By Dr. Paul Losoff, PsyD | Bedrock Psychology Group | Northbrook, IL
I have a confession to make. I am a licensed clinical psychologist with nearly two decades of experience, a doctoral degree, and a deep respect for evidence-based treatment. I have also spent more time playing Minecraft than I care to admit.
These two things are more related than my colleagues might be comfortable admitting.
You Start With Nothing
If you have never played Minecraft survival mode, here is the premise: you are dropped into a world with no tools, no shelter, no food, and no instructions. Night is coming. Things that want to kill you will emerge from the dark. Your first job is simply to not die.
So you punch a tree. You gather wood. You build a crude shelter before the sun goes down. You make tools from what you have. You survive the night. And then, slowly, you begin to build something more.
Most developmental psychologists would recognize exactly what is happening.
Maslow in Block Form
In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed that human motivation operates in layers. Before a person can pursue love, belonging, or meaning, they need safety. Before safety, they need their basic physiological needs met — food, shelter, rest. The famous pyramid is a sequence: you cannot reliably move up until the layer beneath you is stable.
Minecraft survival mode is Maslow’s hierarchy rendered in blocks.
You cannot build a beautiful home until you have tools. You cannot make tools until you have resources. You cannot gather resources safely until you have a shelter to return to. Each layer of capability enables the next. The game will make it hard for you if you skip steps. Try to go looking for diamonds before you have iron, and the game will remind you — usually through an untimely death — that sequence matters.
What strikes me as a psychologist is how naturally players accept this in the game, and how fiercely they resist it in their own lives.
The Shortcuts We Try to Take
I see this in my office regularly. Someone arrives convinced that if they could just find the right relationship, the right job, the right achievement, they would finally feel okay. They are looking for diamonds before they have iron. They are trying to build on a foundation that has not been secured yet.
This is not a character flaw. It is a very human response to pain. When the lower levels of the pyramid feel too hard, too slow, or too painful to address directly, the instinct is to leap toward something that feels like it might compensate. Sometimes it works temporarily. It rarely holds.
The work of therapy is often exactly this: going back down to the layer that was skipped, doing the unglamorous work of stabilizing it, and building from there. It is slower than clients want it to be. It is also the only thing that actually works.
Growth Is Not Linear — But It Is Sequential
One thing Minecraft gets right that the textbook version of Maslow sometimes obscures: growth is not a clean upward march. You lose resources. You die and respawn. A Creeper blows up something you spent hours building. You go back to basics, regroup, and start again from a more informed position.
Therapy is like this too. Progress is not a straight line. Clients often feel like they are backsliding when they are actually just encountering a deeper layer of the same material — one they are now equipped to handle because of what they built before.
The goal is not to reach the top of the pyramid and stay there. The goal is to build a foundation solid enough that when things fall apart — and they will — you know how to rebuild. Faster this time. With better tools.
What the End Has to Do With It
Here is the part that gets interesting. Minecraft survival mode does have an end. You build enough, grow enough, develop enough capability, and eventually you can face the final boss. You can finish the game.
Most of my clients do not believe, when they first walk into my office, that there is an end. They believe their anxiety, their depression, their patterns of self-defeat, are permanent features of who they are. Part of the landscape. Non-negotiable.
They are wrong about this. Not always in the way they hope — therapy is not a cure, and I am skeptical of anyone who promises otherwise. But there is a version of done. A place where the work you came in to do has been done, where the foundation is solid, where the tools are in your hands and you know how to use them.
In Minecraft, that moment comes with a portal and a dragon and a strange poem that nobody expected.
In therapy, it tends to look quieter than that. But it is just as real.
Why I Named This Practice Bedrock
Bedrock is the bottom layer of Minecraft — the indestructible foundation beneath everything else. You cannot mine through it. It is simply there, holding the world up, keeping you from falling into the void below.
That is what I am trying to help people build. Not a perfect life. Not an absence of difficulty. Something beneath all of it — a sense of self that holds when everything else shifts. A foundation that does not collapse under pressure..
