ESTHER PEREL’S GAME OF LIFE
THE PSYCHOTHERAPIST SAYS PLAY IS FUNDAMENTAL AND CREATED A WAY TO DO IT MORE. TODD MARTENS
AG A M E , says Esther Perel, the famed psychotherapist behind the relationship therapy podcast “Where Should We Begin?,” is a ritual. ¶ Sometimes, in therapy sessions, Perel will toss patients a ball, initiating a game of catch in which one can speak only when holding the toy, turning potentially challenging talks into a game of inclusion. Other times, she instructs couples who can’t stop fighting to lie on the floor, seeking to disarm them of any active posturing. ¶ This, to Perel, is play. It’s an attempt to create an imaginary structure with game-like rules. Or to “create a ritual,” says the author of multiple relationship books and a sometimes puppeteer, who is now also a game developer. Her newly released “Where Should We Begin? — A Game of Stories” takes its name from her podcast and comes in a box designed, she says, to look like it might house exquisite Belgian chocolates.
During a virtual call with Perel, who was at her home in New York, we open the box and, instead of chocolates, I find a set of cards meant to inspire participants to tell a story. Soon I am playing a game in which I find myself revealing inner secrets with one of the most accomplished therapists of our time.
Following the path Perel suggests, the cards lead me to talk about something I wouldn’t tell my parents, as well as of a habit I need to let go. A tale of selfishness, loneliness and insecurity emerges from my recent pandemic days, plus a mistake that gets me to think deeply about games as a therapeutic tool.
I’m trying to figure out if Perel is joking — or using metaphors — when her advice involves a match, a piece of paper and an invitation to a friend or a date to more or less burn the past and set expectations aflame by creating a ritual of play.
“A ritual encapsulates a whole story,” Perel says. “Light a candle. Behind that candle is a whole story of commemoration, celebration, welcoming or yearning. But the candle doesn’t tell it just by its flame. By the context it’s all explained. Stories are like play, as play makes the stories.”
Think of each card in “Where Should We Begin?” as that candle, a story waiting to unfold.
FOR THOSE intherapy, it makes sense that Perel would make a game. Therapy can and even sometimes should feel like a game. For when we play we are malleable, dropping preconceived notions of what should or shouldn’t happen.
Play, says Perel, “is fundamental.” It’s “the way we make sense of our lives. It is a key to our hierarchy of needs. But because it is fundamental with children we have mistaken it. We say, ‘Play is for children.’ In fact, it performs an essential role.”
For all the struggles we have endured in the pandemic — the uncertainty, loss, loneliness, isolation and emotional havoc — a positive of the last year and a half was that we were reminded of the power of play.
Happy hours over video apps quickly become tiresome, yet games such as “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” “Among Us” and “Minecraft” thrived. They were a means to communicate.
“I think people found video games during the pandemic,” says behavioral scientist Jon Levy, whose book “You’re Invited” circles back to the importance of play numerous times when it comes to connecting with others. “Like getting people together and playing ‘Among Us,’ that’s awesome.”
Yet that’s not so much what Levy is interested in.
“I think the remedy, as we come out of this pandemic, is to not confuse play and party,” he says. “People will start socializing and drinking and get hangovers and all that, but what we want is play. We want that feeling of freedom in social interaction. I think the cure for loneliness and isolation is play. It’s low stakes. It’s high reward and it triggers belonging.”
“In a Protestant, puritan, antihedonistic and work-driven culture, play is not seen as productive,” says Perel. “It’s seen as not having an outcome. I think Protestant societies are challenged, because it is not something you can measure.”
Game designer-author Holly Gramazio says many view play as “hokey or embarrassing.” She recently collaborated on “The Infinite Playground,” a book full of play ideas that ask us to look at our world as a game board. The next time you’re in a museum, for instance, ask yourself: What one painting or sculpture would you take home if given the opportunity?
While not a game per se, it is play.
Gramazio has worked on a card game, “Art Deck,” designed to get us to draw unexpectedly — a fast track into learning the brains of our drawing companions — and has a passion for installation-like games that take place in public spaces.
“I’m interested in playing in a space as a way of knowing that space and feeling at home there,” says Gramazio. “When you were little, there was probably a game that depended on details of the space — a staircase or a corner — and a game that took advantage of those details. Play that takes advantage of the details of a space can make us feel at home there. I like giving people those experiences.”
There’s also a broader field of study around the gamification of daily life. This can range from point systems for chores or dieting to worksheets that view personal challenges as “bad guys,” or workplaces such as Amazon that are reported to use games to increase productivity. This sort of thinking, while I don’t doubt can be beneficial, generally hasn’t worked for me.
Gramazio helped me articulate the reason why. “I am opposed to mandatory play,” she says. “If you have to play a game, it’s no longer a game.
But people do connect well when they have a joint activity. A game that is simple takes the pressure off.”
I thought of this comment while thinking of the most important game I played during these late pandemic days, which incorporated an app but was centered on something I always thought was impossible for my racing mind: meditation.
It turns out a lot of other people think they’re bad at meditation too, which led to the creation of the Muse headband. “I’m a psychotherapist who teaches my patients to meditate, but I hated meditation,” says Ariel Garten, one of the core three developers of the Muse, designed to monitor brain activity and provide light audio prompts — a bird chirping, thunder — to put an aural image to how the brain is working.
“A million people can tell you what you’re supposed to do during meditation, but then you’re alone in a room with your thoughts that you’re trying to escape and they don’t go away,” Garten says. “So you think you’re not good at it, and we do not like doing things we’re not good at.” With Muse strapped around my head, some could argue I wasn’t meditating so much as hearing imagined forest worlds. But it worked, putting me in a game-like focus. I became a protagonist on an excavation into my brain.
