Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg) and Speaker 2 (Vanessa Gill)
Episode 47: Social Learning, Game Theory, & Autistic Girls
[Introductory note]
Hey! I’s Meg, and I am so excited to tell you about our upcoming live course, ‘A Crash Course in Neurodiversity-Affirming Goal Writing’. This course is two and a half hours and it’s taught by autistic speech language pathologist, Rachel Dorsey. This is actually a short version of her full course, ‘Goal Writing for Autistic Students’, and it’s taught live with participatory case studies. Rachel is an amazing instructor, and you’ll walk away from this training with the skills, confidence, resources, and concrete process to support you in writing neurodiversity-affirming, strengths-based goals for your clients every single time. Like all Learn, Play, Thrive courses, this one will be registered for ASHA and AOTA CEU’s, and it will be jam-packed with actual strategies you can use in your real work. Check it out and get the details at learnplaythrive.com/crashcourse. Hope to see you there.
[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum Podcast. A place where we explore research, amplify autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life, and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Proctor from learnplaythrive.com.
Meg:
Before we get started, a quick note on language. On this podcast, you’ll hear me and many of my guests use identity-affirming language. That means we say ‘autistic person’ rather than ‘person with autism’. What we’re hearing from the majority of autistic adults is that autism is a part of their identity that they don’t need to be separated from. Autism is not a disease, it’s a different way of thinking and learning. Join me in embracing the word ‘autistic’ to help reduce the stigma.
Welcome to Episode 47 with Vanessa Castañeda Gil. Vanessa is autistic and the founder of Social Cipher, which is so cool. It is a game-based social emotional learning platform. Okay, if you have been listening to the podcast for a while, you may remember that you’ve heard us talk about a different game-based neurodiversity-affirming social emotional learning platform on Episode 39 of the podcast. That platform was called Bridges, and yes, this is another one. There are two. It is amazing. And I’m so excited that these exist that I just want to keep bringing them on to your radars. Because the truth is, I know that trying to change the work we do is really hard and that therapists are stressed. We know we should move away from teaching social skills, but it can be really hard to know exactly how to do that. And these are autistic-led businesses that are really doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us. So, you can check out Social Cipher at socialciphergame.com. Cipher is C-I-P-H-E-R; I’ll put a link in the show notes as well at learnplaythrive.com/podcast. If you do decide that you want to purchase it to use in your work or with your child, you can use coupon code ‘LPT5’ — like Learn, Play, Thrive — for 15% off; that’s ‘LPT15’.
Okay, we’ll circle back around and talk more about what Social Cipher actually does and how they do it during the episode. But first, I want to tell you about Vanessa. Vanessa’s mission is to unite her passions for art and stories in innovative ways that help people. Learning from her experience growing up autistic, she founded Social Cipher, which, like we said, is a game-based social emotional learning platform for neurodiverse youth and the professionals who work with them. Her team is 40% neurodivergent and they recently released their game series called Ava, a space pirate adventure that explores social challenges through the eyes of an autistic protagonist.
Vanessa and her team have earned all kinds of recognition. Forbes 30 Under 30 — Vanessa is under 30 — AT&T Aspire Fellows, Facebook Global Gaming Citizens. But I will tell you, this episode is not a 30-minute sales pitch for Social Cipher. In this conversation, we explore Vanessa’s own story as an autistic woman and the implications of this for other girls and women who are autistic. We dive into game-based learning and narrative-based learning and how this is so different and so much more impactful than a lot of what we are typically doing in therapy. We also really explore the deep differences between neurodiversity-affirming social emotional learning, and the typical social skills model. I’ve been having these conversations for years now and I walked away from my talk with Vanessa with even more clarity on what neurodiversity-affirming social emotional learning truly looks like. Here’s the interview.
Hi, Vanessa! Welcome to the podcast.
Vanessa:
Hi, Meg. Super good to be here.
Meg:
Yeah, it’s great to have you. I want to start with your own neurodiversity story. What was your own journey like, learning about yourself and discovering that you were autistic?
Vanessa:
Yeah. So, that for me all starts when I was 14, that’s the age that I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. And I had a really difficult time with it, actually. We didn’t really have the resources to really understand what this actually was. And so, for me, all I really knew at the time about being autistic was a lot of the TV shows that were coming out with all of the white, male, robotic savants. And I was like, okay, well, I guess this is who I’m supposed to be, because this is the representation that I have.
