During this highly interactive workshop, participants will discover how to:
1. Use character creation as a therapeutic window into a client's self-perception, values, strengths and sense of agency.
2. Explore a client's favourite superhero, fictional character or fandom to uncover themes that may otherwise be difficult to express directly.
3. Work therapeutically with origin stories, helping clients reframe difficult experiences as part of their story rather than allowing those experiences to define the whole story.
4. Intervene from within the story, introducing therapeutic skills through the language of a game, character or fictional world without disrupting engagement.
5. Create emotional and psychological safety through safety tools and "Session Zero" conversations that establish expectations, boundaries and readiness.
6. Confidently engage with unfamiliar games and fandoms, even when the client knows far more about their favourite world than you do.
Bio
Candice Hamilton-Miller, RP, MSc is a Registered Psychotherapist, clinical supervisor and author based in Ontario. She has worked with children, teenagers and families for roughly three decades, beginning in autism and developmental services and continuing through community mental health, private practice and supervision. Neurodivergence, sensory processing and executive functioning run through all of it. She supervises interns and qualifying psychotherapists, consults to experienced clinicians carrying complex cases, and writes clinical training books through CHM Publishing, including the Tiny Trainings for Therapists series. In these trainings, she covers comics, fandoms and superheroes, and highlights the intentionally eclectic approach to this work and the research that supports
it’s use.
Alexander Nicholls, RP, DTATI is a Registered Psychotherapist and art therapist, holding the Diploma of the Toronto Art Therapy Institute. He has facilitated tabletop role-playing games for over a decade, and trained as an art therapist during the pandemic, where he met the research on their therapeutic use and combined the two into an approach of his own. Over five years of practice he has run individual, group and family sessions with
Sheena's Place, serving clients with disordered eating, with York University Student Services accessibility groups, and with clients presenting with social anxiety, ASD and ADHD. He is a co-founder of Storied Therapy. He teaches therapeutic tabletop role-playing gaming, character creation and backstory work.
Kelly Medeiros-Thompson, RP, CYC is a Registered Psychotherapist and Child and Youth Care practitioner. She holds a diploma in child and youth work from George Brown College, a degree in child and youth care from Toronto. Metropolitan University, and a Master's in Counselling Psychology from Yorkville University. She works with children, young people and adults presenting with ADHD, anxiety and depression, drawing on solution-focused therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy and narrative therapy, and holds a Geek Therapist certification from Geek
Therapeutics. You will learn about video games in session: matching a game to a clinical goal, the therapist's stance as co-player or observer, and what gameplay shows you in real time, as well as how to manage challenging situations when gaming with clients for maximum therapeutic benefits.
