Ever had someone, maybe even a therapist, judge you for your interests in gaming? Maybe you have never had a therapist really understand you? Perhaps you just love the idea of your therapist being just a much of a nerd as you. This episode with Mike, the nerd therapist is for you!
In today’s episode Mike chats about how he uses things like video games, role playing and other nerdy interests to connect with his clients. We discuss why using pop culture, gaming and play based therapy can be helpful for not just children but people of any age. We also talk about some of the misconceptions people have about video games and the balance that is needed.
Who is The Nerd Therapist?
Mike Keady is a Counsellor in Perth, Australia.
Mike uses videogames and tabletop roleplaying games in individual and group therapy and provides education to clinicians on the use of pop culture to understand clients’ own personal journeys. Mike is an AusPATH member and LGBTQIA+ supportive counsellor.
Mike proudly calls himself ‘The Nerd Therapist’.
More details about Mike and his practice can be found on his website
You can find Mike over on Instagram
Our latest episode is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major podcast platforms. And guess what? The transcript is available below for your reading pleasure. Happy listening!
Transcript
SAM SELLERS:
[00:10] Hello and welcome to Inside the Therapy Room. I’m your host, Sam Sellers. I’m a registered therapist, a wife, and a fur mama, and I am passionate about breaking down the barriers and stigma attached to therapy. I want to begin by honouring the traditional custodians of the land we live and work on. Today, Mike is in Noongar country and Sam is on Gundungurra land. We pay our respects to the elders’ past, present, and emerging, for they hold the memories, the traditions, and cultures of our First Nations people. We must always remember that the land below our feet is, was and always will be Aboriginal land.
[00:53] Today we are chatting to Mike Keady. Mike is a counsellor from Perth who uses video games and tabletop role-playing games in individual and group therapy and provides education to clinicians on the use of pop culture to understand clients’ own personal journeys. Mike is an AusPATH member and an LGBTQIA+ supportive counsellor. Tune in to hear Mike share how using pop culture can be so helpful. We talk about the benefits for neurodivergent folk. We discuss the controversy that can surround video games, what it’s like inside his therapy room and what myth he would love to smash. We hope you enjoy joining us inside the therapy room.
[01:41] Welcome. It is so nice to have you. Your episode I am very excited about because it is unlike, I guess, anybody else’s in that you use popular culture, gaming. You sort of self-profess the nerd therapist, yeah?
MIKE KEADY:
Yep, that’s the name.
SAM SELLERS:
[02:07] So, I guess these are typically things that people would not necessarily associate with therapy, which I love. I love when people think out of the box and involve things that are a little bit off the beaten track. So, I love that. Tell us a little bit about how you work, the types of things that you utilise.
MIKE KEADY:
[02:32] Well, it comes down to the person because I use a few different approaches and styles, but at the end of the day, as horrifically pretentious as this is going to sound, I got told during my degree “meet your clients where you are.” Cool, I will. “Where are you?”, “I’m in Star Wars”, “Wicked. Let’s do it.” So, I’ll get a referral, and they really love Minecraft. I’m like, “sweet, let’s play Minecraft.” Or I’ve got like a teenager who doesn’t have like their group of people, and they love fantasy stuff. I’m like, wonderful. I run the Roll for Growth program, which uses D&D for group therapy. Let’s work on that social anxiety while we’re playing a game with a group of people that also don’t have their people. And it’s about creating at least one piece of social connection for people who maybe don’t have it.
[03:32] Because in a weird way we’ve seen this rise of nerd culture and now you can go to the shops, and you can like get D&D stuff or nerdy stuff just at any given shop. But there’s still that stigma to being too nerdy or too into Star Wars or too into superhero stuff. So, you still have like these kids or these young people, or even these adults who don’t have their group of people. So, creating these social opportunities, so I run a tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, but because of concerns around the business ethics of big businesses and that Dungeons and Dragons tells a specific kind of story, it’s a fantasy story, whereas other people may not vibrate with fantasies. We were like a Star Wars story or a cyberpunk story or a vampire story, which is other games. So, like any of us do, we tailor the intervention, the client experience to what we believe or what the evidence suggests would be good for them.
[04:45] So, for some people it’s we play a video game to alleviate the anxiety of a straight up conversation. Because a lot of the time for young people, if they’re one-on-one with an adult, it’s because they’ve done something wrong, or the adult isn’t happy with them for some reason. So, we play a game as a tension breaker and some games have quite therapeutic goals that we can work on simultaneously. Other people may need more social supports, so we run the social group. I run the social groups. And then there’s the comfort of knowing that your therapist is going to get your references, which is handy without having to explain a specific reference to a scene in Avatar: The Last Airbender or people tying their experiences back to the stories they know, which is the point of mythology is connecting our experiences to stories so we can relate to each other. And it’s nice. It’s an unexpected aside.
