We were lucky to catch up with Jack Berkenstock Jr. recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jack, thanks for joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

I would have to say the main connective element would have been the realization that games can be more than just fun and recreational. It started from a conversation about how gamers had been working through some oif their issues like shyness and confidence. This was a story related to us from a colleague of ours about just gamers playing. We started to connect the dots. Here were people enjoying a game and through playing they were working with traumatic histories and obstascles in their life. I immediately thought, these people are getting benefits above and beyond the regular fun of play and without the guidance of a trained professional. This caused us to reassess our own gaming and what it had given us over the years. Some of us worked throuogh trauma at the gaming table and it was all kind of incidental. I hesitate to say accidental – there was a purpose, but it wasn’t really front-facing. One could argue that maybe we came to the understanding after the process. We conceived the idea in our method about what if we could construct and guide the process of therapy using games as the delivery system? This way we avoid two issues – one your friend group not being your therapist, which has its own dangers and also we gain the benefit of a monitored process in case of any serious reaction the player might have. We then started breaking down other aspects of this process, like the format of the group, the actual way that this method of using games interfaces with traditional modalities. We actually tallked about our method for about 3 years before working with any clients, just to hammer out the details. And we keep learning more day by day.

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.

I am a Master’s Level Clinician with about 30 years of experience in the Human Services field. I have worked in educational, recreational, in patient and community based settings. My experience extends between children, teens and adults both neurotypical and neurodiverse, including people with intellectual disability. I started out wanting to be a teacher but quickly found teaching was not what I had hoped it would be. But I found that I worked very well with kids and teens who had behavioral and emotional challenges. This drove me to pursue my Masters after I worked with adjudicated youth in a lock-down facility. While there we actually ran role playing recreationally and later referred back to this time as the start of Bodhana – seeing games bring more positive change to players.

The Bodhana Group offers a full range of services. First we offer online and in person groups utilizing board games and role playing games. These groups are offered to children, teens and adults, supporting folks with Autism, anxiety, depression and behavioral challenges or social capacities. In our group, we call our service Therapy blended RPG, because it all starts with a clinical approach, then finding ways for the game to deliver those therapies in a more engaging, less confrontational and more creative and fun way, The game provides some safety in giving clients a buffer of sorts with using the character to explore issues through story and play. We see it as a blend of many therapeutic approaches – most notably narrative therapy, drama therapy, expressive arts therapy and other traditions like CBT. Our board game programs focus more on capacity building, using games to help with resilience, critical thinking, social capacities and expression.

In addition, we offer a rich array of training and consultation services for therapist, social workers, educators and other helping professionals in how they can develop and implement these programs into their own organizations. We have provided training and guidance to agencies to help start game based programs. We specialize in finding customized ways to bring gaming into an agency and have helped start programs across multiple states. We bring our 10+ years experience to you. We also have Twitch and YouTube channels that offer some of our presentations and panels for free to the community to help raise awareness to the transformative power of games.

We also have peer reviewed published research in the efficacy of role playing games with adults with social anxiety. This is another of our commitments to showing how serious this form of treatment is. The study was published in 2022 and has over 3,500 views. To help with raising awareness we also run an annual game convention fund raiser called Save Against Fear, which combines a community family based experience 0of games, prizes, special guests with a two day professional conference where we host speakers sharing their knowledge and expertise in the field of integrating gaming and intentional use. Save Against Fear is run during the second weekend of November and is in its 14th year. This year is a great time for celebrating our most recent accolade – our proprietary role playing game system Branch Riders, co designed and being published with Onyx Path Publishing, this multi genre game was built for fun and also designed to be more easily used by professionals for intentional gaming. It was successfully Kickstarted this past year and offers many unique gameplay elements and a wonderful setting where you adventure t0 protect 8 genre based realms from a force called the Blight.

We also have a program, called Give Meeples to the Peoples where we take donations from private donors and gaming industry companies and “play them forward” to local nonprofits, libraries, schools and churches to help them start board game libraries.

We belijeve above all that games are fun and not only a great way to further healthy development. Games not only are a direct method for goals, but they also become a passport to natural support systems as people move from groups to using gaming to make new connections and strengthen bonds. We are the most proud of the impact we have had on those we support and the community in general. Seeing programs as well as people grow and develop and hearing the stories of people whose lives gaming has impacted is all the fuel we need to keep moving forward.

We pride ourselves on providing an alternative to traditional forms of therapy that allow for people to have fun while they are growing and changing. Our ability to customize what we do is also the reason it works. An RPG story helps clients with defining their story.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

Collaboration with other professionals doing this work. As an emerging field it is very important that we realize the only way this will grow and develop over time is by sharing information and what we have learned through running groups and working with clients, Speaking at a lot of conferences and conventions, we love hearing some of the innovative uses of RPGs from professionals who work with different types of clients than we do. This has included people using board games for persons with substance abuse issues or using games with veterans with PTSD. The field grows when we share our successes and our failures. A practice this emergent is not something to be kept secret – we need to share and keep information open to make sure the process and approach has integrity. Its such a rich playroom right now and we need to share our toys so we can all play better.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

It would have to be our partnership with local game stores. Gamers have long considered the FLGS – Friendly Local Game Store as kind of a church. Its a place you go to for fellowship and belonging. Its what grows our hobby and our community. We come closer together through playing together. So game stores are a main way where we hear the stories of how people have grown and changed. We also run a lot of our groups in game stores. This supports the institutions that propel our hobby, but it also helps us normalize what we are doing with clients. They see other people in the store gaming and that makes the hobby okay. We run summer camps in game stores to help bring more peopple into the hobby. After our groups, now that the clients have learned to play, we transition them to use the store they are already familiar with to get further into gaming and start their own groups and make new friends. Our groups also contain sessions where we teach the clients how to GM. Clients then can join groups at the store, in their local libraries, or at their schools. Local gaming culture is the life blood of the hobby. We couldn’t do this without them truthfully.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thebodhanagroup.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebodhanagroup/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebodhanagroup
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebodhanagroup/
• Twitter: https://x.com/TheBodhanaGroup
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBodhanaGroup
• Other: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tbgjack/branch-riders-tabletop-role-playing-game