When I was able to shift my mind away from thoughts I was trying to avoid, I would hear birds. But if I went back to a more depressing space, the rain came. What struck me with Muse, though, was that you can’t “win” at it. If you get excited that you’re hearing more birds, you have increased brain activity and the birds fly away.
“Even though we’re giving you reinforcement with the birds, you’re learning that you need to be equally as uninvested in your rewards and your failures,” says Garten. “It’s a lesson in equanimity. It’s a fascinating balance. We get you hooked, and you care about how many birds you get, but you need to be uninvested in getting the birds.”
Because? “That bird flies away,” she says.
“Through play, we create our opportunity, and we get out of
our fixed space,” says Garten. “So much of our neuroses or problems are because we get rigidly fixed on ideas. Psychological flexibility is the greatest predictor of success in a relationship. When we’re able to be psychologically flexible — play — we move from a rigid space to one that can explore possibilities that aren’t directly in front of us. So yes, play is essential.”
During the pandemic, Perel started to think of play as something we’d need as we get reacquainted with the world and with each other.
Front of mind still for Perel are issues concerning “collective grief, prolonged uncertainty, ambiguous loss and stress,” all of which may rear their heads at unexpected moments. She lists them and says, “This is heavy.”
And thus, she says, she started thinking of a game, but she doesn’t use that term: She talks of something prescriptive.
“What is the antidote to that heaviness, to that vigilance to constant risk management that we’re dealing with?” she says. “I wanted to talk about the importance of maintaining a sense of humor, a sense of playfulness, of remaining curious and remaining connected to life and nature through art and play. I wanted to create an experience.”
The goal: a game about the stories we tell, don’t tell, half tell and why. Prompts can be revealing — talk about a fantasy you’re conflicted about or discuss a text you fantasize sending but won’t. What makes the game unique is the way those prompts are paired with topics, which can alter the flow or tone of the narrative of the game.
“If I got a prompt card that said, ‘Share something that I’d never tell my mother,’ and then I got another prompt card that said, ‘Share something from my teenage point of view,’ that completely changes the way that I might interpret the story card, which says, ‘I’ll never forget about the time that ...,’ ” says Steve Tam, who helped Perel develop the game. “If I’m thinking about it through the lens of something I wouldn’t tell my mother, my mind goes to maybe some more illicit memories. If I’m thinking about that card through the lens with my teenage point of view, I’m now going to a more nostalgic place.”
PE R E L knew she had something when she play-tested the game with some of her oldest friends and heard secrets she didn’t know her lifelong confidants had.
“I don’t want people to play against each other,” she says. “I want a game where the presence of the group unlocks stuff in people that they didn’t see coming. It doesn’t have to happen in a therapy office. It happens at my dinner table.”
And it happens on a Zoom call. Once Perel and I start moving through her game, things escalate quickly. We talk first about sweets and vices. But it’s also hard to escape the recent pandemic, especially for those of us who went through challenging times and are eager to excavate them.
I should note: All this talk about play had me feeling relatively confident. Aside from moments of severe depression, I like to play all the time, and I’ve counted on games to rescue me from the former.
Yet if every psychotherapist I talk to tells me play is a key to happiness and growth, why recently did I recede and stumble into habits I thought I had long since kicked? Sure, the pandemic, but I want — need to get deeper. It’s too easy to blame a vice or an external event. Those are surface-level excuses, and then we don’t move forward with new tools. Bad things, after all, will always happen, but if play is a way to stop from spiraling, why did it recently fail me?
Or maybe it didn’t, since play is what set me on this journey of self-discovery. Perel’s cards create a veil in which digging into emotional struggles feels safe— a game for sharing and exhaling.
We get to talking that a potential concern that’s crystallized recently isn’t that I can’t play — I love to play — but that when it comes to my imagination I try to script it.
That is, I build worlds and scenarios for professional and personal relationships and often sketch out such imagined ideas on the page. I basically create a short, happily-ever-after story for every aspect of my life. When reality clashes with that fantasy, I can — let’s just say — stumble.
In the context of the game, she doesn’t see this as a major problem — whew — but I am encouraged to embrace my scripting habit and share it with those who are important to me, then play with it so it’s out in the open — toy with so it isn’t so much a below-the-surface anxiety as it is something to laugh over. Being upfront that early is, well, more of an “oh dear” than a whew, but change isn’t stubborn; like being in a state of play, it comes from being vulnerable.
Perel offers me a sort of game prescription: an entry or, depending on the circumstance, reentry ritual.
Write down all my ideas and preconceived notions, she tells me, and then bring them along on a future get-together with someone important. “Everyone has preconceived notions,” Perel says. “So take your little script and burn it in front of her or drown it in water. Ask her to join with her own. Then you’ve created a play ritual. And then you can talk.”
I like that idea. It feels like casting a spell, but I was wondering if a match was too intense. Perel picks up on my thoughts and dismisses them with a smile: “The elements just make it more dramatic,” she says, clearly having fun with the conversation her cards inspired. But more important, we’re getting outside of ourselves and creating a sense of escapism in the everyday — a moment of personal disarmament for later contemplation. This is ultimately a reason we play and what a deck of “Where Should We Begin?” can facilitate.
It’s a game, after all, about getting real with ourselves and those we treasure, and that is its own form of escapism.
“Lift yourself beyond the mundane,” she says. “Transcend boundaries. Transcend the limits of reality. All of that is escapism. This is not a game where you forget yourself.”
No. After all, the best games aren’t the ones in which we slay a dragon. Unless, maybe, it’s a mental dragon.