<
https://mindsitenews.org/2025/09/10/minecraft-for-child-and-teen-therapy/>
"Family and child therapist Braulio Rivera has long worked with kids from ages
six to eighteen struggling with everything from bullying to depression. Before
the pandemic, he was able to create a strong bond with his young patients in
play therapy – they’d sprawl on the floor playing with Lego blocks and
figurines while telling him about what was going on in their lives.
This kind of play therapy was rewarding and successful. But in March 2020, the
Covid-19 pandemic lockdown was declared, and his in-person counseling work shut
down overnight.
“It was so jarring,“ recalls Rivera, a licensed professional counselor at
WellPower, Colorado’s largest provider of community mental health services. He
and other therapists at WellPower rushed to set up virtual sessions, but he
worried that he and his young patients would be unable to truly connect on
Zoom.
Indeed, Rivera was immediately struck by how much harder it was for his young
patients to open up on a screen, especially in group therapy. Like other
therapists across the country, he found that without an in-person connection,
many of his young clients become withdrawn, squirming in their seats, turning
off the webcam or muttering “everything’s fine” to questions about how things
were going. It was discouraging.
But not long afterwards, he was on a Zoom call with an 11-year-old client who
had sought solace in
Minecraft, a video game that allows players to explore
and build virtual three-D worlds. The boy invited him to a
Minecraft session
and soon began talking about how lonely he was. It was an epiphany, and Rivera
began developing a
Minecraft world for group therapy sessions within the
game.
The idea was an immediate hit.
Minecraft therapy quickly became enormously
popular with his patients and with other kids and teens in the clinic’s online
therapy program, Rivera says, with the young patients literally counting the
days until their next session."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-america-gun-violence-decline/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