[05:51] I didn’t expect any of this to be where it is now, but I didn’t expect the parents to be as into it as they are because it’s cool for the parents to know that their young person’s working with someone who gets it and isn’t going to judge the parent for letting their kid watch weird cartoons or play video games. The amount of young people I get, the amount of people I get, because adults as well, that have been ridiculed or dismissed or people who have been just poorly treated by clinicians when they say, “Oh, I like video games”, “Oh, well, that’s your problem.” It’s still a highly stigmatized form of recreation. And it’s comfortable for people, but especially parents to know that the person, the young person seeing isn’t going to give them the business for it.
SAM SELLERS:
[06:55] Yeah, and I will still get parents who will come into my room and will go, “we can’t get them off the video games. They’re just spending hours and hours.” And so, there is always this notion in society that screens or technology or video games or fantasy is somehow damaging for our young people. And we know that it’s not necessarily as clear cut as that, nothing is ever that simple. So, I would imagine that it would be a refreshing perspective for a lot of parents.
MIKE KEADY:
[07:34] It should have been clear to me when it happened, but my first mental health role was in 2019 through to 2021, I was working at a primary school and one of the students comes up to me and he makes a reference to the Pokémon game, so Pokémon Sword and Shield were out at the time, and I can’t remember what exactly he said, but he mentioned his difficulty with a thing, and I’m like “Oh, I’ve been playing that too but I didn’t choose that starter, I chose the fire starter. I always play the fire type Pokémon” and he just looks, and I get dragged, like not physically, but like “come with me”, and he drags me to the to the front of the school to meet his mom and he’s like “Mike knows Pokémon” and I’m like…
SAM SELLERS:
Oh, what a beautiful moment.
MIKE KEADY:
[08:27] And it was a series of little moments like that that made me realize that this is not a thing young people get to experience. And I didn’t as a kid. I didn’t have any adults around me who played video games.
SAM SELLERS:
[08:42] Yeah. I mean, I think in general I have this very firm belief that as a therapist I don’t want my clients to ever feel like they have to educate me. And so, it’s such a big thing for people to be able to have somebody who understands the things that are important to them, and particularly things that are often used as coping strategies or management tools to deal with anxiety or to deal with depression and things like that. So, I’m assuming that what drew you to this space is your own love for these things?
MIKE KEADY:
[09:22] It was an accident. I was in a mood and that’s a recurring theme with me. So, I’ll set a scene. It was 2020. It was September. So, I graduated February 2020 and then had a little break. I had a little break. I went on a holiday after I graduated, and I came back a week before we locked down. And the thing is, I didn’t know anything about what was going on because I didn’t take my phone with me on my holiday. I’m in the Canadian mountains and I don’t have a phone, and I get back and I’m like, “Hey, why are there really scary signs at the airport?”
SAM SELLERS:
Did you then have to go into mandatory hotel quarantine?
MIKE KEADY:
[10:06] I got back a week before, but I’m a homebody. So, I basically did anyway. So, I started my practice when we were in the lockdown because I’m like, “I don’t know how long this is going to last. I don’t know how much help people are going to need, but I’m a newly graduated council with a love for DBT. Let’s do this.” So, I start up a practice and it’s at the risk of attacking almost every other therapist out there. It used a lot of browns and greens, had a lot of earth turns. And I talked a lot about like mindfulness and ACT, which was fine, but the Facebook algorithm didn’t like it. So, I got nowhere within a few months because it’s just white noise in the field of like mental health.
[10:56] But I’m in a lot of therapy Facebook groups. And in one of the groups, one day someone asked, “Hey, what’s Minecraft?” And there were a lot of like okay responses. And as someone who played a lot of Minecraft, I’m like, “Yeah, okay. It’s kind of like digital Lego, except also you can build stuff and interact with it. So, you can like make a farm or you can build a castle, or you can get this stuff called Redstone, which lets you do electronics, and you can code stuff. And it was recently that this guy made a Redstone circuit that would let you play Minecraft in Minecraft, which was funny.”
SAM SELLERS:
Oh, wow.
MIKE KEADY:
[11:35] Because it’s all just electronics at the end of the day. But it was funny. So, I was sharing this stuff and then I think nothing of it, cool I helped people with my nerdy stuff. The next day I see a similar post on the same group, “what’s Pokémon?” And I’m like, “here’s my time to shine” because all the answers are terrible. A lot of the answers were like, “Oh, it’s an animal fighting game enjoyed by children.” It was so disingenuous. And I’m like, I gave like a three-page essay in Facebook comments of like, “Pokémon is about these animals that exist in the world with us that are kind of sentient, but also animals at the same time. And they’re magic, but kind of not really. And we live with them and they’re friends and they enjoy like fighting with each other, but in a friendly way that like being knocked out is the worst thing that could happen unless you’re a terrible human being, and then your Pokémon might die because you neglected.” And it’s all these themes, and like throwing in the quote from the Pokémon movie, the first Pokémon movie, which is like, “I see now that the differences of birth should not be what separate us as people. And it is truly what we do with the gift of life that defines who we are.”
