Learning to Walk in Other People’s Shoes

1Trying on other people’s shoes

The majority of that growing came from being able to put myself in the shoes of the personas I wanted to learn from. When I wanted to learn to cook I would watch Giada De Laurentiis and I would pretend to be in a cooking show. Working through the success and many many many failures of cooking without having any idea what I was doing. Similarly, when something on the computer or TV didn’t work I would change my mindset to that of my brother who loved to work on his cars. Like me, at the time he really didn’t know what he was doing, but man did he try a lot. And I definitely had no idea how to work a giant standing TV cabinet, but if I wanted to watch The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron on time I had to figure something out.

The moment that stands out the most to me though was seeing my neighbor, whose family was always around. I got to see the good, the bad, and the neutral experiences of having your family there normally. And that let me start putting myself in those shoes and seeing how I would react in those situations. That would prepare me for the next move to El Paso when I was in middle school having to interact with my family more often than before.

Once I moved, things were relatively more of the same. I lived in a much nicer area, better schools, parents still weren’t around often, but I started to see them at least every night around 8pm when they finished whatever they were up to. And I can go on and on about all these other experiences I had where I put myself in someone else’s shoes, but the point is if I didn’t have things I could place myself into, I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do any of those things.

2Taking it to the table

Being able to take that expression into theater work, D&D, general LARP and roleplay let me turn a lot of negative and painful experiences into meaningful ones. Which is why I want to pitch the idea, for those that haven’t tried it, to let your unconscious mind express itself in a form of roleplaying. And this isn’t to pitch our offerings (shoutout to Andrew and Devin, who run our TTRPG tables here at DFW YAS, y’all the best and everyone should check em out), but just in general, either with friends, solo experiences, or wherever you’d like.

When I say roleplay helped me, I really mean two things.

3What the research says

I am not the only one who thinks this either. Earlier this year a group of researchers published a study in Transcultural Psychiatry called Tabletop Role-Playing Games as Drama Therapy in the Wild. They did 54 interviews with gamers across North America and collected 149 surveys, and what they found was that players who built a more personal bond with their characters, treating them almost like a second version of themselves, showed real improvements in how they saw themselves. Two things made the biggest difference. One was how much the player could get absorbed into the world, and the other was how safe they felt with their group.

There is also a 2021 review called Let Your Clients Fight Dragons by Sören Henrich and Rachel Worthington that pulled together the research on D&D and mental health published up to 2020. They ended up with 13 studies covering 992 participants. Players were not any more depressed or more likely to break the law than people who did not play, and in one study it was actually the non-players who were more likely to say their lives felt meaningless. On the good side, players scored higher on creativity and on empathy, and the players who got the most absorbed in the game tended to be the most empathetic. One study even had students play six 4-hour sessions of D&D and found real changes in how they worked through moral problems compared to students who did not play. The authors are upfront that the research is still pretty thin and call their results promising but preliminary, which feels fair to me.

4Bleed, and why the table matters

There is a term in the roleplay world for what happens between you and your character, and it is called bleed. Sarah Lynne Bowman wrote about it for Nordic Larp back in 2015 and broke it into two directions. Bleed-in is when your real life feelings and relationships show up in your character, and bleed-out is when what your character goes through follows you home.

She is clear that bleed is not good or bad on its own. It can help you express things you normally hold back and even teach you skills you take back into real life, but it can also hit hard if nobody at the table is looking out for each other. That is why the group safety piece from that study matters so much, and why a lot of tables start with a session zero and use simple tools like lines and veils or an X-card, so anyone can say they are not okay with something and have it respected.

TTRPG Term definitions if you’re new

That part alone is good practice for everyday life. Learning to say what you are not okay with, and learning to notice when someone else is not okay, are skills a lot of us never really got to practice growing up.

5Another perspective

Do I think everything can be solved through a TTRPG campaign or session? No, of course not.

But I do passionately believe that everything can be solved by taking a moment to understand another perspective.

Because at the end of the day we all got where we are because of the things that happened in our lives. How our parents raised us, that moment we decided to do or not do something, and all the other decisions we have made. They create layers of choices, and the better understanding we have lets us make a more conscious decision tomorrow.