Dr. Paul Losoff is a licensed clinical psychologist and co-founder of Bedrock Psychology Group in Northbrook, IL. He specializes in evidence-based therapy for adults dealing with anxiety, depression, burnout, and identity issues. He is significantly better at therapy than he is at surviving Creeper attacks.
If any of this resonated with you, we offer a free 15-minute consultation. Call 773-389-2352 or visit bedrockpsychologygroup.com.
By Dr. Paul Losoff, PsyD | Bedrock Psychology Group | Northbrook, IL
I am a clinical psychologist. I am also a Minecraft player. These two facts are more connected than you might expect.
If you have ever finished Minecraft — truly finished it, defeated the Ender Dragon and sat through what follows — you know that the game does something unusual. It does not roll credits and send you back to the main menu. It gives you a poem. A long, strange, quietly devastating poem. Written by Irish author Julian Gough, it is unlike anything else in gaming, and frankly unlike most things in literature.
I am not going to reproduce it here. You can find it easily enough, and I would encourage you to. Read it slowly. Sit with it the way you would sit with something that unsettles you in a way you cannot immediately name.
What I want to do is talk about what it means — through the lens of the work I do every day.
Two Voices, One Self
The poem is structured as a dialogue between two voices. For most of it, the reader assumes these are two separate entities — one speaking, one listening. By the end, it becomes clear they are the same.
This is not a literary trick. It is one of the most accurate descriptions of the therapeutic process I have ever encountered.
Most people come to therapy believing their inner critic is a separate, authoritative voice — something outside themselves that has accurately assessed their worth, their potential, their place in the world. One of the most important things that happens in good therapy is the moment a person realizes that voice is not an outside observer. It is them. It was always them. And that means it can change.
The poem understood this before most of my clients do.
The Player Who Forgot They Were Playing
One of the poem’s central ideas is that the player — you, the person holding the controller — became so absorbed in the game that they forgot it was a game. They forgot there was a self outside of it. They lost the thread back to who they were before they started playing.
I see this constantly in my office.
Not with Minecraft specifically — though sometimes, yes, with Minecraft — but with the roles people absorb so completely that they lose track of where the role ends and they begin. The high-achieving professional who cannot locate any identity outside of productivity. The parent who has given so much of themselves to their children that they cannot remember what they wanted before that. The person who has been in a relationship so long that they genuinely do not know what they think, feel, or want independent of another person.
The poem calls this forgetting. I call it the presenting problem.
The work of therapy is not to judge the forgetting. It is to help someone find the thread back.
You Are Not Alone in Here
The poem makes a claim that sounds mystical but is, I think, clinically sound: that the experience of being a self — isolated, interior, sometimes unbearably alone — is something every human being shares. The loneliness is universal. The sense of being the only one who has ever felt this particular thing, in this particular way, is something everyone feels.
This is one of the most therapeutically significant realizations a person can have. Not that their pain is minimized by being common, but that their isolation is not as total as it feels. That the wall between them and other people is thinner than depression or anxiety has told them it is.
The poem reaches for this across the distance of a screen, through a game about mining and building, and somehow lands it. That is an extraordinary thing to do.
Bedrock
I named this practice Bedrock for reasons I have written about elsewhere — the layers of a life, the foundation beneath them, the work of finding ground that holds.
But I would be lying if I said the Minecraft reference was purely incidental. Bedrock is the layer you cannot dig through. It is the bottom. The limit. The thing that is still there when everything else has been excavated.
In the game, it keeps you from falling into the void.
In therapy, that is what we are building toward. Not happiness as a destination. Not the absence of difficulty. Something more like a foundation — a self that knows what it is, knows what it values, and does not collapse when the world gets difficult.
The End Poem ends with something close to an invitation. I will not reproduce the exact words, but the spirit of it is this: Wake up. You were dreaming. And now there is work to do.
Dr. Paul Losoff is a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of Bedrock Psychology Group in Northbrook, IL. He specializes in evidence-based therapy for adults dealing with anxiety, depression, burnout, and identity issues. He has been playing Minecraft longer than he would like to admit.
If this resonated with you, we offer a free 15-minute consultation. Call 773-389-2352 or contact us.