And so, I just decided I would become that. In a way, I felt like I was told that I just could not connect with people due to a lot of the stereotypes and so, I decided, you know, why bother? I’m just not even going to try because I don’t want to face that failure, because I am 14. And so, I just kind of tried to shut myself off to all of the emotional connections in fear of getting hurt. And as you would predict, that did not turn out well. And I went through a lot of mental health issues, depression, and anxiety, and low self-esteem for a lot of years. I hid my diagnosis for over six years from everyone except my family. And yeah, that’s really how it began, which is really rough.
Meg:
That is really rough. And it really highlights the harm that we do in our gross misunderstanding of autism, right. This misconception; one, that it only looks one way, and two, all of our neurotypical’s really poor understanding of what autistic social connection looks like. And so, it’s interesting to hear your story about how you internalized that stereotype and it negatively impacted your connection with other people and your sense of yourself. And that’s just — it’s just so unnecessary for that to play out. What’s the lesson here about girls and women and autism?
Vanessa:
Yeah, I mean, I think the big lesson here — I mean, look, I didn’t meet another autistic woman until I was 20-years-old. I had known I was autistic for over six years at that point. And, you know, during those six years, I really couldn’t use that. And I — like, I had Temple Grandin, and that was my one. And I learned about Temple Grandin maybe when I was around 18. And so, but that was also just one, you know, one idea or one form of what autism could look like in women. And I had no idea about the fact that, you know, most of these diagnostic skills, most of the research that we had at the time, was on autistic males, and that it manifested so differently in girls and women. And so, I just kind of kept going along with that.
But I think that the real story here, the real thing that needs to be highlighted is that there just needs to be far more representation, far more variety, in terms of autistic women. And especially, I also think that as an autistic Latina, like, that was also a huge thing for me, was that there are all of these cultural things that take hold. And just so much intersectionality involved here that wasn’t ever known or apparent to me over all those years. So, I think that the representation is important. The fact that just more neurodivergent individuals need to be — I mean, I think it’s been getting a lot better. But at that time, more neurodivergent individuals needed to be represented and needed to be talking about this. Like, all of the information that I got about autism was from neurotypical folks, and I never knew anyone over the years who got it and who had experienced that.
Meg:
One of the answers I most often get when I ask people, like, “What should we be telling parents of newly diagnosed kids?” And it’s often exactly what you’re saying. Connect them to other autistic people, autistic kids, autistic adults who might share their experience or just show this range of what autistic people look like and what their experiences are, as opposed to just hammering in this sort of flat medical idea of autism that’s harmful and people aren’t connecting with. So, I love what you’re saying about finding autistic people who are going to represent that in intersectional, in real, in complex, in dynamic, in autistic ways for our newly diagnosed families or not so newly diagnosed folks, wherever they are.
Vanessa:
Right. I think that’s super important. And oh, just to add, like, I think that, on top of that, I think it’s really important to talk about the cha — like, be really open about the challenges that are going to be faced in the future. But it’s not so much in a sheltering way. Like, it’s not so much, “You’re gonna face all these challenges, these are all the things you’re going to have a difficulty with. Let us protect you,” and more about like, “Yes, these are the ways the things that you might have difficulties with. Let’s try to start now and figure out strategies to help you advocate for yourself and help yourself thrive,” for folks that maybe won’t understand. How are you going to have the language to be able to communicate what you need, because unfortunately, this society isn’t really built for us, and you need to start learning that language early on.
Meg:
I love that balance. So, it’s not, “Oh, autism is a strength and a superpower,” and it’s not, “Oh, autism is a devastating disability.” It’s, autism is a learning style and neuro type, and it has its strengths, and people have their individual strengths, and there’s going to be challenges, and what tools do you need to start the self-advocacy process now so that you can be successful in that throughout your life. And when we’ve talked about self-advocacy on the podcast before, it always starts with knowing you’re autistic, knowing yourself, knowing your strengths, and knowing what kinds of supports you need to be successful. And I want to ask you how that ties in to your learning about yourself as an autistic person. And moving from what you described as that being a really complicated and negative part of your identity for those first years to where you are today. How did your relationship to yourself as an autistic person change?
