What Anime, Gaming, and AI Taught Me About Trauma
Updated: 4 days ago
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, somatic therapist, and founder of Healthemindset. He specializes in nervous system healing, ancestral wisdom, and trauma recovery for empaths, Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and LGBTQ+ communities.
For years, I kept two languages separate: the clinical language of nervous system regulation and trauma, and the language of anime, comics, and games that had shaped me since childhood. It took one client’s offhand comment about Demon Slayer to show me they were never meant to be separate at all.
I want to tell you something I kept quiet for longer than I should have. For years, I sat with clients in a clinical setting and talked about nervous system regulation, attachment wounds, somatic awareness, and the architecture of trauma. I was good at it. But there was a whole other language I spoke fluently that I was leaving outside the therapy room: the language of anime, comics, and gaming.
The characters I had grown up with. The stories that had held me when nothing else could. The fictional worlds I had turned to as a child when the real one felt like too much, too loud, too unpredictable, too unkind to someone as sensitive as I was. I had learned, somewhere along the way, that these things were not serious. That they did not belong in a clinical space. It took a client to teach me otherwise.
We were about six sessions in and making slow, careful progress. Then one day they mentioned, almost offhand, that they had been thinking about a scene from Demon Slayer. Tanjiro, kneeling in the snow, grieving his family, choosing to get up anyway. They could not explain why it kept coming back to them. But something in their body responded when they talked about it: a loosening, a recognition, a particular quality of emotion that our more direct clinical conversations had not quite reached. I leaned in instead of redirecting. That session became one of the most clinically significant of our entire work together. That is when I stopped leaving those worlds outside the therapy room.
The power of narrative distance
There is a concept in narrative therapy called externalizing, the practice of separating the person from the problem, giving it a shape outside the self so it can be examined without the full weight of shame and self-judgment collapsing in. Anime, comics, and gaming do this naturally and powerfully.
When a client is talking about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender – his rage, his need to prove himself, the way his father's voice lives inside him long after he has escaped his father's presence – they are often talking about themselves. But the distance the character provides makes it bearable to say things they could not say directly. The defenses soften. The shame quiets. The emotion becomes accessible because it belongs, for a moment, to someone else.
Neuroscience supports what storytellers have always known: narrative activates the brain differently than direct emotional disclosure. When we're immersed in a character's experience, research on narrative empathy suggests our own mirror neuron systems engage much as they would if we were living the experience ourselves. For trauma survivors especially, narrative provides a natural window of tolerance. This is a core reason why body-based and somatic approaches to trauma healing often use story, metaphor, and image as entry points into difficult material. This is also why so many clinicians are now integrating talk therapy with somatic approaches rather than relying on one modality alone.
Inside the session
I work with a client, a young adult who identifies as a highly sensitive person and carries complex trauma from early childhood, who has spent their whole life feeling like they were born into the wrong world. They love Black Clover, specifically Asta, the one character in a world of magic users born without any magic at all, who refuses to accept that the world's definition of power applies to him.
In one session, I asked them: What do you think Asta's body feels like in the moments before a fight? When the world has told him again that he does not belong, that he has nothing, that he should give up, what does his nervous system do? They described it vividly: the tension that does not tip into shutdown, the breath that stays open even when everything around him is trying to close it, the specific quality of determination that lives in the chest rather than the mind.
Then I asked: Where in your own body do you recognize that? The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when something real is happening. We spent the rest of that session tracking, somatically, carefully, the places in their own body where that quality lived. Not as metaphor. As lived sensation. As a resource they had been carrying all along without knowing how to access it. That is somatic therapy. That is Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). It got there through anime. For a closer look at what this kind of embodied processing can look like in practice, I’d point you to this piece on somatic experiencing in trauma resolution.
Characters as clinical mirrors
I have noticed consistent patterns in the characters my clients are most drawn to, and those patterns are clinically informative in ways that no intake assessment fully captures. Clients who were parentified early often identify with characters who carry impossible burdens with unwavering loyalty, like Tanjiro in Demon Slayer. Clients processing rage that was never allowed expression are often drawn to characters whose anger is enormous, legitimate, and eventually integrated rather than suppressed, like Naruto.
