Grumble, grumble...

Passing through an alleyway two days ago, early in the morning, about a mile from home — while taking a morning walk — I found the scene shown in the image. It appeared to be a set of cards thrown over the back fence of the house not shown, laying strewn across the alley. Obviously, there's no telling who threw them; there's every reason to believe they weren't dropped, since the distribution is too wide for them to have fallen out of a pocket, and not wide enough to have been dropped from a car or even a bike. Can't say if the owner threw them over the fence, for that's what it looked like, or if perhaps someone exhausted with the cards threw them out despite the owner. I like to write the story that they're the owner's cards.

Why? Because these are self-help cards. I have a closer image, that I've included below. Reproducing the text of one of the cards, it reads,

"I'm unapologetic about what I desire and trust that what I focus on WILL GROW."

The other cards had like phrases. I think what fascinates me is the irony of the scene, whatever brought it about, as I'll explain.

First, of course, there is the conclusion that the cards were not working. That personal fealty or self-discovery cannot be obtained by buying a set of cards. The introductory card happens to be upright also, it's at the bottom left in the image. It reads, in part,

"Hi Miracle Worker! I'm so excited that you picked up The Universe Has Your Back cards. My hope is that this deck will help you so deepen your connection to the innermost part of yourself and in the universe. In that connection you will be guided to your true purpose to be love and spread love..."

Sorry, that's as much as I can bear.

Self-help is a blight. Not because people don't need the help, and not because such needful people are responsible for their own misery, but because weakness is such an opportunity for a certain kind of person who invokes a certain kind of falsity in order to prey upon the weak. And charge them money in the process. I find that arrangement very hard to bear... and not because I was once the victim, or even because I've never needed help. I've always been able, somehow, to find help from real people... not the sort of sly, shifty, sweetly dressed monsters that created and distributed this deck of cards.

There is irony in that these garbage cards have been hurled into an alley to become garbage, but I think the deeper reading is that the act of not simply throwing them into a garbage bin is evidence of selfishness and abuse against what would otherwise be a fairly clean alleyway. I live in a fairly nice part of town. The streets are clean, the alleys too... and while I've lived in parts that weren't so, this is only to say that whoever scattered these cards bears a selfishness that just might, possibly, be the reason why they've had to cling to such means to get self-help to begin with. Help begins with concern for others. Others are not being shown concern for by littering the ground thusly.

On some level, civilisation begins with, "I will not make my shit someone else's problem." Here, I mean the slur in both the colloquial and denotative manner. Humans evolved, unlike cows, not to shit where they live. If there is one darkness that reveals a public test of character is it that we should not make our issues someone else's problem.

Because someone will ask, no. I did not clean them up. Perhaps I should have. If it had been next to my property, I would have. But somehow, on some level, I felt these neighbours by this alleyway had the right to deal with the matter in their way. Some would disagree. It is hard to explain why I arrive there, so I won't try.

Why, then, address it here? On this blog, purportedly about D&D? I am so happy you asked, Gentle Reader. I think it is because of a tendency that is growing to turn every group activity into some kind of default therapy. I wanted to play hockey, baseball, soccer and football as a youth because I enjoyed those activities. My coaches made them about winning, which ruined organised sports for me. Nowadays the same sports are being ruined because "they are good for the kids."  Not good fun, but something they can learn from, that they can grow from, to help them cope better in later life... when ultimately they realise there's a hidden agenda behind everything they might have enjoyed for the sake of the activity itself.

Whenever we hear about someone playing D&D in school, it's never to educate: it's teaching children to negotiate, to get along, to act as a group, to express themselves... or some other justification that the children would learn to do themselves anyway, without the need of our slathering the pseudo-psychology on top like thousand island dressing on a birthday cake. D&D is a game that is enjoyed. It is not therapy.

There is something deeply hostile in making every pleasure justify itself by forcing it to be a developmental experience for the participants. Can D&D be therapeutic? Of course. So can virtually every human activity that we enjoy or excel at or simply love. But "therapy" as a function is not the same as something that is coincidentally restorative. Therapy requires a therapist; an interloper, who wedges themselves between the activity and the participant parasitically, because the opportunity exists. The therapist model (the cards name her "Gabrielle") is poison because its a scam. It says, I'm not here to help; I'm here to exploit.

Frankly, I'm sick of my game being exploited by people who don't, in fact, want to play it.

Fair enough, we can look at the title here, "Mastering Your Dragons: Using Tabletop Role-Playing Games in Therapy," merely as a physical tool, just as therapists have used sand, dolls, painting, theatre, journaling, walking, music, gardening, chess... even picking up trash along the side of a road. But then, why the branding inclusion? Why isn't this just "Using D&D as a tool in therapy?" Why is it "Mastering your Dragons," as if that's remotely what the fuck psychology is supposed to be doing. Why are these professionals acting as though they have a marketing department on staff?

It's a language of a TED talk, which did soooo much for the credibility of TED talks. It's media self-promotion mainstreaming on what looks like, for the moment, like a hot commodity. They want its language, its costumes, its metaphors and its cultural capital... until, of course, it has none of the last, whereupon it will be dropped for whatever zings the strings of the next therapeutic model. It disgusts me.

Tonight, I had a conversation with a former co-worker, with whom I haven't connected since 2008. Nice enough fellow, working as a teacher now, had a working model of the Alexis I was back then... but of course he wondered what I've been doing since thing, which is, mostly, among various jobs, this blog. As usual, there's always the difficulty in describing D&D to people who have no real idea of what it is other than words they've heard. I never encounter impoliteness, just a sort of confused, slightly wondering stance about how anyone could be this engaged with something that is, so far as they know, a kind of game-hobby thing. Because they don't know what to say, they just sort of skip over it, you know, to ordinary things. "Oh, you have a grandson now?" That kind of thing.

The last thing I need is for someone at some point in the future to ask, "Oh, isn't that a kind of therapy?"

Honestly, it seems like it's been one simplification after another: childish, satanic, nerdish, escapist, socially maladjusted... and soon, coming to a theatre near you, "Oh, I'd heard that's very good as a therapy... are you having success with that?"

I can't wait.

It's like I've retroactively bought "universe" cards 47 years ago.