[12:49] And it’s some like civil rights era quality quote about equality. And it was beautiful. And I’m just sharing all this stuff and people are like, “wow, this is cool.” And then the next day, so there’s three days, on the third day, there’s a post about Fortnite. Which it’s controversial.
SAM SELLERS:
I mean, that’s a very hot topic.
MIKE KEADY:
[13:12] It is. And even in gamer circles because I don’t like their business practices. I can’t deny it, but I also feel like they get hated because they’re popular and a lot of kids play it, and we find that that’s a thing that just draws a lot of heat for no real reason. And I go, “Okay, look, remember the Hunger Games? Remember how popular that was with everyone. Let’s conceptualize this as a video game. And remember how much everyone in this group was probably into it.” And then explain that. And then I’m sitting there one day and there’s a post about “what is Pokémon?” again. I’m like, “I’m not doing this again.” So, I make a website. I called it The Nerd Therapist and I started writing articles. I was smashing out one a day and it was Pokémon, Fortnite, Minecraft, and then went to like a brief rundown of Star Wars.
[14:15] And then I’ve written Roblox, Dungeons and Dragons, the Civilization series, and then I just did specific character bios. I think I did one for Deadpool, and then the Mandalorian because season two was coming out. And just picking up stuff like, “here’s the thing you need to know.” It was just a one-on-one thing for parents and professionals like, “Here’s what you need to know, and here’s how you could use this in conversation.” And I did not attach my name to it. I just created this anonymous website and every other day I was like, “Hey, I found this cool resource. You should check it out.” And it exploded.
SAM SELLERS:
I’m not surprised.
MIKE KEADY:
[15:01] The page was getting messages from people with like letters after their name and job titles. And like people who teach like the clinical psychology at universities. Like “Hey, what does this Pokémon mean?” And I’m like, “to tell you or not to tell you that this is the trans rights Pokémon?” and just going on about all this stuff. And after about four more days I got a job offer of these people seeing my page and like, “we’re not sure who you are, but can we have a phone call? We want to talk about some work.” And they wanted me to move like across WA and start doing it. I’m like, “I can’t uproot my family to a country town during lockdown but thank you for the offer.” Or it wasn’t lock down but during like still being in containment between weird and everything.
[15:56] After about six weeks of running this anonymous blog I’m like, “Okay, I’ve spent more time on this than my actual practice. Let’s combine the two.” So, I rebranded that website from The Nerd Therapist into Pop Culture Competence. Because that was my thesis I did, is looking at nerdy stuff as through the lens of cultural competence, and then rebranded my counselling practice from Counselling with Mike to Counselling with Mike, The Nerd Therapist. And then I did some research into like D&D because I think it’s a season of Stranger Things had come out or was not long about to come out. So, I’m like, “okay, did an article.” And while writing the article I found news articles about people doing it for group therapy, and I’m like, “let’s do that.”
[16:52] And this kind of broke the dopamine, and I started learning and applying research and figuring myself out and just let it all cascade.
SAM SELLERS:
[17:03] I mean, it’s so great because there is just so few things like this to use what is current, what is popular, what people are enjoying that we generally just see as pure enjoyment. As something that could be enjoyable, but also meaningful and helpful and all those things, I think it’s great.
MIKE KEADY:
[17:26] It’s interesting because I have met people, and this is going to sound peculiar to a lot of your listeners, I’ve met people from the Jedi religion who are whole heartedly, not like devotees of the force. It’s not because the forces aren’t real. They don’t believe Star Wars is real. It is followed some of the ideological tenants in the movie and the expanded Star Wars content of this Ideology of “let’s work on ourselves and do better so we can do something good for the world that we live in.”
SAM SELLERS:
[18:00] Yeah. I think we can learn out of anything realistically. I have clients who do the same sort of thing but with literature that they’re reading or things like that, and you take concepts out of things that we just naturally enjoy for entertainment, and we can learn from it and use it. So, yeah, I mean.
MIKE KEADY:
It’s the purpose of storytelling.
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah, absolutely.
MIKE KEADY:
[18:32] The best one I found that I immediately had to recreate when I was working at a school was, okey, to preface this question, have you seen the Avengers movies?
SAM SELLERS:
Oh, multiple times.
