Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games
A new book in October 2024
About This Book — Introduction
Welcome to Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games!
As the title says, this book is about exploration. And it was an exploration for me as I was writing it. I hope it will be a happy exploration for you or at least help you turn tedious and scary thoughts, discussions, and internal conflicts with your emotions into something curious and fun to explore.
This book is not a work of science.
If you are searching for one, I recommend reading Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart. It not only demonstrates the results of countless studies conducted by Brené Brown and her team but also by many other teams of scientists studying emotions around the world. Brené Brown makes research results accessible and gathers many valuable resources with recommendations and possibilities to research further for whatever emotions or experiences of those eighty-seven she and her colleagues have addressed interest you most. In addition to the wealth of references and resources she offers, Brené Brown includes findings from her previous acclaimed works. However, as in those earlier works, she adds a personal touch and shares her personal experiences. I resonated with both the research results and the author’s personal experiences, which would be obvious if you ever happen to open a copy of the book on my e-reader and see the numerous highlights in it.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is neither a glossary collecting emotions to whomever the knowledge of them may be of interest and importance.
If you are a writer, filmmaker, or game designer and searching for how emotions translate into thoughts, body movements, and other internal and external reactions of a character, then be sure to get a copy of The Emotion Thesaurus by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.
If you are a children’s educator and need a handy cheat sheet when you help children deal with their emotions, then you can find one created by Tom Drummond and offered as a PDF file on the page he titled “Emotion/Feeling Vocabulary.”
If you need to explain emotions to children and want to make the topic more tangible for them, tap into the wealth of the A Little SPOT of Feelings series of books written and illustrated by Diane Alber. I got a copy of her acclaimed A Little SPOT of Feelings: Emotion Detective and found it extremely helpful in my research and understanding of emotions and feelings. So, it can serve not only children but adults as well.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games does not attempt to replicate any of these brilliant resources and the efforts that have been put into them.
I did use the resources above and beyond for inspiration and sources for valuable quotes. But this book turned out to be something completely different.
It offers a simple and fun guide and tools to navigate your emotional response to the worlds inside and around you as your life unfolds.
Why might you need such a guide? So that you can let yourself feel whatever emotion washes over you without suffering. Instead, you can learn from the experience with curiosity and be empowered by what you learn. Learning helps us grow and survive and is essential for living to the fullest since learning can be fun. Because, essentially,
“Fun is just another word for learning.”
— Raph Koster, Theory of Fun for Game Design
[Koster, Raph. Theory of Fun for Game Design (p. 47). O’Reilly Media. Kindle Edition.]
I highly recommend reading Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, A Little SPOT of Feelings by Diane Alber, and other books and resources studying and exploring emotions. It will help you better understand what happened to you and the people around you when you and they experienced these emotions in the past and prepare you to understand, cope with, and also embrace them better in the future.
But before or while you gather knowledge about emotions through reading, watching, or listening, and also after you forget the knowledge you gathered when you are in the middle of experiencing them — which is often described as being hit by them — you can profit from simple tools to navigate your experience of emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
That is what this book is about. Here is how this book is structured and how you can use it.
After this introduction, Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is split into three parts.
Part I, “Why and How to Explore Emotions Like Games,” explains why it makes sense to explore emotions and anything related to them, like games. It also provides you with definitions of concepts of emotions, feelings, and experiences. Then, you will learn about games, game components, and how these relate to emotions and anything in life. And finally, I will share the tools for the gameful exploration of emotions.
Part II, “Examples of Exploration,” demonstrates many examples of such gameful explorations. At some point in writing this book, I chose to explore emotions, feelings, and other related concepts in pairs. I address the reasons for this several times in the book, starting with Chapter 10, “Contrasts and Opposites,” which begins Part II of the book.
Before I continue to describe the next and final part of the book, here are a few words about Part II, which I named “Examples of Exploration.” This title is deliberate because, in contrast to Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, which makes the science of emotions accessible and understandable, I am not after any research in this book. Even if I worked in science and have a Ph.D. connected to it, I don’t have any background in psychology or related fields.
Part II of this book is utterly personal. These are my personal explorations. Yours will be different from mine. There might be commonalities, but there will also be differences. I discovered that when I taught this gameful approach to emotions to students studying writing, film-making, and game design at South Gate Creative Writing School in Aalborg, Denmark. We played a kind of lottery game, and one of the students picked “envy” along with a couple of other emotions to explore. Before the course, I wrote a chapter on envy. Our explorations had a few common threads but were generally quite different. But both rang true, if not entirely, to the student, me, and others who participated in that seminar. Still, we could resonate with many aspects of both explorations, our own and the other explorers’.
The awareness of the difference in perspective from various persons and also from the same person at different times and circumstances became a big epiphany for me. I would never be able to express how one might perceive emotions and all the aspects of their experience in various situations. Trying to provide precise definitions of emotions myself would only narrow the topic unnecessarily and distort the uniqueness of individual experiences of emotions.
The following inspiring quote I found in Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown confirmed the realization I had above:
“Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint.”
— David Kessler
[This pearl of wisdom by David Kessler is quoted by Brené Brown in Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (p. 111). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.]
That is true for any emotion. Each person’s experience of an emotion is as unique as their fingerprint. Simplifying it into a few brief lines would not be of any help, but being of help was and is ultimately my intent with this book.
The experience at the seminar and the epiphany that followed were enlightening for me. They demonstrated firsthand that each of us needs to explore our own emotions, define them, and understand them. But, like in games, we can learn from watching others play and explore those games. So, this is what Part II is for — to share my explorations and gameful definitions of emotions and anything that relates to them with you and to show you how I play these emotion navigation games and what experiences I make along the way.
