One of my close friends has a lot of trauma associated with her family, and I often help her manage that trauma whenever she finds herself facing an unavoidable family visit. About a year ago, we came up with something that proved quite helpful—a variant on the “Buzzword Bingo” game.
Buzzword Bingo first hit most people’s collective radar with the following “Dilbert” cartoon by Scott Adams, which was published on February 22, 1994:
In response to this comic, Buzzword Bingo cards started popping up everywhere, including at MIT graduation in 1996.
My friend and I turned this into a Trauma Bingo game by using traumatic events that she thought were likely to happen during the visit for the squares. I coded the game into a Google sheet, and we shared the link with several of her close friends. Every time one of the events on the list happened, she texted us, and one of us marked it as having occurred in the Google sheet. We occasionally texted her photos of our Bingo cards as the visit progressed.
My friend found that several aspects of the game helped her manage the triggering events during the visit:
- Predicting the traumatic events before the visit helped her be mentally prepared for them, making them less likely to take her by surprise.
- Sending out updates maintained her connection with her support network, and reinforced the notion that these events were indeed traumatic, and reinforced our support for her as she endured them.
- The Bingo card and associated spreadsheet provided documentation of the traumatic things that happened without her having to go through the effort of describing/explaining them after the visit.
- The Bingo game provided an easy opening for her to process the visit with the rest of us afterwards.
When I described this game to a close friend who is a psychotherapist, she (the therapist) loved the idea (for all of the above reasons), and she asked me to share the spreadsheet with her so she could use it with some of her clients.
How to Use the Spreadsheet
You can find the spreadsheet here. Make a copy so you can edit it.
There are two tabs. The first tab, called “Bingo Squares”, is the data for the Bingo cards.
- Put a brief description of each triggering event/statement in Column A. You can keep the “Free Space” as a free space (as in traditional Bingo), or you can put a likely event there instead. (My friend uses “Episode”.)
- Before the game starts, in column B next to each event, pre-fill the spaces with something like “no” or “not yet”. This will set the pie chart to 100% “not yet” for the start of the game.
- As each triggering event/statement occurs, change the text in column B next to that event/statement to “yes”. This will update the pie chart, and will highlight those squares on any new Bingo cards that are generated.
The second tab, called “Bingo Card” is the Bingo card used to play the game. The card contains the free space plus 24 items randomly selected from the Triggering Event/Statement list on the other tab.
- Print out a card.
- To generate a new card, go to an empty cell and hit the “delete” or “backspace” key, which will make the spreadsheet recalculate.
How the Spreadsheet Works
The hidden columns in the “Bingo Squares tab are where the randomization happens. The way it works is that it assigns a random number to each traumatic event/statement (hidden column C), and then sorts the columns with the events and the random numbers (hidden columns D-F). The first 25 rows in the sorted column (including the Free Space) are used to populate the Bingo card.
The sample spreadsheet is one that might be used for the Bennet family in Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice. Make a copy and play with it so you can see how it works.
This Year’s Games
For many of my students, vacations mean being trapped in the house with the dysfunctional family that is the source of most of their trauma. This year in particular, Christmas vacation feels like a return to the year when they were trapped in their homes, where they were insulted, belittled, and made to believe everything that went wrong was their fault, and there was no escape. I shared this spreadsheet with some of them, and they were grateful and looked forward to playing the game as a way to manage the trauma and triggers of the upcoming “vacation”.
If you want to play the game, you can:
- Play the version described above, where you share the spreadsheet with people in your support network. (Make them “view only” unless you want them to actually be able to edit the sheet.) Send them periodic updates as events occur.
- Play a private version, in which you use the spreadsheet and Bingo cards by yourself to help you process events as they happen, but don’t share it until afterwards (if ever).
Either way, I wish you a holiday that’s as free from trauma as possible, but I also wish for you to have every advantage you can in managing any trauma that manages to get through!
