We were lucky to catch up with Josué Cardona recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Josué, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

Like most nonprofits, Geek Therapy started as a response to a need. In this case, it was a personal need. It took me years to realize that Geek Therapy was a response to my feeling misunderstood for most of my life.

The year is 2011, and I’m working as a mental health counseling intern at a hospital in New Jersey. I worked primarily with Spanish-speaking families because I’m fluent in Spanish, and it’s so important for helping professionals to know the language of the people they are helping. I also worked with children, and that’s when I realized how important it was to speak their language, metaphorically.

According to the founders of Play Therapy, play is the language of children, and the kids I was working with spoke of superheroes, characters from their favorite shows, and video games. I know that language. Despite being Hispanic, I identify more as a Geek than anything else. By Geek, I mean someone who is really into pop culture and uses it to navigate the world. I understand the real world better thanks to my passion for science fiction and fantasy, and my affinity for superhero stories and video games.

One day, I asked my supervisor at the hospital if I could use video games in one of the groups I led. We already used board games and toys, and by that point, I had integrated comic books into the program, so why not use that Nintendo Wii I found in the program’s game closet? Well, my supervisor was strongly opposed and said no. In response, I launched a website that night called Geek Therapy.

My goal was to create a repository of news articles I had collected to demonstrate that video games and other geeky things were being used to help people around the world. That’s the origin of Geek Therapy’s first iteration, but the nonprofit organization came later.

After the curated news site, I started interviewing the people in those articles and launched a podcast. I recruited mental health professionals to write for the site and created additional podcasts covering different topics. I developed the Geek Therapy model that explains what works and what doesn’t in this type of work and started teaching the model.

By that point, the mission was no longer to prove people wrong; it was to help a community flourish. Once there was a community, it seemed to me like officially taking everything and making it a nonprofit organization was the answer to helping the community be more invested.

It was recommended to me many times that I make money off of what I built, start a for-profit business, but I was invested in the mission, and I wanted the community to feel ownership of what we’re building.

Thirteen years later, I’m proud of what we’ve built. It feels right. I’m currently a steward of the mission, and I love having a group of passionate people working on it with me. I can’t wait to see what the next generation does with it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My earliest memory is playing Super Mario Bros. on NES with my mom. My dad once bought a Sega Master System off a co-worker and brought it home that day, just like the day he grabbed Mortal Kombat on the way home from work—not because it was a special day, but because we played it at the arcade and he knew how excited I was. My parents loved movies and sci-fi. It’s what brought our family together. Until my mom died in 2023, my parents, divorced more than 30 years before, my sister, and I all played a mobile game together and tried to beat each other’s scores.

I’m a big Geek, and Geek Therapy is an extension of that, but it has never been my day job. Before becoming a therapist, I was a biomedical engineer. I’ve mostly worked in healthcare in one way or another, and I was recently the director of an innovation lab at a healthcare startup.

My brain makes a lot of things very hard for me. I have a few mental health diagnoses, and if you know about mental health, there is a lot of overlap of symptoms, and diagnoses can change depending on the evaluating clinician and when you are tested. What I know for sure is that I fall asleep in meetings, I can’t work on one thing for very long, I get very excited, and I’m willing to, and often do, make drastic changes in direction. My work experience is very mixed, and Geek Therapy started as a side project—an unavoidable obsession that I couldn’t let go.

In high school, I was debating whether to study psychology or engineering in college, and I was pushed by the adults in my life to pursue engineering. So I did. Then, five years in, I started going to school for counseling while still working as an engineer. After becoming a therapist, I’ve worked in research design/development, education, innovation, consulting, diversity & inclusion, and more. My career isn’t as uncommon as I once thought, but it is still very hard for most people to understand why I do the things I do.

It took me years to realize that Geek Therapy was a way to address my way of being, how I experienced the world, and how I felt like no one understood what I was going through. That’s why Geek Therapy’s goal is for everyone being served by a helping professional to feel heard and understood. Additionally, it aims to make the job of helping professionals more fun and engaging, reducing burnout by inviting them to bring more of themselves into their work.

Just as Geek Therapy became a lifeline for adult me and something I wish I had as a child, I want it to be for others. The organization has built a great community full of people who are passionate about our mission. Join us as a member or volunteer if any of this resonates with you. Or if you just want to geek out and do good.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m still unlearning the idea that everyone is built the same.

When I was 29 years old, working full-time as a psychotherapist, I had never felt more anxiety. My fear was that I would lose my job because I was falling behind on paperwork. So I went to see a therapist, and the session went something like this:

Me: I’m feeling very anxious. Therapist: Why? Me: I’m afraid I’m going to get fired. Therapist: Why? Me: Because I can’t get my paperwork done. I fall asleep whenever I sit at my desk and start working on the paperwork. I’ve tried everything. Therapist: Why do you fall asleep when you do paperwork? Me: Therapist: Yeah, I don’t think anxiety is the problem here.

He suggested I get tested, and that’s how I got an ADHD diagnosis.

Now, I’m very mindful of what I can and can’t do. I will actually fall asleep if my mind is not engaged, so I need to do things like use a walking treadmill desk or take meetings standing up. Those are just some of the accommodations I need to do desk work. But you know what? That can also be exhausting and lead to burnout. There are jobs and tasks that I am much more suited for, and I try to have more of that in my life. Otherwise, it’s a struggle.

What I’ve learned is that if we don’t make accommodations for ourselves, we will suffer unnecessarily.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think presenting at big events has been one of the most helpful things in getting recognition and growing Geek Therapy’s reputation.

In 2013, a friend suggested we submit a proposal to present at San Diego Comic-Con. I told him he was crazy. I felt Geek Therapy needed a few more years before we were ready for something like that. I had a lot of reasons not to apply. We did it anyway, had an amazing time, and met incredible people.

I felt I owed so much to that event that I spent years thanking my friend for convincing me to do it, every chance I got.

After almost 10 years of thanking my friend, one day after thanking him again, he said, “Josué, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. You should try being a straight White male in America.”

That hit me hard. I realized I had so much baggage about being a member of a minority group, about growing up the way I did, about my family, that it never occurred to me that it was possible to apply.

My advice is that no matter who you are, if you have an idea or a dream and you’re not sure you’ve earned it or that it’s at all possible for someone like you to achieve it, have the audacity of a straight White male and go for it anyway.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://geektherapy.org
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/geektherapy
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/geektherapy
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/geektherapy
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/geektherapy
• Youtube: http://youtube.com/geektherapy
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@geektherapy