The game is a tool to bypass resistance. The person who is "playing" came into the office to solve a here and now problem. They are stuck. The game helps them by pass their resistance. It isn't about simulating life (robot or otherwise) it is enacting life right now.

Let me state here that I am not a mental health professional or a counselor. I have been helped by a few (most of them very little but a couple very much) and I've used role-playing as informal therapy with friends, family, and support groups, too. So my experiences may be substantially different from yours and from the norm as well. I can't even claim to know the norm of therapeutic role-play, but I know what's worked for me. Please excuse me if I'm a little less coherent here than normally, as it's a little disconcerting (for me anyway) to talk about receiving therapy.

I've experienced role-playing in customer service training, cultural awareness training, drug resistance education, sex ed, and many other areas, too. I'm aware these aren't therapy per se, but the uses of role-playing in education are inspired by and borrowed from therapeutic uses.

I have not seen role-playing used as therapy for what I'd call a `here and now' problem. Rather, I've seen it used to point out a recurring pattern of problem behaviors or a recurring pattern of unhelpful responses to stressful situations. Recognizing the pattern and how it can be broken is the goal, and role-playing is used mainly because it allows the pattern to be presented without blame being assigned. Therefore, it's not necessarily the case that an emotional response is that helpful right away. The situation is often too emotionally charged to talk about things directly at first. Seeing intellectually that certain people doing the role-playing are doing things in a counterproductive way and that there are better ways to handle them is the first step. Tying that to real life is the second step, and being able to talk about it directly is the third step.

This is why I think of therapeutic (and educational) role-playing the way I do. We'd make scenarios based on my real life. Then I'd play a fictionalized me, and others would play fictionalized versions of themselves. I'd of course play smarter than I was acting in rela life. Then, we'd switch roles. Someone who knew me well and who cared about me would play me. I'd play someone whom I'd hurt deeply or with whom I'd had an argument. I'm sure you can imagine that an exact real-world episode wouldn't be too helpful here. By explicitly playing fictional characters but with the same issues I was having, we could work through the episodes time and again with comments and suggestions from an unbiased outsider without any of us feeling we were being blamed. Later, when I was struggling with the not very useful patterns in my life, we could compare what was constructive in the role-playing sessions and what I was doing. It made it feel more like training to do something good in the future than admonishment for doing something wrong in the past. Avoiding the blame game was a big part of it.

Seeing the realistic paths the characters could take and the realistic consequences of them then applying those lessons to my life helped very much. That feels like Sim to me. I'm not sure how it necessarily falls outside the Big Model.

[MatrixGamer]

I've experienced role-playing in customer service training, cultural awareness training, drug resistance education, sex ed, and many other areas, too. I'm aware these aren't therapy per se, but the uses of role-playing in education are inspired by and borrowed from therapeutic uses.

I think your description of therapy role playing is very accurate, and I think all these other educational uses of role playing are very similar to what happens in counseling sessions. It is about recognizing patterns and hopefully changining them.

I am personally satisfied with Ron's explanation that therapy has "other social agendas" (beyond using a game for fun) and that all types of creative agendas can exist when theraputic role playes do delve into exploration etc.

My initial concern was that if there is a conscious move to make something less real (and thus easier to cope with) is that ducking the simulationist creative agenda. I now realize that one can be a simulationist "lite" and still have it as the agenda.

When you get down to it all of us put limits on how much simulations and reality we want. If I'm playing in a WWI game I don't want to really be in the mud being fired at by machine guns! I willing to cut it off at imagining it.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[John Kim]

I am personally satisfied with Ron's explanation that therapy has "other social agendas" (beyond using a game for fun) and that all types of creative agendas can exist when theraputic role playes do delve into exploration etc.

My initial concern was that if there is a conscious move to make something less real (and thus easier to cope with) is that ducking the simulationist creative agenda. I now realize that one can be a simulationist "lite" and still have it as the agenda.

I can't quite parse either sentence of the latter paragraph.  What is the agenda you are referring to?  

Incidentally, I'd direct you to some semi-recent threads on GNS that I started:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13154">Classifying by Social Function
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13670">Social Function and Feedback in Narrativism

That hasn't really progressed in the past few months, but I think it's worth taking up in future threads.  Basically, the real "agendas" of people are social and/or individual.  So, for example, in the case of therapy you are pursuing the agenda of treating someone's psychological problems.  You may use Gamism, Narrativism, or Simulationism in pursuit of that agenda.  As Ron points out, this is always true.  The true reasons why we pursue any of GNS are real-world reasons.

[MatrixGamer]

I am personally satisfied with Ron's explanation that therapy has "other social agendas" (beyond using a game for fun) and that all types of creative agendas can exist when theraputic role playes do delve into exploration etc.

My initial concern was that if there is a conscious move to make something less real (and thus easier to cope with) is that ducking the simulationist creative agenda. I now realize that one can be a simulationist "lite" and still have it as the agenda.

I can't quite parse either sentence of the latter paragraph.  What is the agenda you are referring to?  

The last paragraph was me restating my first idea when I started the thread. I thought that people's resisting engaging in play might be a different creative aganeda. So not GN or S. Ron's answer that people resisting play would be something that would fit in the social contract box of the big model made sense.  People who resist playing never go futher into the model. They don't play so they have no game related creative agenda. If "other social agendas" is added to the social contract box then it connects the model to the rest of the world.

For instance. I say to a client "Let's play a game!" They say "Let's not! I want to talk about my mother." Their "other social agenda is to do therapy. Or another example. A young woman come to the game and several young guys pay her a ton of attention. They have a less than honorable "other social agenda".

Doesn that make sense?

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

When I bring up topics I like to listen to what is said and if good points are made, change my opinion. Arguing for arguments sake is no fun and counter productive. (Ironic this coming from someone whose game reiles on players making arguments every turn.)