THURSDAY 2/16 ~ Ludic Liberation Lab: ATTACHMENT!
Can you earn Secure Attachment in a non-attached way?
Happy Valentine’s Day, stranger.
I hope that if you are choosing to engage with this Christo-capitalist holiday you take the time to honor more than just the presence of romantic love in your life. There are so many types of love! Love for friends, animals, places, plants, books, ideas, art, shared fantasies, collective projects. Sometimes I feel like I can deeply love a shape, a negative space, a word, or a moment, yet my affairs with these abstract, inanimate, and fleeting lovers go undocumented and uncelebrated by our monocentric concept of love.
Do you know that the word "Ludic" in Ludic Liberation comes from "ludus" — one of 8 types of love in the Greek language? The types are:
Eros (sexual passion)
Philia (deep friendship)
Ludus (playful love)
Agape (love for everyone)
Pragma (longstanding love)
Philautia (love of the self)
Storge (family love)
Mania (obsessive love)
Ludic love is free, playful, flirty, non-attached to any particular outcome. So it's ironic that this month's Ludic Liberation theme is ATTACHMENT.
Attachment theory is all the rage these days. Are you anxious or avoidant? Secure or disorganized? Fearful or dismissive? The research suggests that the attachment messages we internalize in our childhood significantly influence what our relationships look like as adults. If your current partnerships, friendships, and care networks feel unsatisfying or incomplete, your insecure attachment "style" may be to blame. But therapists counsel that we can change our ways and "earn" the coveted secure attachment, as long as we're willing to put in the work. We say — as long as you're willing to put in the PLAY!
Join February's Ludic Liberation Lab to see if you can form "SECURE ATTACHMENT" with a stranger in under 90 minutes! We will use game mechanics from RPGs and attachment theory to practice relational moves that confirm or challenge our childhood character conditioning. In the process, we will reveal how our inherited and culturally-influenced relationship scripts support or sabotage ways we show up in present love and relationships, and decide whether we want to change the rules. Can we design new relational scripts that are more effective, more authentic to us and our desires, and more liberating? Join the lab to find out!
We play to remember we are always playing!
This lab is collaboratively designed and will be facilitated in partnership with my Statistically Significant Other — Steven Koteff — with whom I am lucky to share many kinds of love, including deep love for words, pets, and play ❤️️.
🗓 THURSDAY, February 16th, 2022
⏰ 6-7:30pm EDT
📍 Zoom
🎟 FREE but registration required (and space is limited)!
The theme for Winter 2022-2023 Ludic Liberation Labs is ADULTING. What does it mean to become an adult? Does it mean giving up playing or inventing games? Does it mean keeping a calendar and having serious conversations and paying lots of bills? Can the enthusiastic acceptance of ADULT RESPONSIBILITIES be liberating?
This season, Ludic Liberation Lab is exploring questions of ADULTING through games related to AMBIVALENCE, ATTACHMENT, and BOUNDARIES! We'll need your help to make these topics fun and thrilling but ludic liberators believe that EVERYTHING CAN BE PLAYED WITH! Join the Labs and/or follow along in your personal existential experiments by subscribing to the Lab Report.