Tumblewood Community is a Wiltshire-based organisation which helps adolescent girls with emotional and behavioural difficulties reintegrate with their home community. They approached ProReal because they recognised that our software could help young people access thoughts and feelings that the more traditional creative therapies they were already employing were not reaching. As the community Director John Kearney said, “Art therapy can be hard for some young people to engage with, particularly if they feel they are not natural artists.”

ProReal trained two Tumblewood therapists in using the virtual reality software, and they both found that using ProReal was particularly effective with those young people who felt overwhelmed by many uncontrolled feelings, causing them to withdraw from conventional therapy. Working in the ‘ProReal world’ was an extremely useful way of helping them have some distance from their overwhelming feelings which allowed them to focus on communicating their internal experience; all without the use of words. To show themselves in this way then allowed the therapeutic process to begin.