Hi, guys,

For those of you still wondering what this subreddit is about, here are some general ideas on our activity. As I've written before, I am a psychologist and psychotherapist hopelessly in love with the field of personal development. Vlad is a game designer. In this subreddit we combine two quite different professional paths and experiences to bring to light a new perspective on personal development. But you might be wondering what triggered us to write about this and how we arrived at the conclusions that are shared with you here. Let me tell you my personal experience because this is the one that I know best, since Vlad is a different person with a different path that led him here. As a psychotherapist I considered it very useful to go to therapy session myself for my personal growth. I truly think that this is an essential step for any professional in this field. When you understand yourself well enough, you are at a lower risk of mixing your own experience with your clients' and can be more focused on your clients' feeling, thoughts and struggles.
After three or four years of psychotherapy (mainly Transactional Analysis, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Schema Therapy), there I was very well understanding my past, having a ton of exercises to do in case of need, but still struggling with a low self-esteem fueled by an inexhaustible perfectionism emerging in almost any action I took.I was able to understand my clients, to guide them and give them good tips on how to cope with their challenges, but in the back of my mind I was feeling quite hypocritical knowing that I am still fighting many similar battles. Yet, there I was, sitting in front of them and “lecturing” them on how to deal with their difficulties. Even though this self-esteem sounds like a single issue in a very complex life, believe me, it can sometimes spread throughout all your life domains. :-) That was my life when I met Vlad, a guy who seemed to have nothing to do with this field, yet soon proved to be very interested in it. We started having long conversations on this subject, opening up to one another and offering suggestions and interpretations for what we were experiencing. We do have our own struggles, but we always take them as challenges that can lead to awesome outcomes. One topic after another led to some feeble notes about a game that has the structure of a tree, than of a temple, and then again of both combined. We started writing down the skills that we seem to lack and then it occurred to us the idea that some of them are clearly linked to one another. Soon after we realised that some of this chunks can actually have a name and an umbrella concept linking them. Since we were already viewing life as a game it only came naturally to name each umbrella-concept as a character. We developed this project a lot ever since, but this is the current form in which we approach these subjects. After starting practising these skills and noticing that they can actually work as mantras to stick to throughout a sufficient period of time, we decided that it might be a good idea to share these ideas with other people, fond of this subject as well. This is how we have reached this point. We don't really know where this project will lead us, but we do have some serious plans of developing and spreading it. Since it has helped us, we think that others could benefit from it as well. So, guys, we hope we'll enjoy this journey side by side and let's see where it gets us.

Keep in touch!