Dear Ludic Liberators,
I have a personal definition of truth that I developed during grad school (a time when I started to feel empowered to make my own definitions, but I believe everyone should try it — no special education necessary!). I’ll offer it here and see if you like it, too:
Truth is a locally coherent configuration of conceptual and contextual elements.
Let me try rephrasing it a few other ways. Truth is what makes sense to ourselves in a specific time and place with the extent of presently available information. Truth is the meaning we impose on a bounded collection of elements — observations, feelings, ideas, objects, memories.Truth is always a relative and temporary accomplishment.
Please note I’m not talking about capital-T, universal Truth here, as pursued by the study of philosophy, but rather the relational, existential truth we are preoccupied with most of the time. This little-t truth can still be life-altering, can lead us to make big new decisions (or re-commit to old ones) or show up to a situation with creativity or cowering. The truth that’s locally coherent for us is now, in this moment. As the elements change — the context, the ideas, the emotions, the moment — so does the truth, and what we should do about it.
How might the temporality and mutability of truth assist us in the process of liberation — the pursuit of freeing ourselves from real and perceived limitations? (Many traditions argue that it’s only seeing the Ultimate Truth that finally liberates us, and I agree in the cosmic sense, but when we play our little existential games on this material plane, we’re still trapped by our little lies and half-truths in myriad ways, and knowing that NOTHING MATTERS or LOVE IS ALL might not really help us decide what to do about our present relationship or job or procrastination habit; as infinite players we need to continuously practice daily micro-liberations.) To investigate this question, at last month’s Ludic Liberation Lab we formulated several hypotheses to collectively test with a number of relational TRUTH GAMES.
Here are the hypotheses — I think they’re pretty provocative on their own:
The pursuit of liberation via truth is really the pursuit of clarity.
The only truth that matters (for existential liberation) is emotional truth.
Blocking or hiding our truth constrains our capacity to act spontaneously; spontaneity is a form of liberation.
Sometimes the present truth can make us feel stuck, but a flight of imagination (the articulation of a possible alternative truth) can liberate us towards new ways of being and relating.
We used several games to explore our theories:
Circling - an Authentic Relating practice that helps to surface what’s present and true in the collective here-and-now. We start with noticing our internal embodied experience (e.g., “My feet are falling asleep”), then move onto observing others in the group (e.g., “I notice X person smiling”), then voicing our curiosities and the stories we are holding (e.g., “I have a story I’m the only one who looks at myself on the screen”, “I’m curious what’s going on behind people’s backgrounds”) .
The Google game - another Authentic Relating practice that invites probing the deep with the shallow. The game involves “googling” each other on literally anything from “drumming” to “how do you know when to break up with your boyfriend” — and allowing whatever comes up from the vault of the googled person’s life to form the top results, one of which we then we then “click” on.
Doubling - a technique from Psychodrama that involves tuning into someone else’s truth and voicing what they might be thinking or feeling in the moment. The person can then repeat the statement or correct it to be more reflective of their truth.
Here’s what we learned:
Games can help clear a space for finding internal clarity. If clarity is necessary in our pursuit of liberation, a game’s set of socially unusual scripts can temporarily remove what’s unimportant and help us focus our attention on the relevant configuration of elements. As one player reflected,
“I wonder whether getting to the truth requires us to be at least temporarily distracted from ourselves or our usual patterns. And that distraction for me came in the form of a concentration on the games that we experimented with. There's work going on in the Self towards that which one needs to understand, but doesn't need to be the focus. So it's a different kind of clearing that I experienced.”
Relational prompts that lower the stakes and invite small, temporary truths help us build up the trust to be more vulnerable and honest with one another. For example, the prompts to notice what’s going in our bodies during the Circling game helped us practice being honest about how we felt in the moment. Feeling the collective acceptance of these revelations in turn encouraged us to take bigger risks, and reveal more. In the words of one of the players,
“the more honesty that I muster, the more liberated I feel, and then the more I hide, the more I feel constrained into my little box over here.”
Iteratively clarifying our truth helps us feel more understood. The Doubling game was especially wonderful for this because of its explicit rule for rephrasing statements that do not feel true for the speaker. As one of the players debriefed,
“I'm very sensitive to being misunderstood, but having permission to correct the story made it actually feel totally fine and actually really helpful when people like weren't quite right or were off.”
Why play truth games?
Playing truth games with strangers or with ourselves can help us cultivate internal clarity, and be/feel more connected to others, and more confident in our decisions. And we need help in all these areas because we play existential truth-avoidance games all the time. Here are two games you or people you know probably play unconsciously:
Truth, dislocated — The game of putting the truth in someone else. This is a game of being unwilling to “own up” to the truth in yourself, and using the tricky maneuver of placing the truth in someone else — your partner, your enemy, your neighbor. For example, say you are feeling lonely and missing your friend. Rather than thinking about ways you’ve manufactured your own loneliness, you might think, “My friend is ignoring me.” A more self-located truth might be, “I haven’t reached out to my friend in a while,” or “I am expecting my friend to do all the work of maintaining our friendship,” but taking responsibility for something that causes our own suffering is displeasing to our ego. So in order to face the truth, we first dislocate it. (That’s why it’s so helpful to externalize our insides — because we can overcome the limitations of our own perspective by putting it into another form.) Playing relational truth games — like Circling or Doubling — can help us distribute the truth among other people, see it reflected, and then try it back on ourselves.