In Part III, “Stories of Experiences,” I share six stories I wrote as part of my other books, which illustrate various experiences of emotions. One of the stories is from one of my fictional books, but it is a true story and is about my own experiences. I precede each story with reference to the book it was initially published in and follow it with a list of emotions, which I and other people I mention in the stories I think have experienced and navigated. You will also see how the tools of a gameful approach to emotions and life can help you navigate emotions with ease and even with joy.
Two chapters conclude this book.
Chapter 50, “An Infinite List,” was my playground to collect all the terms I could find for emotions, feelings, and related experiences or concepts. The list grew and grew until I realized that human beings will not only never stop evolving in general, but also when it comes to expressing the ways they are experiencing their emotions and how they deal with them will never stop either. That is how this chapter became what I call a beginning or part of an infinite list of emotions and anything that relates to them.
Chapter 51, “Your Turn — Conclusion,” summarizes this book and offers a few final tips for your own explorations.
After reading the summary above, you might wonder whether to read this book from beginning to end or browse and read whatever speaks to you at any moment. Ultimately, it is up to you, but if you would like a bit of advice from me, here it is.
I suggest that if you read this book for the first time, then read Part I in the order it was written as if you were reading a novel. And just like in the case of a novel, I recommend that you don’t expect that reading it will change you. You change every day, every moment, if you will, anyway. You don’t need to push the change. I hope the only expectations you have for this book and this particular part of it are for it to be interesting, fun, and engaging to read. And I hope this book will fulfill these expectations. If it will, then it will be of value. And it will become your awareness booster. That is one of my favorite expressions nowadays, and I find it speaks for itself.
You can read Part II and Part III of the book in the same way as Part I, and I hope you will find many awareness boosters there as well. However, you can also read the chapters and stories in them, like in Choose Your Own Adventure books, where after reading each chapter, you can choose how the story unfolds next.
At this point, you might wonder why I wrote this book and why I claim that it makes sense to explore emotions like games, and later in Chapter 2, “Reasons,” in Part I, I will address this in more detail. But here is my main intention for this book, summarized in an analogy.
When you are overwhelmed by an emotion and express that in any way, many people around you will say, “Let yourself feel it.”
But how can we let ourselves feel, especially if we want to feel but not hurt, or at least not suffer in the process?
When an emotion or a swarm of them blinds you with fear as a bee swarm might, you might not be able to tap into all the knowledge you tapped until now. You might not even be able to name what you are experiencing at that moment.
This book will make you aware of simple tools you already possess but do not know how they can help you navigate and feel your emotions with curiosity and a sense of fun as opposed to the hurt or suffering many might relate to.
By the end of reading this book, and with the skill sets you will discover having and strengthening while reading — even if you might not believe it — you will be able to become aware easier and quicker when something is off and where you need to take a closer look.
Then, you will be able to separate one bee of emotion from the whole swarm and look at it without hurting it — and yourself further — or being stung by it.
You will then be able to recognize where this emotion takes you, which behaviors it dictates if you act upon it, and what could be the results of those behaviors. Last but not least, and probably most significantly, you will recognize what choices you made related to your state of mind, the circumstances you are in, the worlds inside and around you, and the state that prompted you to experience that emotion. Or you could say you will become aware of what led you to engage in that emotion game.
A note on terminology: In Chapter 3, “Meaning and Definitions,” you will see that there are differences between emotions, feelings, and experiences. In some cases, it isn’t easy to differentiate between them. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to any of these when considered through a gameful prism as an “emotion game.” Further, please note that I don’t use the term “emotional game” in this book because any game and how you experience its gameplay can be emotional. Here, we explore emotions like games; thus, we focus on emotion games, not emotional games.
The skill sets described in this book will help you see that you can stop playing a disturbing emotion game, either while or even before engaging in the behaviors that emotion might demand. You will also find out that you can choose to play another game, which will help you ignite healing and empowering emotions.
The gameful approach in this book will help you also undo the knots of seemingly small discomforts and upsets before they can become huge swarms of angry bees chasing you.
To use other analogies, this book gives you simple but bright and fun tools to navigate emotional storms and swirling undercurrents and enjoy your life’s journey wherever it takes you.
About this article:
It is an excerpt from Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games: How to Feel with Curiosity Rather Than Suffering.
In this book, Victoria Ichizli-Bartels offers simple tools to explore your emotions, resulting feelings, and connected experiences as if they were games.
Ichizli-Bartels argues that you may not be able to control your emotions, but you can navigate them; often without having to act through them, but allowing yourself to feel with curiosity and without suffering, pressure, or guilt. All you have to do is know your tools and use them well during your navigation adventure.
Navigate Your Emotions by Exploring Them Like Games is a surprising, revolutionary, and never-before-undertaken approach to exploring emotions, feelings, and experiences by dissecting them into the main and well-known game components: goals, rules, feedback systems, and voluntary participation.
The three parts of the book present a detailed introduction to the approach, many examples of gameful explorations of emotions, feelings, and related concepts considered in pairs, and true stories from the author’s life illustrating sometimes surprising but always illuminating experiences of emotions.
The concluding two chapters will introduce you to the start of an infinite list of emotions, feelings, and related concepts and give you some ideas and a template for your gameful explorations of emotions.
Letting yourself feel an emotion does not need to be stressful or scary. Take the gameful challenge this book offers. Learn how to navigate your emotions by exploring them like games, the tools you will need for that, and what you can do to control these tools and become the best designer and player of the fantastic game collection that is your life.
P.S.
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