Clients navigating questions of identity and belonging, queer clients, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) clients, and clients who feel they exist between worlds frequently identify with characters who do not fit neatly into any single category of their universe. The ones who are powerful in ways their world does not yet have language for. When I ask a client which character they feel most like right now, I am asking them to tell me something about their current nervous system state in a way that bypasses the cognitive filters that so often stand between a person and the truth of their experience.
Gaming as nervous system training
Gaming is often treated as avoidance. But gaming is also, for many of the clients I work with, one of the primary ways they have learned to tolerate frustration, regulate activation, and experience genuine states of flow – the full-body absorption in a meaningful challenge that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified as one of the most reliably positive human experiences available.
Understanding the relationship between emotions, regulation, and engagement helps illuminate why gaming serves as genuine nervous system training for many people, not just entertainment.
For clients with trauma histories, the sense of agency that gaming provides – the felt experience of being the one who makes decisions, takes action, and sees consequences can be profoundly regulating in ways that directly counter the helplessness that trauma installs. The game gives us the raw material. The clinical work helps them integrate it.
When AI becomes another bridge into feeling
Not every client's fluency is in a fictional world. Some of my clients are the opposite of immersed, they're analytical, always in their heads, thinking their way around a feeling a dozen times before they ever get near it. For clients like this, I've started using Artificial Intelligence (AI) between sessions to help tailor worksheets and reflection prompts to what they're actually carrying that week, and to help them get racing thoughts out of their heads and onto the page first, in their own words, before we work together to refine them.
It's the same underlying principle as externalizing a feeling into a character. Getting something chaotic and internal into an external, organized form makes it possible to finally feel what's underneath it. Decades of research on expressive writing shows that turning disorganized thought into coherent narrative meaningfully reduces anxiety, and I've seen that same shift happen for clients using AI this way: less overall stress, more capacity to actually do the emotional work in session, and, more than once, meaningfully better sleep.
I want to be direct about the boundary here. AI is not my co-therapist, and it never touches the therapeutic relationship itself. The American Psychological Association's ethical guidance on AI in clinical practice is clear that these tools exist to support clinical judgment, not substitute for it, and that's exactly how I hold it. The attunement, the felt sense of being met, the co-regulation that happens in the room – none of that comes from a tool. It comes from presence. What AI gives some of my clients is a way to arrive at that presence less encumbered, so the real, human work has room to happen once we're face to face.
Your story awaits
If you came to this article and recognized yourself, if you grew up in fictional worlds that held you in ways the real world sometimes did not, if you have characters you love with an intensity that has sometimes felt embarrassing, I want to say this directly: that love is not escapism. It is intelligence. You found, in those stories, a mirror for parts of yourself that the world around you did not always reflect back. Bring it into your healing. Let it be a resource rather than something you leave outside the therapy room. Your favorite character has been trying to reach you for a long time. Maybe it is time to listen.
Bring your whole self to healing
The characters, stories, and worlds that have held you, and the tools that help you finally get out of your own head, belong in your healing too. At Healthemindset, sessions are built to meet you exactly where you are, including the parts of you that speak fluent anime. To explore working together, visit here.
Read more from Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, LCSW, Psychotherapist & Ancestral Healer
Christopher Sanchez-Lascurain, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), is a somatic therapist, AEDP-trained clinician, and founder of Healthemindset. Drawing on polyvagal theory, Curanderismo, and his Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestral healing traditions, Christopher offers a deeply integrative approach to trauma recovery and nervous system regulation. He specializes in supporting empaths, highly sensitive people, and members of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities navigating the intersection of identity, culture, and healing. His work bridges clinical rigor with cultural reclamation, creating space for clients to reconnect with their bodies, their lineages, and their wholeness. Christopher is based in Los Angeles, California, and works with clients remotely all over California.
