What Minecraft’s End Poem Taught Me About the Work of Therapy
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.
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