Technology

Personally, I've found immersive roleplay in video games to be incredibly therapeutic. As well as creating some distance from personal trauma and being able to kind of exist in a space outside of yourself, it creates opportunities to have experiences that you could never (and potentially should never) have in real life.

It's an opportunity to experience a kind of emotional catharsis in a safe environment where others are on board with playing out intense feelings. It can be a space where you can push your own comfort zone and stretch your confidence and capabilities.

I've managed to work through stuff that it would have taken me forever to unpack if I didn't get to repeat patterns in roleplay and really see how they play out in a way that was harder in my own life.

I've gotten so much better at establishing boundaries and seeing when people are trying to push at them or ignore them, and I know how to handle that now without feeling powerless. I played a few villains and anti-heroes, and one of them picked up this habit of getting right up in people's faces and saying hello; I'm nowhere near as brazen, but the practice made it much much easier to quickly develop a rapport with someone. Sometimes going to the laundromat feels like doing crowd work, which is great for someone with more than a few signs of thankfully currently mild agoraphobia. There are times when I do run into panic or anxiety when I've gotten myself out of it by sort of invoking the strength of one of those characters, because they're not afraid of a damned thing and they're me.

Anyway, video games are great but roleplay in the right game is absolutely next level. It's like remembering dozens of incarnations or something. It's wild and we don't really talk about how wild it is because the outside world seems to view it as childish and embarrassing, which is a major loss for them.