My World And Welcome To It

I went to a party last night, a very nice benefit held for a friend heading to South Africa to work in an aids orphanage. I truly admire her courage, and her faith in the world and herself to affect change. Anyway I was socializing and, geek that I am, proselytizing about the newest technologies that were out there for people to play with. Our host, who is a therapist, stopped me and asked if I could help him with designing a website where he could offer up a video of himself for clients to view. That's easy, I said, we could knock that out in a day, but it got me to thinking about a conversation we might have...

"So what if you wanted it to be interactive, you know, have people ask you questions and you answer them."

"That's a little more interesting though I don't know if people would actually enjoy it much less utilize something like that. It's really just the telephone with faces at that point. "

"Well what kind of therapy would work over the internet"

" I don't know, certainly not traditional therapy, a lot of that is about the interaction between the therapist and the client. There are a lot of subtle cues that would be lost over such a limited medium."

"Well what about none traditional therapies. I have a friend who's been working on getting her degree in Dance Therapy from Lesley and other friends in the past who've worked in the field of Art Therapy. These are approaches I've always thought had a lot of potential because they bring in the creative aspects of the mind as a tool towards finding answers to issues that we all have."

"Perhaps, but isn't the internet rather limited? How do you dance on a computer?

"Sure, dancing may be out but there are areas of intense creativity being generated on the internet. Have you ever heard of Second Life?"

"I've heard of it, isn't it a game where people go to meet other people."

"It's actually a virtual world where you recreate yourself through the embodiment of an Avatar".

"An Avatar?"

"Yes, a totally fictional representation of yourself as you wish to appear. You could be a man or a woman or even a child. In fact you don't even need to be human. You could have six legs, a monkey tail and the head of an alligator if that's the way you want to see yourself."

"You mean I can change my avatar to reflect what I'm feeling inside?"

"Indeed, and you can have conversations within the virtual world in this form with your therapist or even amongst your therapy group, who by the way all have their own unique avatars. An added benefit is that you can travel in these worlds, even fly, to make believe places so the therapist could conceivably introduce different actions and more sophisticated venues to reach into and explore the psyche."

"So this is Avatar Therapy."

"Yes and it does exist today in limited fashion. People use it to overcome fears such as flying or spiders. It's really up to the therapeutic community to take this and run with it. "

"There's an old saying, "The sky's the limit" - here, I guess, the only limitation is our own imagination"