Dungeons and Dragons and Gender Therapy
Dungeons and Dragons recently has exploded among college students, especially with the popularization of Critical Role (popular web series where a group gets together and plays D and D). With Covid-19 more and more people are using Critical Role to spend time with friends online. For my Capstone Project at Champlain College, I wanted to analyze and see if Dungeons and Dragons could be used in Group Gender Therapy as a discussion tool and a way for group mates to build rapport with each other.
What is Gender Therapy, and why Dungeons and Dragons?
Gender Therapy is a specific type of therapy for those questioning their gender, who are uncomfortable with aspects of their gender or body or experiencing gender dysphoria. Someone who does not feel connected to gender roles or stereotypes. It typically aims to tackle the core issues and provides a safe space for those who are questioning and want to explore other identities and talk about in detail what they are experiencing and how to deal with it. At a baseline, Gender Therapy helps you look mainly at the societal implications of gender and what that means to a person. Figuring out ways to either talk them through or provide help in figuring out the confusion around them.
Dungeons and Dragons is a very open-ended platform for discussion. You can be anyone you choose to be, and while in the session, people will refer to you as that character. This allows for the easy trail of names, pronouns, style of dress, or talks of fashion, all to be explored without the client committing to anything.
Creating and role-playing as characters usually entails some bit of the individual’s own personality or potentially issues (typically with backstory) and possibly for issues to surface even if the player does not realize this is the case.
Why I Wanted to do This
Gender Therapy seriously helped me when I was questioning my identity, but Dungeons and Dragons had a significant role as well. There were patterns in my characters that I started to pick up on. One specific moment while I was playing a male character, it just felt off compared to my time playing female characters, which always felt natural to me. While that wasn’t the deciding factor, I started to really question myself and my identity. In the Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I switched from playing that male character to a female because I found the male pronouns had really bothered me.
Out of that came the idea of using this platform to explore gender roles. I tried out new names in D and D (briefly even went by one of them), and being in a space where I was able to hear female pronouns used in relation to myself originally made me more confused, but also concreted the direction that I needed to go. Looking back at the time, the character I had switched to in that campaign was also struggling largely with finding herself. I realize now that why I was able to play her so well was because I was dealing with the same issues and the fear I was going to be ostracized.
As cathartic as seeing that character accomplish her own goals were once the campaign came to a close I felt melancholic. On the one hand, it felt nice to see her story come to a close, but there was emptiness present now that her story was over, but mine was really just beginning. But on a larger scale, it still helped me get through a difficult transitional period of my life, and it’s my belief that it can do the same for others.
How I Went About This
Over the semester, I did intensive research into therapy models that had similarities using a baseline idea of what I wanted, then adapting and changing it, seeing what models worked and borrowing ideas to get a general concept. The final project details how you would use Dungeons and Dragons in gender therapy, detailing ideas on making encounters, planning sessions, character creation, and handling after-session discussions.
I’ve run and written Dungeon and Dragons campaigns in the past, and I’ve played many other campaigns, so I used many personal examples from what I’ve experienced and tuned that for use in therapy. One of the most significant hurdles was time since, typically, D and D sessions run from anywhere between three to five hours. The typical therapy session is an hour to two. Making things concise and focused on discussions was the main objective.
Basis in other Therapy Models
The most significant connections pulled for this idea are in Analytically Oriented Musical Therapy, Psychodrama Therapy, and Queer Theory-based Narrative Therapy.
Analytically Oriented Music Therapy uses music creation based on a “Rule of Play,” which is typically an issue in the client’s life. The client proceeds to play any instrument using their emotions and feelings about the problem, even those that are subconscious are apparent in the music. The therapist and client then listen and discuss why areas sound the way they do. In my experience, characters in D and D follow a similar trend, especially in their personality or actions.
Psychodrama Therapy uses role-playing and improvisation to investigate and gain insight into the client’s life. Typically this involves acting out real-life situations that the client has gone through. Similarly, I wrote a module that discusses how to make an encounter around real-life situations that the clients may encounter and discuss and role-play as their characters how to deal with the situation. The most considerable difference here is the focus is not on actual life events that the client has been through because misuse can have severe impacts on the client and the therapist alike. Utilizing encounters and similar situations as different characters allows for more control of the therapist to ensure that everyone feels comfortable.
Narrative Therapy and Queer Theory narrative therapy helps change the client’s viewpoint on life situations and problems; typically, this involves separating themselves from the problem to look at the problem for what it is. In collaboration with Queer Theory, it can look at situations, especially around transgender issues and the idea of gender as a whole. Typically examining the concept of what being feminine or masculine means to the individual. Changing the narrative to show they’re focused on other people’s view of gender roles and not their own. Here the world the players are going to be in is mainly going to allow for complete freedom of dress and gender expression, this is both to enable them to explore those opportunities but also provide a space where they can fully identify how they might want to without any fear of prosecution or self-doubt and then discuss that further.
What does it all look like?
In proper implementation, the group would play D and D biweekly and having the other meeting be discussion. During the D and D meetings, the therapist prepares an encounter or a situation for the group to deal with. This could be anywhere from dealing with a problematic individual to going clothing shopping. There’s also two ways this could be run, one uses primarily a D20 (20 sided die) which the clients roll to determine how well their character did and the other is more discussion based and involves the group coming to a conclusion on how the situation should be handled helping each other through all the steps.
In the other meetings what transpired during the encounters would be discussed in detail, along with why they chose to go about things a certain way/why their character chose a specific course of action. Much of this is done by recording the sessions either with video or audio so the therapist can highlight specific moments throughout the session to further discuss.
Final Thoughts
This project meant a lot to me and has had a lasting impact. Before working on this capstone, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. After diving into queer theory and gender studies for scholarly articles my viewpoint changed completely. I now know that I want to pursue a career as a gender therapist and utilize this model moving forward.
As it stands right now, I have completed only version 1 of this therapy model, and I want to do a lot more work on it. My goals for the future entail finding Gender Therapists who would be willing to work with me and utilize this model so I can work to improve it.
Contact Information and Mentioned Therapy Models—
izzyindo411@gmail.com — Reach out to me if you have any further questions or are at all interested in this project and I send you all of the information and pieces that I worked on for this capstone
Analytically Oriented Music Therapy — Eschen, J. T. (2002). Analytical music therapy: Introduction. Analytical music therapy, 17–33.
Psychodrama Therapy — Kedem-Tahar, E., & Felix-Kellermann, P. (1996). Psychodrama and drama therapy: A comparison. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 23(1), 27–36.
Narrative Therapy and Queer Theory — Nylund, D., & Temple, A. (2017). Queer informed narrative therapy: Radical approaches to counselling with transgender persons. Social Justice and Counseling, 159–170.