MIKE KEADY:
[18:48] Okay, cool. So, for your viewers who may not, and not to like do the mansplaining thing, but just for the ease of access for like the people watching this at home. There is a hammer, Thor’s hammer in the Avengers series, is Mjolnir, and Mjolnir is enchanted with magic so that it can only be lifted or used by anyone who is worthy to wield it and is worthy in the eyes of Thor’s father, Odin. Which is a whole thing. And in the fourth Avengers movie, Thor is incredibly depressed and grieving and traumatized, and he is like, it’s tragic through his entire story arc of that movie. You can tell this man spent like five years in a hole grieving the most terrible things that could happen to people, some of the most terrible things that could happen to a person.
[19:37] And he looks at the hammer in a scene and he picks it up and he just realized in this moment that despite everything terrible that had happened and how he’d responded to it, he was still worthy to pick it up. And I saw a friend of mine who was a tattoo artist within like a week of that movie coming out had made still worthy tattoos for people. I have a hoodie with it written on it because they were selling them and I had to buy it because it’s that perfect intersection of nerdy stuff and work stuff for me, is this this moment where he realizes like no matter how depressed and how traumatized and how down he was over what happened to him and his people, he was still worthy and it didn’t affect his influence it didn’t affect his value.
SAM SELLERS:
[20:27] Yeah, amazing. I mean Marvel is sort of, I wouldn’t say that I’m a particular nerdy type of person, but Marvel and Doctor Who tend to be my two wheelhouses. And I’ve often talked about the superheroes in the Avengers and things like that and used Hulk as a reference for emotional regulation and all that sort of thing. There’s just so much potential there that I think it often just gets missed, I think it’s really easy to think it’s just entertainment, but there’s so much content there that can be utilized that people are already, kids in particular and teenagers, are already connecting with, so let’s use what they’re already connected to rather than trying to thrust something in front of them that is completely foreign.
MIKE KEADY:
[21:24] Yeah, a hundred percent. And you know, there aren’t many people you could talk to where you could go “what book means a lot to you?” But you’ve drilled that down because not everyone can read or not everyone has access to book. Okay, what story means a lot to you? It’s the same question but multimedia. So, you can talk about like the video games that meant a lot to you or what characters you relate with, and there’s a lot of stuff that can be done in that sphere of, in that most horrifically cliche therapist line, it’s like how does this make you feel?
SAM SELLERS:
[22:06] Absolutely. And characterization is something that’s easy for people to conceptualize because we do so much character stuff with movies and books and tv shows, it’s easy for people to sort of understand that concept. And I mean, the amount of people who talk about Sheldon Cooper. For people who don’t know, Sheldon cooper is a character in the tv show The Big Bang Theory who it’s obvious is on the spectrum and has a lot of beautiful quirks that make him unique, but he is a unique character. But the amount of people that identify with him, and often in the show is painted as quite an annoying character, and at times frustrating to be around, so many people are connecting. I mean, just even last week I think I had five clients bring him up. He’s a very relatable character I think for some people.
MIKE KEADY:
[23:10] That’s interesting for a show that’s been over for as long as it has.
SAM SELLERS:
I know.
MIKE KEADY:
[23:15] Because fun fact, I’m not a fan.
SAM SELLERS:
Wow.
MIKE KEADY:
Not at all a fan.
SAM SELLERS:
That’s more controversial than Fortnite.
MIKE KEADY:
[23:31] Well, got a lot of notes, but one of one of the notes is for a show being about what it says it’s about, they get so much wrong. And that’s what annoys me, that’s one of the things that annoys me. Part of the other thing is like, “Oh god they’re all terrible.” Especially, I know people are re-watching it now, and I’m like Sheldon is horrifically sexist in the first couple of seasons.
SAM SELLERS:
Yes. I mean, they all are, to be honest, all of them, they all are. But yes.
MIKE KEADY:
No, three are sexist, one’s a predator. If you know Howard Wolowitz in real life, unfriend them, just stop, that person is horrible. Not a fan.
SAM SELLERS:
[24:20] Yes. But I mean, I think it’s interesting because so many of the tv shows that all came out around the same sort of era, there’s so many things that are problematic about some of the storyline characterization.
MIKE KEADY:
[24:38] That late thousands period was a weird transitional period of like “The 90s is over, let’s just have like wildly transphobic stuff in the storyline, but also let’s push other boundaries” and then you get just some of the stuff that was coming out there, like looking back it’s like “this wasn’t that long ago.”
SAM SELLERS:
[24:59] I know. My wife and I recently re-watched, well I re-watched, she had never seen it. But we watched Two Broke Girls which is a wildly funny show, but there is so much problematic with it, so many transphobic, so many racist jokes and it’s just like you sort of, I loved it and I’m sitting there re-watching it going, “Oh, that is a bit yuck”.
MIKE KEADY:
[25:32] It reaches a point where it’s like, “I actually can’t continue with this.”