Vanessa:
Yeah, so, honestly, I think that it was building Social Cipher. You’re probably going to — we’re going to talk about this later. But it really was building Social Cipher that helped me so much. And it was because I was finally looking at myself. And I had to really dig deep into my past self, who, honestly, at the time, I hated, or I resented, or I was just angry at her. Like, I, for the longest time, just kept getting down on myself because I couldn’t detect that kids were bullying me. And I was mad, because after the fact when people told me that I was actually being bullied, and I was just discovering all of these things that just flew right over my head, and I would blame myself for it. And I would blame being autistic for it all the time. And that was the enemy for me for so long.
But building Social Cipher, and writing the story of Ava, our main character, and writing who she was going to be, and how this character was going to think about herself and reflect on all the young people playing, I was like, I don’t want Ava to hate any part of herself in the way that I had been treating myself that whole time. And I realized that that positive autistic representation wasn’t something that just had to reflect in our game for all of these other kids. It was something that I was going to have to live by, and I was going to have to start to do first. And so, I started realizing that, oh, hey, yes, this world isn’t built for me. It wasn’t so much my fault. It wasn’t that I — I kept calling myself broken for so long. And I was like, I’m not broken. I just, I’m just in a place where I learn very differently from folks and I process things differently. And it doesn’t mean that I have to try to keep conforming and fitting myself into this mold in order to be happy with myself. It’s that I have to kind of find my own shape and figure out who I am and just stand proud in that in order for other kids to be able to do that in the future, too. And so, it was really that. It was kind of a transformation that had to happen in order for this company that I was so passionate about to work. I had to change myself first, and that happened for the better.
Meg:
I love that process. I never would have imagined that, that you were doing this work yourself as you were developing In Social Cipher. And I want to circle back around in a few minutes to what you’re describing, this narrative-based learning. You’re describing how you rewrote your own story, as you were writing your character story, and I want to circle back to that. But let’s start at the beginning and talk about Social Cipher. How did this project come about?
Vanessa:
Yeah. So, this project, all of this came about, I think, in college, actually. So, as I was saying, with my process, so I had hidden my diagnosis for over six years. And when I got to college, I found folks who were, you know, as weird, and passionate, and ambitious, and excited as I was. And that was so freeing. Like, I was finally able — I have had a special interest in neuroscience for ages. And I went into neuroscience research. I did that for four years; I published. And originally I did that because I really wanted to figure out my own brain in a way that made sense to me and through STEM. For me, it was through STEM. And it was through understanding all these processes and these systems. And so, I published my first paper, and I looked back at just how much of my confidence had grown and how I had finally sort of found my people that accepted me for who I was, and I loved who they were. And I kind of put two and two together, and I was like, wait a second. Maybe I can put my personal experience and my research experience together to help other young people just feel better and not have to, you know, be able — at first, honestly, it was about trying to get them to — and like, I hate to say this, but it’s true. Like, at first it was about trying to fix my former self, as I was kind of saying before, and it was about trying to help kids conform so that they wouldn’t have to go through the pain that I went through.
I later realized that that was the wrong way to do it and it’s about, you know, finding that self-advocacy language, finding the things that you love about yourself and realizing the nuanced greatness and challenge of being a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world. But yeah, it really all started because of putting all those things together. And I had these wonderful friends, and they were the first people I told about my condition after six years of hiding it. And they became my co-founders. And we started, you know, all these pitch competitions, we ended up winning them. Right after graduation, I went to live in D.C. in a mansion with all these other social entrepreneurs for a couple months, and they paid me to work full-time. And ever since then, it’s, you know, we haven’t really gotten back. And today, we are a game-based social emotional learning platform for neurodiverse youth and the professionals who work with them. So, we build space pirate adventure video games that help youth understand themselves and those around them. And then, we build software and curriculum that helps professionals like counsellors, teachers, therapists, better understand their youth social emotional well being. So, that’s what we do.
Meg:
I love the story, and I love that it ends with space pirate adventure video games.
Vanessa:
Oh, yeah.
