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Key points
- Clinicians rely on role-play to help develop empathy, identity, introspection, and prosocial behaviors.
- Role-play is often part of stories and storytelling.
- Play therapy with children uses role-play and helps us understand their view of themselves and relationships.
Co-authors: John Corbett and Terrance Dolan
Role-play is one of the most basic ways we learn about how to interact with other people, our identity, the world we’re in, and our place in it. It’s something we almost universally do as children and frequently continue as adults. To a degree, we all play different roles without realizing it; as an example, the way we interact with others at work is likely much different than how we are with our friends or with our siblings. When we engage in imaginative role play, we can practice socializing, safely take risks, explore different ways of connecting with others, and even resolve internal conflict, all while having fun. One way to define it is “to experiment with or experience a situation or viewpoint by playing a role in a make-believe scenario.” This definition captures many activities that would qualify as role-play, however to capture the essence of this activity, we invite you to participate in the exercise at the end of this post, which introduces one of the most common organized role-playing games.
As mental health clinicians, in our therapeutic work we often rely on role-playing to naturally encourage the development of empathy, introspection, and reinforcement of prosocial behaviors. Frequently when patients enter therapy, they carry core beliefs with them that paint a narrative of their life experiences, which are at times distressing, discouraging, and dysfunctional. Often these are the results of some form of trauma—living through adverse events in their lives, the results of psychiatric or medical illness, or family, social or economic problems. Through role play in treatment (which could be individual, couples, or family therapy), clinicians can help patients retell their life story through a more empowering lens. And by retelling their histories, and interacting with their therapists, they may have a corrective emotional experience that helps them change and promotes recovery and well-being.
In play therapy with children, clinicians rely tremendously on role-playing to understand their patient’s experience of the world. Depending on their level of development, young children do not often have the language to describe their experience of life. Instead, they rely on play to express and hopefully understand their internal world. Play is a unique way they communicate, cope with difficult emotions, and learn new behaviors. For example, by playing with a child using dolls, we can observe how the child plays with them (i.e., what role each doll plays, how they treat each other, etc.) and through this process, the child can convey crucial information about their emotions, state of mind, experience of family relationships, and development of self-esteem. With this knowledge, the therapist can understand areas of strengths and weaknesses that could be explored in the therapy.
As an example, Mark is a 6-year-old child who just started kindergarten and has recently been refusing to get picked up by the school bus after the first couple weeks of school. When he and his brother were playing in the sandbox with trucks, he took his smaller pickup truck and backed it into a corner while his brother used a larger one to move around the sand. After doing this, his truck (in his voice) said to his brother’s big truck, “Leave me alone! I want to play in the sand too!” Once his parents connected with his teacher to discuss school refusal, it came to their collective attention that one of the older students, who was much bigger than him, in his class wasn’t allowing him to use the swing on the playground. Mark was acting out this scenario through his play, processing the experience of being bullied off his preferred activity on the playground. If this were in therapeutic play, the therapist could have the trucks talk with each other, and elicit what the little truck was feeling. Then, breaking out of the role-play, a therapist could ask him if anything like this happened at school or home, and hopefully he would be able to reveal his fear of bullying. Then an intervention could follow.
An Exercise to Try
Consider using the principles described above with you and other family members to learn more about yourselves and your identity, perceptions of others, and world view.
If you had to write yourself into a fantasy novel, what kind of character would you be? Would you be a stalwart knight who defends the helpless and pursues evil? A studied wizard who excels in the meticulous gathering of magical research? How about a thief who slips in and out of the shadows in the dead of night? Spend a minute or two thinking about this and, if you have a notepad, write down a sentence or two about them. Once you have this jotted down, what would this character look like? What’s their name, gender presentation, and pronouns? You can spend as much or as little time as you’d like brainstorming a protagonist. The further one goes into describing a character, the richer the narrative that accompanies that character.
Now that you’ve had some time to think about the character you’d be, imagine that they were about to embark on an adventure and that you’d be adopting your character’s voice and personality in order to guide the character through their trials. Sounds interesting, right? This is the basis of table-top role-playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, in which players create a character for a fantasy world, and then describe their characters' actions through speech. Their actions succeed or fail according to a set of game rules and guidelines, but within the rules, players have the freedom to improvise. And just like in real life, their choices shape the direction and outcome of their adventure. Even if you haven’t played one of these role-playing games (RPG), you most likely know someone who has.
Now, let's turn our focus back to the character you’ve made. Are there aspects of this character that you think align with your own qualities? How about aspects of this character that you don’t align with at all? We ask these questions to highlight an interesting concept in role-playing; when we are role-playing a character, it’s hard to completely separate our true self from the character. We often draw from our prior experiences and values to inform the decisions we make, even when we try to keep the narrative of the character in mind. As one becomes more accustomed to role-playing games, people can often branch their characters in different directions to adopt alternative styles of adventuring and ways of experiencing their imagined world. Similar to the characters played in RPGs, we also have our own personal narrative that naturally develops as we grow up (and doesn’t finish when we become adults!). As events happen to us, we add more chapters to our story and better understand who we are as people and how we fit into the world around us.
In summary, role-playing is an effective way of learning about ourselves and others and confirming these beliefs through taking on the other person’s role. If one gets it “wrong,” the other makes corrections to clarify what they are actually thinking, feeling, or worrying about. Making mistakes and asking for clarifications is a part of process of understanding the other’s perspective. Role-playing is, and should be, therapeutic, educational, and fun.
A version of this was previously posted on the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at The Massachusetts General Hospital.