An excellent tool for testing whether you’ve dislocated your truth is “The Work” by Byron Katie. After years of doing her worksheets, I almost instinctively imagine that any judgemental statement I make about another person (e.g. “They are being selfish”, "They are trying to trick me”) can be more truthfully rephrased as being about me (“I am being selfish” or “I am trying to trick me/them”).Truth, exiled — The game of putting the truth into your own shadow. This game is more twisted than the above one, because it involves first coding the truth as especially bad, shameful, taboo, and then hiding it from ourselves in our unconscious while cleverly presenting ourselves as the opposite. I often suspect someone is playing this game when they’re very loud and public about what’s “really important” to them or make claims about the thing “they’ll never do.” Imagine a yoga teacher who claims that sexual relations with students are deeply unethical and should never be allowed, who is later inevitably revealed to have had sexual relations with their students. Similarly, when someone loudly says, “I’m a feminist,” I’m always curious in what ways they’ve hidden/exiled their internalized misogyny. Our personal local truth is never moralistic or pure, but we are afraid to own its contradictions, so we use morals, ethics, and external ideologies as a way to hide the conditioned complexities of what we really are. But when we exile our truth from ourselves, we are bound to contradict what we say and what we do anyway, to send mixed messages, or to “accidentally” act out our shadow selves.
Carolyn Elliott’s Existential Kink is a very good technique for un-exiling your truth, as is the parts work of Internal Family Systems therapy. But we can also use the relational games described above to poke at the shadow and exiled truths with each other (especially through Doubling!), and see if they might want to reveal themselves and transform.
Truth = Clarity + Honesty?
Here’s a new theory I’m developing after our experiments and I’ve got a truth table to show for it.
Perhaps the quality of relational truth can be formulated as the combination of Clarity and Honesty. Clarity being the ability to really see the truth, and honesty being the ability to really express it.
Clarity without Honesty is Lying. Honesty without Clarity is Confusion. Lack of Clarity with lack of Honesty is Unconsciousness — not even knowing where to start. Clarity together with Honesty is an Actionable Truth. We can get better at both Clarity and Honesty by playing relational truth games that invite us to see and clarify our truth and take risks in expressing it. This theory is very fledging and perhaps only very locally coherent. What do you think?
🎲🎁 TRUTH DETECTOR - A Game of Discernment
I would like to leave you a game gift! If you missed the lab but want to play with truth, I am excited to share an original Ludic Liberation game with you called Truth Detector. The game was created as a Personal Existential Game (PEG) for an early client but has since proven to powerfully stimulate personal discernment in many existential players. It invites you to formulate a truth statement and then test it using data from your own body and wisdom and influences. There’s also a fun “points” element that makes you feel like you’re in a bit of a contest with yourself! The game requires pen and paper and some sacred time for exploring your truth. Download it below, and if you play it, let me know what you think!
Next Lab - November 17th - Acquaintance Therapy
Get excited for November’s Ludic Liberation Lab on November 17th. We will continue experimenting with “relational risk” through an innovative new practice of Acquaintance Therapy, led by my Deep Play Institute colleague Netta Sadovsky.
During this 90 minute experiment we will treat our group of online acquaintances with the temporary reverence of couples therapy. We will study who we are to one another and why, and who we would like to become. Questions that will guide the exploration: What are we doing to ourselves and each other, consciously and unconsciously, in each passing moment? What acquaintance ghosts do we project into this exchange? What roles do we feel drawn into within this group and why? What do we want from and for this group? This experimental form is designed for people who want to take on emotional risk for the sake of relational learning. The facilitator, Netta Sadovsky, is a therapist specializing in here-and-now group process from a Psychodynamic perspective, with training in Internal Family Systems Therapy and small group consultancy in the Tavistock Group Relations tradition.
The Lab is free and your strangeness is necessary for us to learn and liberate together, so please register and come! In case you feel motivated by testimonials (who doesn’t?), here’s what a recent participant shared about their experience with Ludic Liberation Labs:
“I've really loved coming to your labs—I can't believe it took me this long to get my sh*t together to show up. It's already such a high priority for me to be there, now that I've experienced it.”
(I love getting responses like this btw, if you ever want to hit reply and let me know how you’re feeling — it gives me great pleasure and really encourages me to keep going ☺️)
Okay, bye 👋! Hope to play with you soon 🤡!
Remotely Truthful,
Natalia
Existential Game maker/Destroyer ♾️🎲