What is Therapy Actually?

Researching the therapeutic process in advance of attending a session, most of what I found was to me unbearably vague - as was my therapist. They talk about integrating personalities and getting in touch with your feelings. They talk about how they won't give you the answers, the answers come from you. They talk about a moment of realisation and personality change. They talk about a lot of things, but the total message to me was something like a magician explaining that what you just saw was a trick. He'll show you this incredible outcome, you ask how he did it, and he says 'Oh, it wasn't really magic, there was a trick to it' then refuses to tell you the trick. You're left knowing that this person is pulling the wool over your eyes, and wondering what advantage it is to them to do so. Why not just talk straight?

I'm the guy that wants to know what the trick was, and I'm going to do my best to describe my experiences directly. This is no parlour trick (though some tricks are employed in the process).

Irrational Investigator Demo Released!

I stopped development on the Irrational series some years ago, because I got sick of designing logic puzzles. However, I was very proud of the demo we put together for Investigator. It moves the gameplay of Redux into a more graphically and world-driven environment, and massively polished the accessibility. I genuinely think it's worth a play.

Thanks again to my contributors, Mikko Tarmia, Martin Camargo and Chris Burrows.

It's my hope over the coming years or so that I can turn out some new indie games of my own. I currently have a functioning demo of a school management sim, and I'll keep you posted as things develop.

It's here if you fancy playing Investigator it's at: https://t.co/WyG4Fv9GDW

On Masculinity & Refusing to Seek Help

This is the second part of an ongoing series describing my experiences with learning about psychology and going into therapy. Here I talk a bit about how old ideas around masculinity can prevent men from seeking help.

Asking for help was fundamentally incompatible with the identity I had drawn up for myself

I'm not going to go into detail about my childhood (but yes, I'm afraid a lot of it does come down to your relationship with your parents, school and peers), but I'm going to say that it was a fairly traditional masculine environment, by which I mean a culture which explicitly embraces the moral philosophy I highlighted in the previous post as problematic. A culture which denies the validity of feelings and the fundamental equality of people. A culture where the moral ideal is the strong, competitive, stoic male; and the inverse is the weak, the emotional. This dichotomy sets up a further moral ideal that encompasses the other two: the ideal of winning over the world.