SAM SELLERS:
Absolutely, I was like, I feel like we might be digressing.
MIKE KEADY:
I do that, you better stop me.
SAM SELLERS:
Are there people, are there presentations that benefit more from this type of therapy?
MIKE KEADY:
[25:57] This is a fun question because I work, given a lot of my social media stuff and a lot of stuff I talk about is obviously neurodiversity specifically, let’s say the neurodiversity is more than just autism and ADHD, so talking a lot about neurodiversity overall. I work with a lot of autistic people or ADHD people. ADHD is, which doesn’t roll off the tongue, but that is the phrasing. I work in that space a lot and it’s probably, again, the secret specialty, the secret group, I call it the accidental specialty, is people recovering from mistreatment by previous therapists who’ve like criticized or been just generally not nice to them because of what they’re into.
[26:49] And I touched on this earlier and it’s honestly been quite a few people, I’ve worked with a few young people who the first thing in the referral was “We are coming to you because you don’t seem like a professional and that’s what we need.” Because when I was working in my first job, I was business pants, button down. I’m looking nice for my business job, because I’ve come from bartending and construction and now, I can look nice for my professional job. And then I realized, again, that a lot of the young people I was working with only ever talked to people wearing business casual if they were lawyers or cops. So, I’m like, “Oh, not a good vibe. This is traumatizing.” I went to work the next day in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and it was rad, and I’ve never looked back. This is as professional as I tend to look, because I work with a lot of people kind of recovering from just poor treatment.
[27:51] And it’s not the therapeutic treatments, it’s the way they’re treated as a person for having their interest. Like, “shouldn’t you have grown out of this yet? I thought that was for children.” And then the parents you know, “the reason they’re depressed is because they play video games.” And I’m like, “No, the reason they play video games is to cope with the fact they’re depressed. And it’s the other stuff that’s going on in their world. Learn about the other stuff. Don’t just take it straight to the video games.”
SAM SELLERS:
[28:15] Yeah, absolutely. They do. I mean, they are very much, they just get whipped out to be used as a weapon almost for people.
MIKE KEADY:
Yeah, “This will solve the problem, that thing I don’t like.”
SAM SELLERS:
[28:28] Yeah, exactly. I guess in saying that we do need to recognize that at times this can escalate into quite problematic behavior. How do you balance that?
MIKE KEADY:
[28:42] Well, that’s the thing we talk about, like any media consumption, how much time you’re spending on it. And there’s a world of difference between the person that comes home from school or work and plays for a few hours versus sort of, back when I played World of Warcraft, there was a healer in our guild who she was a great player, amazing. Had a lot of skills, had a lot of in game money, had a suspicious number of high-level characters. It takes time to get like high level characters. We found out she was playing seven days a week, 18 hours a day. She was sleeping for maybe four hours a night and playing while she was at work instead of working. And that’s your gaming addiction. That’s your person putting in more hours than like the hardest job. That’s your gaming addiction.
[29:37] But I’ve said, and it’s kind of my own personal belief since I was 10 years old when I played too many video games, is at the time I wasn’t, but it did escalate for me as well. But I kind of aligned myself with this idea that I’m not going to accept criticism on the way I spend my free time from people who watch the same amount of television, because it is all just the way the way we play games. Some notes on how some games, especially like some of these mobile games are nothing more than skinner boxes, pushing the button for the dopamine of the flashy lights and the ads for the micro transactions. Personally, I’m not a fan.
[30:23] I do have some notes on like ways the industry could improve, and games that should be played over other ones, such as I’d say, Minecraft over any mobile game, or the portion which should be taken with like Roblox, for instance, Roblox has a lot on it that is not for all audiences. And it would be hard for parents and even professionals who aren’t tech savvy to do, all right, you’ve got to have the right settings of like the right social settings, right social privacy settings, so you’re not getting messages from people you aren’t friends with. But also, the right kind of awareness from the grownups to know that some of the stuff on that is not appropriate for kids. And I’m not a huge fan of it for that reason is because it is, for me, more were to kind of supervise the appropriate content when a lot of the stuff on there is just, there are some interesting and some cool stuff on there, but there’s not enough of it to make it worth me ever recommending it to people, so no.
SAM SELLERS:
[31:34] I mean, and it certainly is a difficult space for a lot of parents to navigate because technology changes so quickly and things get updated so frequently that it is understandable that parents feel overwhelmed and just feel like they don’t know how to manage that situation. So, the only thing that some of them can think of is, “Well, we’ll just not let them do it. We’ll just try and take it away.” Because it’s just too overwhelming. But it sounds like, I guess part of the process of ensuring that something that can be just for entertainment or enjoyment, and learning doesn’t become problematic is that there’s more mindfulness about it around the way that you utilise it.