Meg:
That’s a end point. And I just want to name that yes, it is hard to talk about the ways that we have internalized and practiced ableism. And I don’t have the experience of being an autistic person going through that process, but I love hearing you name that because a lot of the podcast listeners are doing that work. And we need to be able to look at it straight on, right, and say like, “Yeah, I have been teaching from a really ableist perspective. And now I’m learning something new. So, I’m going to try something different,” and name it again, and again, and again. Because I had already been teaching somewhat neurodiversity-affirming trainings through Learn, Play, Thrive when Rachel Dorsey, who’s an autistic SLP, called me on ‘teaching social skills’ quote, ‘to help people meet their own social goals’, which that was my like back door end. And I was like, well, I’m going to teach them the neurotypical expectations here, because it’s going to help them meet their own goals. And she was like, “Yeah, and then what? What is the long-term impact of that?” And I needed to hear that, and revisit that, right. So, I appreciate you naming that that was part of your process, because it’s part of all of our processes.
Vanessa:
Right.
Meg:
So, let’s circle back to your game. Why do you teach through games? What’s the benefit of that?
Vanessa:
Yeah. So, we found in certain studies that neurodivergent youth are actually two times more likely to be gamers. And we suspect that’s because of a couple reasons. I really think that these objective goals and these levels, they align really well with autistic traits. They just give so much structure. I also think that overall, games are this place where you can be whoever you want to be. You can practice and understand human interactions or alien interactions without this fear of judgement or this fear of rejection, right? Like, you can just explore this world, do what you want to do, and do it without the scariness of being rejected or judged in the real world. And I think that has a lot of power. And along with that, I think unlike video type media, or books, you are truly — you are the character. You are in this and you are actually interacting with this rich world around you. And I think that’s super important.
Meg:
Can you sort of describe the experience of going through one of your games so we can picture it as you’re talking about it? What is that like?
Vanessa:
Yeah, totally. So, our game series, Ava, it follows the adventures of an autistic star mapper. So, she’s a 12-year-old star mapper. And essentially, she’s going through this world to really find community, battle her own self-doubt, and recruit or not recruit a bunch of space pirates. So, essentially, the gameplay is a lot like Super Mario Brothers. So, we call it 2D platforming, so you’re jumping around, using a grappling hook, you’re going around these different space pirate worlds. And what you’re doing is you’re deciding whether or not to recruit all these different space pirates around you. And we have designed the space pirates to be all along this range of like, how quote-unquote ‘worthy’ or ‘good’ for your team they might be. So, it’s all about really identifying like, is this space pirate respectful? Are they a good friend to you? Are they good at what they do? Are you all going to get along?
And one thing that we do is we have this dialogue system throughout it. And each dialogue choice a player makes is going to lead to a totally different outcome. We also give choices to these players in terms of who they want to and don’t want to recruit. So, sometimes there will be space pirates that are super friendly and super respectful. And we’ll still have students that are like, “Nah. No, there’s something off, I don’t like that.” And we give them that choice. Like, we’re not going to push you into making the right or wrong choice. We don’t believe in that. It’s about really learning from the choices that you’re naturally going to make and having super interesting discussions about why that is. And by having a professional, like a teacher, counsellor, therapist, next to you going through the curriculum and talking about these, all of these different scenarios that are going on, you’re getting a really good understanding of how this kid would be behave in real life and sort of the motives behind their choices.
So, if I can share a story, for example, we have one really good example was back when we were doing our pilots. So, we had this wonderful counsellor named Cindy, and she was working with a young woman with ADHD. And so, in this particular quest that they were doing, Ava is trying to recruit this space pirate and Zeke. He looks like a really cool guy, he looks kind of like an e-boy. He has purple hair, and he has a really — it seems like he has a really impressive reputation, right? And so, Ava’s trying to go, you know, scope him out, see if he’s gonna be a good fit. And what was happening was that this player just kept appealing to Zeke. The problem was that Zeke is designed to be one of those people that’s like super popular and cool, but is actually kind of low key disrespectful. And so, we designed it so that, you know, Zeke will keep giving you chances to just be like, hey, wait a minute, maybe this guy isn’t actually as cool as he seems. Maybe he’s actually trying to take advantage of my kindness.
And so, what we were seeing was that this player just continued to try to appeal to him, no matter how disrespectful he was being. And Cindy was so concerned about this that she actually pulled in the parents and they all had a meeting. And she was like, I have been working with this client for three, four years. And I never knew that she had these issues with identifying trustworthy people, with being able to advocate and stand up for herself. And so, they actually made an action plan to be able to kind of combat this as time goes on. And with the neurodivergent girls and young women, especially, it’s so important to educate them about, this to educate them about advocating and standing up for themselves because it is so easy to be manipulated, to be taken advantage of. And so, without playing through this game and this episode, I don’t know when they would have found that out. And so, it’s things like that that are just super important that keep us going with this.
