The Thinking, Feeling, Doing Game

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I remembered this game when I was posting in another thread just now.

I was maybe 6 or 7 and even then the game seemed SO stupid and SO condescending. I had this therapist who thought that this game was the best thing ever invented for helping children. If she had just freaking had even once single conversation with me and found out that my father was hitting me in anger, something better than my leaving therapy unfulfilled and destined for a life "in the system" might have happened. not that thay's why I resent the game, I'm just still angry looking back that I was, honestly, probably smart enough to have had pretty honest conversations like that. Even jsut explicitly teaching me social skills would have helped A LOT. It was a collosal watse of time and embarassing to play, and I remember.

Not that a. I think it would be a bad thing for all or even most kids or b. I know enough about children to qualify "a" or c. I ever, ever want to be a child therapist.

Did anyone who was in therapy have to play this game, and if so, did you absolutely DESPISE it like I did?

what exactly was the game like?

i never did well with most of the stuff therapists wanted me to do. eventually they had to learn to let me do things my way because i wasn't about to do it theirs LOL!! !

april

The coolest therapist I ever had (who was pretty Aspergery himself) would just talk to me about anything. Not even having to focus on "big" stuff. Just anything. Chatting even. And I loved it that one time he played the client and I got to be the therapist, hehehe. He was awesome.

Too bad I stopped seeing him. Only therapist I ever really liked because it never felt like therapy. (He was a "talk therapist" btw. Not a behavioral therapist.)

He was the 4th in a line of 7 therapists. Damn. I've spent about 13.5 years of my 24 in therapy... What a waste. "Family problems" they'd say.

If only people around me knew about Asperger's then.

If my parents sat down with me and explained the system instead of vaguely implying that getting good grades was important for my future i would have been so into it. Just around 4th grade explain to me, "Okay, listen kid, here's the deal. You go, learn a bunch of useless and semiuseful garbage, waste a whole bunch of time, and then it will be cheaper for us to send you to college. You need college to get a good paying career, which is like 200,000 dollars a year instead of a low paying job which is around 40,000 dollars a year. And trust us, you'll need it, for some reason your expenses WILL go up with your salary, it is a law of nature, i dunno. Everyone except school principals are clear on the idea that school before college is a royal waste of time, but because people like you - kids - are generally considered irresponsible and stupid you don't get any rights until you are 18 years old. At which point you can start taking classes which will actually affect your future. None of us like it, but we're victims of it together, so just try not to let on to the teachers you are aware of this, because they're victims of it too and they don't wanna hear it."

I would have been so into school...

Oh riiiiiiiight. Yeah, college graduates get $200K a year. Right. Umm, I think that's beyond what most people get even with a Ph.D., depending on the field. If you just go to college, no grad school, you get shi- for pay. If you go to get a master's you get crap for pay (which is slightly better.)

(chamoisee is in shock) I make less than 10K a year! And I have all these kids to support! Wow, I could live sooo well on that 'low paying' 40K a year...

Counselors- it could've been worse, Serissa! My counselor didn't play that game (I haven't heard of it). What she did do: tried to bribe me with small 'presents' (which were things like bubble bath that I didn't want that badly anyway) to tell her "secrets". The woman made me extremely uncomfortable, always a LOT more eye contact and touching and emotional crap than I wanted to put up with...and there was no way at all that I was going to tell her a real secret! I just told her silly things like where I hid my favorite stuffed animals... Man, just thinking about that woman makes me feel squirmy and violated... (shudder) And then there was the time that she made me eat baby food applesauce- and she fed it to me with a spoon!! ! That was very humiliating for a twelve year old....what in the hell was she thinking?!

My dad was also abusive at times, but there was no way I was going to volunteer that, because I'd already notcied that every time I told her something, she went and told it to my dad, therefore she was not to be trusted.

That b---h!! ! ((and ba-----, as well))

On a happier note, I'll be glad to make anything over 30K, though of course the higher the better. ((It won't go a lot over though in my chosen field considering I want to start my career at a master's level and not a phd or psyd))

200,000 a year with a college degree. Not in this economy. The average salary for someone with a bachelors is 50,000. those who earn 200 grand are an exception, not the rule. Sadly few people in this world realize that and assume they will make big bucks after college.