MIKE KEADY:
[32:23] It’s all about like responsible consumption. But my one my one note and my one kind of, it’s not a criticism, it’s just a note on anyone who’s like worried. And I saw this as a kid growing up, something I see now as like a parent in and out in and around the community and something I see as a professional, is when you’re trying to get your kid away from the computer, make the thing that you’re trying to get them to go towards, make it interesting or make it relevant. Like I’ve seen someone recommend, and this is not to disparage anyone’s interests, but some of the recommendations I’ve seen it’s not easy to implement or interesting to them. It’s going to be hard to get a 15-year-old who’s really into like Call of Duty to do crossword puzzles or jigsaw puzzles, or something like that. You’ve got to keep it relevant to their interests, which is kind of what I offer with the Dungeons and Dragons is it’s still nerdy, we’re still doing stuff, it’s still gamified, but it’s in a group of people with friends.
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah, there’s community around it.
MIKE KEADY:
[33:28] Yeah, it can be. In some of my groups we use the digital character sheets. So, you get like a sheet for your character, and this this piece of paper has got all your characters information on it. And sometimes we’ll use the digital ones, if we’re updating things or if we’re changing stuff, sometimes we use that. So, there can be a bit of tech, which is fine for people who maybe need their phone as a fidget or as a distraction, or to manage some anxiety. That’s valid. And I don’t have an opinion. But for the people, for the younger kids or the kids who don’t have a phone, or for the kids who don’t want to be on a phone, there’s still the physical stuff, they play with some dice because I’ve got my got about 20 sets of dice people can use, and they’re fun to roll and to play with.
SAM SELLERS:
[34:16] Yeah, I mean there is that sensory aspect that they would enjoy. So, I guess, how do your sessions, you sort of alluded to a few of the things, but you know, typically, your sessions probably look very different to a stereotypical therapy session. What is unique about the way that you work?
MIKE KEADY:
[34:42] Honestly, the structure isn’t different. It’s very much like because I come from a background of doing DBT. I learned DBT from lifeline. I did that in 2020. It’s how I found my office, which is cool. But it’s the similar you come in. So, I want to say running like a two-hour roll for growth session will start at say 12 o’clock, 15 minutes to check in. How’s everyone doing? What’s everyone up to? Just a bit of a check in. How’s everyone’s we’ve been doing? A bit of that community stuff. Depends on the group. So, some groups like to get straight into it. No preamble. But some groups do like to have a bit of a chat. And then we play the game. And then we play often depending on how the session goes, we try to end with a bit of an epilogue sort of thing. So, we get to about 10 minutes till the end and go kind of one thing of, “Hey good work, great teamwork today, great communication. I like the creativity from this response.” Just kind of analyzing the session and having a thought, seeing like some summaries could be made.
[35:43] Because it’s interesting if you look at communication and expressive storytelling through the lens of the things people want to say or how they wish to see themselves. If you look at it as a power fantasy, without the connotations that power fantasy usually has, because it’s usually quite an icky kind of phrase. If you look at it as in “if you had magic, this is how you’d act” you can kind of see a little bit about what people are trying to tell you about themselves. Especially when it’s a repeating behavior, or if they play multiple characters, but have all had a similar kind of backstory. There are threads you can pull to learn something about this person deep down, that maybe they don’t even know about themselves. And I can say I’m one of those people. The reason I’m a therapist is because I played World of Warcraft. Whenever I’m playing a video game, when I’m playing a video game with other people like World of Warcraft, where we work as a team towards mutual goals, I play in the archetype of a paladin. I usually have a big stonking hammer I can bop people with. I usually have heavy armor so I can protect myself and then a shield and magic so I can protect other people and heal them.
[36:54] And I was working construction. And I was sitting there thinking, “I can’t do this forever. I don’t want to get out. What can I do?” And I was thinking to myself, “how have I spent my free time? How do I spend my free time?” Well, every day for about six hours, I pretend to be an elf, which I don’t think is something that can make me money. But I also am an elf with hair, which is nice. But I’m also an elf that has special magic that can help people and heal people and lift them up when they’re down. Sometimes quite literally. And kind of stand between them and danger and help make sure everyone gets to achieve their goal. And I’m like, “Well, let’s do mental health.” That’s how I’m choosing to spend my time is helping people, and kind of back to some of my happiest days in any job I’ve had were the days of taking a moment to sit with someone and be like “hey, what’s up? Why are you crying in the walk-in freezer?”