Meg:
So, in typical social skills quote-unquote ‘training’, we’re often really reinforcing people pleasing, and masking, and it just couldn’t be more different from what you’re describing. That we’re not teaching people, ignore your gut, ignore your needs, ignore your internal experiences, and please act in a way that makes other people more comfortable. You’re saying that your goals are to help people learn about themselves, their preferences, how their choices play out, to hone their internal judgement about people, and to let that springboard conversations with adults in their lives that can help them build on skills that will protect them and help them nurture the right relationships. And you said ‘battle self-doubt’. These are completely different goals that you’re talking about here with social and emotional learning than what we usually do that’s so focused on external behaviors — act regulated, act predictable. And you’re saying, learn yourself, and build on your skills that help you know and love yourself, and be safe and valued in your relationships in your life.
Vanessa:
Right. That’s precisely it. And I know that that is the right way, because I spent so many years doing it in that external way, right. And I think that’s what, honestly, that masking is what led to my own self-hatred for so long. Because I wanted so badly to be this like, predictable quote-unquote ‘normal’, just like, completely expected person. I thought that that was the way that I could get through and be successful. And the fact that I just could not or that it would burn me out completely to even try to do that, and I couldn’t wrap my head around, was what made me have so much just resentment towards myself. Because I was just like, “Why can’t I do this? It must be because of my autism.” And I realized that it was because of that. And had I had these tools, had I had to Ava, to realize that no, there are so many internal things that you’re ignoring that could truly build you up from the inside, could truly help you grow and be successful in your own way, that would have saved me six years of my life. And I want to do that for others, too.
Meg:
I often get emails from people that are like, what’s the research? What’s the evidence? Can you send me the research on behavioral approaches and social skills training being damaging? And the research that’s out there isn’t robust, but it all says that teaching masking harms autistic people’s mental health and raises the risk of depression, PTSD, suicidality. We don’t even need that research because you’re seeing it, everybody’s seeing it. And it stands to reason with anything we know about development of self, right. If you’re taught to be inauthentic, there’s no way you’re going to feel connected and joyful in your life.
Vanessa:
Precisely.
Meg:
How else is what you’re doing at its core just really different from traditional social skills models?
Vanessa:
Yeah. So, what we have seen in our research of the rest of the market is that, unfortunately, there are so many games or electronic products, digital products out there that are kind of chocolate-covered broccoli. So yes, they may have that evidence base, they may have research backing from certain frameworks. But do they engage kids? No. They are something where there is a clear educational framework, and then there are some graphics, and some basic gameplay kind of slapped on top. There’s nothing that keeps kids engaged. There’s nothing that keeps them immersed and really motivates them to actually want to keep learning and want to apply this to your life. There’s nothing that answers the question of, “Why is this actually important to me? How is this actually going to help me grow?” And as you were saying, a lot of them are so focused as well on that external social skills building, and it’s scripting. And it’s trying to just constantly reach this ever-rising bar of what it is to be like perfectly normal, and no one can reach that. No one will. And it is — there should be so much more of a celebration of difference that is going on out here especially for these different serotypes.
And I think, for us, we decided instead of going this — instead of going this more didactic skill-and-srill, you must learn this or stay this amount of feet away or form this eye contact, we instead went for story and character-based learning. So, for us, with narrative-based learning, the reason we figured this out was because in the very beginning, I was like, okay, so the way we’re going to do this game is we’re going to divide everything into different emotional lands. And there’s going to be a Sad Land, and a Happy Land. But that is not how things work. That is not how real life goes. Social interactions are such a complex and tangled web when you have your own thoughts, what you think the other person is thinking, what the context is. You can’t just sort of break things down into different emotions and different facial expressions and expect people to be able to apply that in the complex nuances of real life. The only thing that you can control and that you can understand is yourself and how other people are impacting you, and how you are impacting others.
And so, we decided on changing that, because I realized that looking back, the real things that stuck with me and my learning throughout the years, it was never acronyms, or frameworks, or rules. It was the stories that really stuck with me. It was the stories of characters who I could see myself in in some way, and seeing their redemption, seeing their interactions, hearing, I mean, even like hearing the music around the times that they were triumphant, or the times that they failed, like, all of that is what stuck in my mind and is what helped me learn. And so, it was like, why are we trying to break down and categorize the way we interact with people? That doesn’t make sense.
