Healing Pokémon, Healing Myself

I've loved playing the Pokémon card game with my daughter - and my ten-year-old self.

Every once in a while, I download Pokémon Go and play it for a while with my kids. In Pokémon Go, Shadow Pokémon are monsters which have been captured and controlled by the game’s main antagonists, Team Go Rocket. They have a menacing appearance, with eyes that glow red and surrounded by a shadowy aura that represents their frenzied state. They are stronger, sure, but their defense is lower and they are saddled with unwanted abilities.

When recruited, players can purify them or keep the stronger, wild beast in their party. It presents a bleak choice to the player: do you want to do the work to be better? It reminds me of shadow work, which is the process of exploring one’s shadow self within their subconscious to uncover facets of themselves which they have hidden or repressed. It’s a buzzwordy term that gets co-opted by influencers, but it’s rooted in Jungian psychoanalysis. It simply refers to the parts of yourself you’d rather not deal with.

A Shadow Pokemon, photographed in the living room.

While I tire of Pokémon Go easily, one perk of the game is that it allowed me to introduce Pokémon to the kids and gauge what sorts of games they may be interested in. With my daughter, it turns out her favorite Pokémon game is…the card game. While I wasn’t expecting it, I have wholly reveled playing with her. Not only has it been great fun, but it’s also allowed me to do some shadow work of my own.

Pokémon is a multimedia franchise created by (among others) Nintendo, launching with Pokémon Red and Green for the Game Boy in 1996. There are dozens of games, TV series, movies, books, toys and more. The Card Game, released in Japan in 1996 and globally in 1998, sees players building becks for competitive play where you summon Pokémon, attach energy cards, and execute attacks to knock out the opponent’s team. It’s one of the world's most popular trading card games and still carries on strong today. Like Magic: The Gathering, another collectible card game that was popular in my youth and somehow still (more?) popular today.

Both Pokémon and Magic games were things I was interested in as an 11-year old. They were aligned with my interests, as I was already a budding RPGamer with a slant towards anime stylings from Japanese developers. I loved JRPGs before we even knew to call it that. But as you may also remember, anime fandom in the late 1990s/early aughts was significantly less mainstream than today. I may have loved Final Fantasy and Pokémon, but I wasn’t finding many friends and neighbors similarly situated, leaving me a bit insecure with regard to wearing my trainer badges on my sleeve.

The CIA could not get me to answer how often we went to McDonald’s this past month.

I resigned myself to simply collecting a few cards, staring at them, and trying to convince my siblings or cousins to play the game. The matches we played were haphazard, either without enough cards to sustain two decks or with the players themselves lacking the wherewithal to know exactly what an energy card was for, let alone how to attach or use it. Simply put, I didn’t know how to play (even after reading the rules), and had nobody who could teach me (or wanted to learn). Even my cousin Mike had a big box of Magic cards; we just stared at the impressive art.

It was card games like these, and even the notion of playing Dungeons & Dragons, that seemed out of my reach during my teenage years. There was always an impediment - money, access to the actual game(s), insecurity, or simply nobody to play with! I was too self-conscious to put my neck out there and try to make friends with people who would actually know what to do. Over the years, my small collections of these games were lost in the shuffle in moves to college and thereafter. I wrote them off as simply not for me. I had growing up to do and my time for these experiences had come and gone.

For nearly twenty years, that was the case. Before I started having my own kids, I last played a Pokémon game in the late 2000s and hadn’t even thought about playing tabletop games. While Pokémon Go came out just before I had my own kids, it was a cultural shift that helped me, at nearly 30 years old, release any sort of insecurity about being a gamer. I stopped worrying about what others thought about my hobby because I was able to stop worrying so much about what others thought generally. A decade later, I’m a nearly 40-year-old lawyer who moonlights as a video game writer going on a half-decade.

A listing of Pokemon cards on eBay.

As a result, it felt natural to introduce my kids to the hobby, even if in small ways. One of my daughter’s first experiences with gaming was simply dancing together to the main menu of Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy! It would be a while before she would formally play games, but in the interim the kids were fine with plushies and characters. While we dabbled in the games and show, one day at Best Buy my daughter spotted a Pokémon card binder, igniting her curiosity. She wanted the binder, but I refused to buy it since we didn’t have any cards to put in there. Hours later at home, she found one that had been hiding in a junk drawer since the last time McDonald’s gave them out as Happy Meals. With a card to put in the binder, I felt obliged.

We marched back to the store where we picked up not only the collector’s binder, but also the box that could’ve changed my life as a twelve-year-old: the Battle Academy box, which comes with detailed instructions, damage markers, a gameplay board (telling you where to put everything to get started), and three sixty-card decks. The game walks you through a few turns with specific instructions before letting players continue the match. First released in 2020, it proved very popular - especially in this house.

My daughter has become an absolute shark at the game, dominating with high-powered Pokémon and using items or other cards with actual strategy. It’s a bit scary, to be honest, since I think I was still learning how to tie my shoes at her age. I couldn’t believe it: here I was, in 2024, actually playing the Pokémon card game. Better (thirty years) late than never, I suppose. We’ve played dozens of matches against each other. I’m chuffed to finally play it, but even more to be able to play it with my daughter. It’s given another opportunity to instill values about playing fairly, good sportsmanship, and fine: a little bit of trash talk every once in a while.

One of the first games we played together.

Playing this game with my daughter has been oddly healing for me. It had been years since I remembered feeling insecure about gaming or wishing for someone with an earnest understanding of the game mechanics, but physically shuffling, preparing the decks, and laying the cards out on a table brought back those memories that feel both alien and wholly familiar, as if they occurred yesterday. I had spent so much of my life, especially as a kid, insecure about something that I loved because I was preoccupied with the thoughts of other people or internalizing some weird self-judgment because my sisters didn’t want to play Pokémon cards and my brother was too young to read at the time. Why did I do this to myself?

Why do any of us do that to ourselves? Through shadow work, we’re able to confront concepts or memories about ourselves that we’ve stuffed in a shoebox in the back of our mind’s closet. We can hide parts of ourselves as much as we’d like, but they are still there. We need to do the work in order to reconcile these facets of ourselves to be fully realized and whole. I’m not talking about crystals and auras but rather addressing uncomfortable truths and recollections about ourselves. It’s empowering and something I look forward to continuing.

In Pokémon Go - just like in real life - the shadow version of ourselves is just us, burdened by the past. We’re able to quietly ignore them for as long as we like, but they are still there waiting for their moment in the sun. Many of us are too afraid to do the work to reconcile their shadow and light selves. I’m so grateful that my daughter’s curiosity led us to this card game, which we continue to enjoy. I absolutely love playing this game with her, ending with a high five or a hug after an earned victory. What she doesn’t know is that I’m also giving my ten-year-old self a hug, too. It’s one both he and I didn’t know we needed.

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February 27th is Pokémon Day, marking the anniversary of the first games on the Game Boy in 1996.