SAM SELLERS:
[37:52] Yeah, I love when things just happen naturally and organically and it just sort of that’s when it works. I just think the more that young people, I feel like not just young people, but even adults, the more we can tap into that imagination and that creativity side of us, the more we learn, the more we understand ourselves more because there isn’t that rational, logical aspect to it. There isn’t that aspect that needs to come into it where it needs to be socially acceptable or any or it doesn’t need to make sense even. And the ability to sort of learn in that group format around communication and problem-solving skills, and all those things that we tend to work on in therapy. But to do that in a fun expressive, creative way is only ever going to amplify that sort of learning and growth period.
MIKE KEADY:
[38:55] And there’s so many studies about play based learning. And we see in younger demographics, younger age groups, we see that play therapy is the way to go. I’m like, “Well, why does this ever stop? Why does it have to stop? Let’s do it.”
SAM SELLERS:
Absolutely.
MIKE KEADY:
[39:15] So, we just run these groups. And it’s fun because one of the things that I see from so many adults is they don’t take time to play anymore. And I’m not saying that the therapy is just playing. We’re just like messing around and goofing. But there is something revitalizing about taking time for yourself to do something fun. And if I make you learn a lesson along the way about teamwork or anxiety, that’s what we’re going to do, because we can do that in these things. One of my D&D groups. So, D&D being, again for the audience, being a collaborative storytelling game where a group of people come around to be characters in a story I’ve written. Well, they’re going to have to deal with a story where there’s psychic vampires feeding on people’s fear and anxiety, and the only way to fight them off is to use techniques to manage your fear and anxiety. And as the game goes on, they get scarier, more anxiety inducing, so you got to get better skills.
[40:18] So, we’ll be there and be “okay, so you’re going to hunt the vampire? Cool. Sounds scary. How are you going to regulate?” And one of them is like, “I’ve got a spell that can summon like an icicle and I’m going to use that to tip, I’m going to hold it above my face.” I’m like yes, and we just do this.
SAM SELLERS:
[40:40] I think it was, or I might be meshing social medias here, but I feel like it was you that might have shared a post around nonfiction being education and fiction being imagination or something in terms of literature.
MIKE KEADY:
That was me.
SAM SELLERS:
[40:58] Yeah, I loved that because I was like, we often think it doesn’t have to be fake or it’s not real. But let’s put a positive spin on that because it’s tapping into a part of our brain that often gets left aside. You know, you turn a certain age and suddenly it’s not acceptable to have made up stories and to play games and things like that. And yet there is this whole part of our brain that is thriving on imagination and creativity. And it’s not getting any workout. So, there would even be an element of self-care to this sort of therapy as well.
MIKE KEADY:
[41:47] Well, that’s one thing I’m doing now is I’m running, again, spur of the moment idea late on a Monday night, running the Roll for Spoons program. And that’s D&D groups for mental health work for specifically neurodivergent mental health workers. I’d be like, “How often do you have fun? Be honest with me now. How often do you just take a time to do something fun and interesting and like cool for you? Let’s run a D&D group.” Just in one of the Facebook groups I though, “I’ll run a D&D group. Let’s do it.” I had enough interest to fill three groups like within a few days. So, just running it. And some of the feedback I’ve gotten has been amazing because it’s something we don’t do a lot as adults.
[42:32] But if we look at, I say this in like the nerdiest, most goth way possible, but if we look at the culture of normal people, storytelling, and parables, but there’s for some reason it has to be related to a religion, a philosophy writer, or something really depressing. We can draw meaning from a lot of different things, and we can draw inspiration from different things. It doesn’t have to be from a specifically like conventionally significant source.
SAM SELLERS:
[43:05] And I mean, it makes sense that we can draw inspiration and meaning from these video games, movies, books, whatever it is, because the people who are creating them are drawing inspiration from real life things most of the time, or their imagination coupled with real life experiences. So, it’s it makes sense that we can then utilize meaning and find a shared experience through this medium. This is my favorite part of all the episodes, which is I asked all of you to think about a myth connected to what you do and all the group of people you work with that you want to smash. What are we smashing?
MIKE KEADY:
[43:52] What are we smashing? It’s a funny one. It’s a funny question because this is my favorite part of any mental health course is where we start busting myths. And now that you’ve asked me for it, I don’t have one because I am in my little echo chamber of neurodiversity affirming therapists. And so, I don’t have to deal with some of like the horrific things that are said by some other groups. Video games don’t cause violence. That’s the fun. Is that even still a thing? Are they still proponents of this?
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah, I think it sadly is.
MIKE KEADY:
[44:33] I’ve done a lot of looking into this and I’ve done the reading because I anticipated a lot of negativities when I started doing this. But I’m three years in and not one negative comment on my social media.
SAM SELLERS:
I think sadly it still is a thing that people, particularly like parents are often the people who are having those conversations and going “I don’t want it to bring out anger” or “I don’t want it to bring out some other unpleasant emotion” that most of the time they just don’t want to deal with because it’s difficult.