And so, doing it through stories was just so much more of a natural way to do it. It’s something that people can relate to at any points in their lives. It’s something that you can take pieces out of, and take away with you even after the game ends, or even after your session is over. And so, we really wanted to bring that in, and just also the lack of autistic women representation, the lack of even like seeing in front of you, someone that thinks like you in some way. We really wanted to actually bring that in. So, stories are important.
Meg:
I love this story-based learning. And I want to name that it would be really easy for people listening to go, “Oh, I do this. I use social stories,” right, which that’s a very two-dimensional surface level, and often problematic. The way they’re used in practice is we’re still teaching deficits-driven, masking, discrete skills; we’re just using a story that’s only loosely a story most of the time to try and give a set of rules. And that’s not how social stories were intended to be used. But what you’re describing also isn’t how they were ever intended to be used. You’re describing something that’s radically different from the ways that OT’s and speech language pathologists, and teachers are used to using stories in our work. We’re doing the same old thing, we’re just doing it with stories, and you’re really describing something different in this narrative-based learning.
Vanessa:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, kids and youth, I mean, all of us are interested in certain movies, and games, and TV shows, because there’s something in those characters, there’s something in that story that resonates deeply with you and that you can pull out at any time to kind of get through hardships, or to realize that you’re not alone, right. And it’s that depth, it’s that nuance, it’s those characters, and the fact that, you know, it’s not only you out here. That really is what’s gonna get you through, and really is what’s going to make you passionate, and what’s going to make kids really gravitate towards this kind of thing.
Meg:
I love this. There was a recent podcast episode with Bridges Learning System. And I love the things that you do the same and the things that you do differently, right. You’re very different game-based social emotional learning programs, and the world needs them both. And they’re both interesting, and story-based, and aesthetically beautiful, and have all of these qualities of music and art, not just this flat two-dimensional quote-unquote ‘story’. So, it’s fun to see this start to just pop up as an alternative to the boring and problematic things that we’ve been doing. Because most of us, Vanessa, are not creative enough to come up with what you have done here with your team. And we don’t have to be. We just have to know it when we see it, right, and find those resources, and help our clients access them. So, I want to ask you a little bit more about the content. You gave the example of deciding what’s my internal sense of this person who I’m meeting and how does that play out, do I want to recruit them on my team. What some of the other content that people are learning or experiencing through your games?
Vanessa:
Yeah. So, with our content, we’re always putting neurodivergent folks first. So, I mean, our team is 40% — actually, probably more than 40% now, because we brought some new neurodivergent folks on — but 40% neurodivergent. And that’s super important to us, because I believe that you need to have neurodivergent folks on your team if you’re building a product for the neurodiversity community. And so, along with that, every time that we’re building a new episode, we have, you know, we have an awesome autistic licensed psychologist on board, we have therapists on board who are also neurodivergent. But what’s really important, too, is just constantly listening to neurodivergent youth and the professionals who work with them.
So, for each of our episodes, right, we’re going out and we’re interviewing hundreds of people, and we’re like, “What is the most difficult thing to teach?” and for neurodiverse, adults or youth, we’re like, “What’s the hardest thing to learn? What do you wish you had more resources to learn when you were younger?” And for us, that first one was trust. It was, yeah, that basic building block of, “How can I build trust with someone? How do I know if someone is trustworthy? What does trust mean to me?” right. And so, that was our first episode. And each pirate you recruit, each quest you do within, has different deeper sort of sub-themes exploring that concept of trust. And so, that was our first episode.
Our second episode is about coping with change and trying new things. That was the second most popular thing that people needed. And so, it’s about, yeah, what are the right coping strategies for me to better understand how to navigate through all these changes in this world. And in this episode, actually, Ava is stuck in this world where everything is constantly changing. And it’s kind of this metaphor for how everything is working out. And she really just has to figure out what’s going to work with her and when to keep going, when to walk away, and just take a break and regroup and figure it out. And we thought that those were really important.
Meg:
I love that. And it sounds like the common thread remains. She’s identifying her needs, her coping skills, what works for her, what doesn’t, how she can ask for what she needs, or when she needs to step away, without all of the shaming and asking her to change or be different.