I think Nomaken was just exaggerating a bit. You don't have to be 100% accurate in all of your posts.

On therapists: the only game I remember doing with my therapist was to look at black and white photos on the ground and tell her how they made me feel. It was the hardest thing for me to do, but I had no idea about AS back then.

Either that or lives in an area with a high cost of living... salaries are higher but prices are also higher. The point has been made and it seems like in a particularly expensive area, those figures might be close to riht.

Around here, you get something like 20k for a semi-skilled job, and around 30-70k for a college degree. That's entry-level, though, so you could go higher than that eventually.

Therapists shouldn't treat kids if they aren't prepared to be respectful. Some kids will work things through playing games just fine; others would like to be told straight out what's going on and how to deal with it. I'd be one of the latter sort, too...

Of course, having it known that your father tended to be violent isn't always a solution. My first therapist, when I was nine, got that out of me about my late stepfather, and somehow assumed that the combination of my telling him (I didn't know it was important; I thought all parents did that) and getting comfortable with therapy in general meant that I was fine. Looking back on it, all the symptoms of a rather obvious case of Asperger's were there--but it had yet to be described in the official diagnostic manual at the time, and I guess he couldn't be bothered to actually obtain a broad spectrum of knowledge on children's brains. I always felt, when I was a child, that people thought my mind must be awfully simple.

It's cute when a child tells you something you already know but don't expect him to know; it's threatening when he tells you something you haven't learned yet. Threatening, that is, unless you respect him.

I guess. Hard to notice things like that. But what can I say, I have AS.

I too would like to know what this game is.

It's a board game, although it's actually called Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game. This is what it looks like: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/29886. I played it when I saw a therapist in my early teens. On the game board, there are spaces that represent actions indicated in the game name. When you land on a space, you pick a corresponding card, and follow its instructions: share something about you or your past (talking), describe how you feel or would feel about something (feeling), or do a simple action, such as physically pat yourself on the back (doing). Then it's the next person's turn.

Like Serissa, I also thought the game was patronizing, and some of the cards were downright bizarre. For instance, one doing card had "kiss someone in the room" written on it. (I ended up kissing the back of my hand.) For the other two types of cards, I knew how to outsmart the game and the therapist. I prepared some "sacrificial topics", which were mildly uncomfortable topics I was willing to discuss, so that wouldn't have to get into very sensitive stuff or share private secrets. In other words, I talked about feeling very anxious about tests in school, to avoid talking about the punishments my parents gave me for bad grades. I simply saw no use: she'd simply insist on me discussing how I feel about it, and I didn't think she could stop my parents' actions that are causing the anxiety, and if she told them, I'd just get punished more. So why bother? She seemed OK with me sharing "sacrificial topics" (she didn't know they were sacrificial), so in end, she was happy, and I was happy.

I actually liked playing that game, but looking back, I think that was because I got more enjoyment out of outsmarting the system designed to get me to share my feelings, instead of actually sharing my feelings (probably without even realizing it at the time). In the end, the Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game can be really fun, if you know how to play it .

I think that's the game they had me play once...I was in 9th grade at the time, so it seemed a bit silly and childish to me...that and I guess I wasn't very good at it. One card told me to act like I was angry, so I went "Um...grr?"

This game sounds like something my family would not be very good at all: they'd just see it as mindless frivolity not worth bothering with.

We do repress emotions etc, because we can't see what would be gained by sharing them. What's in the past is in the past, we say.

Whenever we get sad we crack jokes, do something enjoyable, go for nice scenic walks and do practical advice that's how we cope with it.

I wouldn't mind having a go at the game myself and would probably okay with some of the sharing feelings stuff because I've been around people (not in my family) who do actually share their feelings explicitly, but my family tend to frown on feelings games like this because it doesn't get any useful jobs gone and isn't intellectually stimulating or educational like chess, cards, mahjong, chinese chequers, Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit.

Reminds me of the Ungame (link). Except the Ungame is for general use, not just therapy.