MIKE KEADY:
[45:19] I remember doing some reading, if you like, when I started doing this, I’m I have to anticipate this question and this myth that I’ve never bought into. And I can see like most of the research against gaming has come from like one special interest group in the States who are presumably funded by political groups who would profit from it somehow. This isn’t a myth of any group or presentation or style of therapy. But here’s something that I’ve learned that I had to learn for myself and that I hear other people saying about themselves. Because this this probably is a myth. I don’t know the phrasing for this. But just because you didn’t do well at school, or just because you had to leave school, or didn’t finish school or whatever happened to you, doesn’t mean you can’t do something. And it doesn’t mean that that’s the end.
[46:16] My grades started to decline to not go to uni, to not bother, I will never be let in. I got told to give up and maybe just get a trade, which is nothing wrong with it because I built railways for four years. I’m not being disparaging; it’s reflecting social attitudes. You can do what you set your heart to, no matter what other people tell you. I’m going to say you can’t get it if you don’t [inaudible] because that’s not how the world works. But don’t let people tell you what you can’t do. Don’t let the fact you didn’t finish school stop you from doing something. Because that’s what I was told. And look at me now. I’m a therapist.
[47:04] And yeah, because we’re told this, that if we don’t finish school we can’t amount to much because there’s some sort of invisible test. But school is not for everyone. School is not for me, whether it’s the academic environment or the social environment. It’s not for everyone. But it doesn’t have to dictate the way your future turns out.
SAM SELLERS:
[47:23] Absolutely. And I think it is probably really sort of indicative of the type of people that probably land in your groups and land in your office because they are often seen as the kids who are not pulling their weight in school or things like that because they’re creative or they’re imaginative and they don’t do math or they don’t do science, and they don’t do the stereotypical that school wants you to do.
MIKE KEADY:
[47:56] You don’t do the nerd thing. You don’t do the nerd thing. The one I see and the one I revive the most is “would overachieve if they applied themselves.” But my note to anyone who’s ever written that on a report is, could they achieve if you created the environment for them to do it? Because this is, as a fun fact, we’re breaking myths and we’re telling fun facts, something like 86%, like it’s some high percentage in the 70s or 80s, of autistic/ADHD individuals who have jobs are self-employed because that is the only way we get the environment we need in which we can just not even thrive but survive in, and then we can thrive. So, that’s my note on that topic is to reflect, put the onus back on the adult of if these young people like me, like a lot of young people that I’ve met in and out of work would thrive if given the right environment to do it.
[49:12] And that’s kind of one of the basic things we learn in therapy is we create this room, and we create the space for someone to think and learn and grow. And let’s see if we can provide that that very basic idea that Kyle Rogers gave us to the other important parts of life. Like teaching, like the workplace or the classroom.
SAM SELLERS:
[49:39] Absolutely. And I think it’s important here to sort of note that we understand that teachers can only do so much.
MIKE KEADY:
Oh, 100%.
SAM SELLERS:
[49:51] The education system is unfortunately very faulty and not set up for anybody who is not neurotypical.
MIKE KEADY:
We’re getting controversial today.
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah, I know.
MIKE KEADY:
[50:01] 100%. No, I thought that teaching was my first preference. Because I put it down to, when I was leaving construction, I said, “Okay, teaching, mental health or personal training.” And I talked to a bunch of personal trainers because I had access to them through work. They all talked me out of it. And then I was working at a supermarket with a bunch of qualified employed teachers, and they were telling me like they must stay working a second job for like financial reasons or for job security because they’re employed only on like term or semester contracts. I said, “I can’t do that.” So, teaching was my first idea, and I got talked out of it by the situation in the industry. And I’m still in some of the Facebook groups about like teaching and homeschooling and learning about the industry. And it’s sad that we’ve got the future of like the world and more specifically the future of like Australia, and we don’t invest everything we have into creating the best for them we possibly could.
SAM SELLERS:
[51:12] I mean, and I think it’s probably has led into a lovely way to end, which is find people who see your strengths and see them as strengths. And don’t turn your strengths and your loves and the things that you enjoy into somehow being a weakness or a fault in your personality. Don’t settle, particularly for therapists, don’t settle for a therapist who doesn’t make you feel anything less than comfy in that space. Yes, I always sort of say “yes, we might talk about things that might make you feel uncomfy, but you should still feel comfortable around me.” Don’t settle for a therapist who sees your unique sense of the world or your unique tastes in video games or anime or whatever it is as anything other than a strength in your personality. So, I think that’s probably a really great way to end it. Thank you so much.
MIKE KEADY:
No worries. Thanks for having me.
SAM SELLERS:
Yeah, it’s been great.
MIKE KEADY:
Great.
SAM SELLERS:
Absolutely. We hope you enjoyed joining us inside the therapy room. Thanks for listening.