Vanessa:
Right.
Meg:
So, for folks listening, a lot of us are OT’s or SLP’s. Is there a way that we can incorporate learning through narratives and games into our work?
Vanessa:
Yeah, 100%. I would say the first thing to do is ask your clients what they’re into. Like, what are their favorite TV shows? What are their favorite movies? Who are their favorite characters, books, stories, all of that. And just go and research. Go watch Doctor Who if that’s what they love, and figure out that the doctor is this quirky, super good-hearted person that is just exploring the world; is this chaotic, good person that just, you know, wants to help. And seeing how does that relate to my kid? Why does my client absolutely love this character? Why do they have like, you know, why do they have posters of this character on their wall?
And I think getting insight into what their favorite characters and stories are, are really going to help you just understand their motivations, what they’re passionate about, and yeah, maybe what they feel is still missing from them, or what they feel they need to get better at or work on. And I think that is really one of the best ways is just figuring out who inspires them, and what stories inspire them, and really understanding why. And bringing that into practice, right. Like, I’ve heard amazing stories of how counsellors and therapists have been so insanely creative. Like, we’ve been so inspired, by the ways that bill — I mean, we’ve had folks who have told us about calming down and meditation by using VR Tetris, like, we have had people who have played card games or video games with their kids to better understand cooperation and teamwork, or have used D&D, which is getting super popular just to help folks exercise their creativity, and play all these fantastical characters, and just try out different things with other people in a safe and fun environment.
So, there are a lot of ways you can incorporate narrative, but I would start by just geeking out with your clients and letting them tell you all about what gets them waking up in the morning.
Meg:
What a fun answer. I love — you were just smiling really big when you were describing it, too, and from a therapist’s perspective that is so much more fun and authentic to deeply learn about what they’re interested in, and geek out on it with them, to learn about them, than to, I don’t know, maybe superficially using an interest to teach another problematic goal, right. Really starting by being curious and joining in as much as we can with what they love, to explore and learn together with them. That’s such a nice shift.
Vanessa:
Right.
Meg:
If people listening today have one big takeaway from our talk, what do you hope that would be?
Vanessa:
I think that the biggest point that I usually talk about is like, listen to neurodivergent people. And if you have, you know, neurodiverse clients, make sure that that representation is present somewhere in their lives. They need some sort of model of what that looks and feels like and what the possibilities and the challenges are of being neurodivergent. I think that representation is so necessary to find early on. I also think that it’s so important to just really pay attention to what they need and want, and providing this judgement-free space for them, where they can feel free to advocate for themselves. And I also think that building on the language that they can start speaking to explain how they’re feeling, how they’re thinking, how they’re processing is so important to start early on.
Meg:
Thank you, Vanessa. Tell us where we can find you online, what you have to offer, and what you’re working on now.
Vanessa:
Sure. So, we are currently in over 30 schools and therapy centers right now. And we sell our game series and our platform. So, we have these three components. We have curriculum, our game series, Ava, and our companion application. And you can actually go to socialciphergame.com, and that’s ‘Cipher’ with an ‘I’, to find our platform we sell to teachers, counsellors, therapists, and you can come and check us out. That is one thing you can do. You can also sign up for any clients to play test with us because we do always play tests with hundreds of neurodivergent youth and check out our blog as well, which is at socialciphergame.com/blog. But that’s really where you can find us. And we’re on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as well as @SocialCipher.
Meg:
And what are the ages or the sort of criteria of who Social Cipher is a good fit for?
Vanessa:
Yeah, so Social Cipher is a good fit for youth ages 10 to 15. So, middle school, high school age. We’ve seen people that have played younger and older. If you’re not sure, you can always schedule a demo with me, and we can talk through it and see if it works for you. You can find the demo link on our website. And it’s also for folks with lower support needs at this point, I would say, but definitely something that you’re going to want to check out. We’re all web-based. So, you can play it on a Chromebook, any type of computer.
Meg:
I will link to all of your wonderful things and your social media and everything in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Vanessa.
Vanessa:
Thank you, Meg. This is awesome to be here.
[Ending music]
Thanks for listening to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast. Visit learnplaythrive.com/podcast for show notes, a transcript of the episode, and more. And if you learned something today, please share the episode with a friend or post it on your social media pages. Join me next time, where we will keep diving deep into autism.
