The Spiritual Social

Tag: gaming

  • The Better Angels of Our Nature

    Meeting a fallen angel in the Pale Clearing in the 2026 game “Welcome to Elderfield” by Chris Cote

    reconnecting to the source-ground of our feeling responses means reconnecting to the inner soul-child who has been cut off in a ‘psychic retreat’ and this constitutes an ensouling of the personality (…) in working through early trauma and its archetypal defenses we are in effect slowly freeing the – powers of the collective unconscious from the dark “fallen” roles as dismembering demons to play their larger life-enhancing role as the integrative life-restoring ‘better angels of our nature’” – p. 124, Kalsched, 2013

    I read last week Donald Kalsched’s second important book on trauma aptly titled “Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption” (2013), and like his first book it left a mark on me and I am now feeling slightly haunted by some of its content. This second book feels more dialectic than Kalsched’s previous work “The Inner World of Trauma” (1996) which I read back in April of this year during a difficult Easter in which I relapsed into depression, saved only by painting and retreating into Kalsched’s book. I think this second book expands on his core thesis that trauma generates a system of self-care which keeps us alive even during difficult life circumstances.

    Kalsched takes that notion and expands on it, showing how that very system can often backfire in keeping a traumatized person away from connecting to the world and other people. In this way, what seems like a protection mechanism can easily turn into a personal hell riddled with demons and monsters, further pushing the individual away from real living and connections. As such, the Inner Protector becomes the Inner Persecutor, keeping its willing ‘victim’ away from real love, intimacy and the comfort of human connections, but also keeping the pain, mistrust, lies and betrayal which normally exist in human relationships, safely away from the wounded person.

    The seductive dream world offers its inhabitant a uni-dimensional experience of life and it can be imagined as whispering: “I’ll keep you safe as long as you don’t connect to someone real and actually begin to live life again”. If the power dynamic is reversed, and through therapy the willing victim begins to recover and take control of their life, and healing is proceeding full-steam ahead, that’s when the self-care system can turn ‘evil’ and begin to trap the traumatized person into cycles of pain and self-sabotage.

    No one but Kalsched warned me about the powerful ‘latch on’ effect that the so-called cozy dream world has on the psyche, and how what can begin as a powerfully protective and safe inner paradise can suddenly turn dark and foreboding at the slightest hint of recovery and freedom. In relation to this system that wants to keep you all for itself, this song by the National popped up in my mind as I was writing these words:

    I liked how throughout the book, Kalsched contrasted his Jungian approach to trauma with Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” (the first book in his Divine Comedy trilogy, and one which I randomly purchased when I was about 15 years old) and also with Antoine de Saint Exupery’s “The Little Prince”. I’m more of a fan of Dante’s than St Exupery’s work, because for whatever reason I just couldn’t resonate as a child with the story of a prince on the moon taking care of his rose…it felt embarrassing to my little girl’s mind, and it still does to this day. Nonetheless, Kalsched links the Devil in the final circle of Hell, described by Dante as Dis (the roman God of the underworld, also known as Pluto) with the mechanism that lies of the root of all trauma and that is dissociation. To bring things into perspective he also sees the little prince as a symbol of the lost innocence of a person’s soul which happens as a consequence of trauma in the process of dissociation.

    Trauma and especially relationship trauma can “scare” the soul away from the body, and through strategies of staying somehow alive, such as dissociation, life continues on, but with the loss of the soul of the wounded individual. Traumatized people are “weird” because they no longer live in reality, they cannot bear the pain and suffering of relating as their soul escaped into a different world, one in which angels can become demons. He analyses this world by comparing it to Dante’s Inferno, and explores the Little Prince as an attempt of the human soul to regain its lost innocence before the trauma happened, to keep a vital spark that made life worth living.

    For many traumatized people, the pain they experienced in reality becomes in their inner world, the image of an internal Persecutor/Protector, a jailer who offers them safety in exchange for a solitary existence. Initially, this system of self-care appears in the form of angels and protective ancestral influences, benevolent beings who keep a person alive and grants them some sort of meaning, solid enough to keep them living against the odds. But through repeated attempts to relate to others in reality and then being disappointed (and in some cases re-traumatized by others) a traumatized person’s system of self-care can gradually change shape and turn from an inner paradise into a living hell, populated with curses, monsters, punishments and pain. Sometimes this becomes the Devouring Anima for men & the Sadistic Animus for women, and often this is expressed on the outside, in the real world as acts of self-sabotage and mental health symptoms. The patient begins to wrestle with the angel.

    Coming back to the larger perspective of Kalsched’s beautiful book I was really fascinated by the fact that he adopts a “psycho-spiritual approach”, which I am all about! Partly this may be the reason why I resonate so much with his writings. There is also an astrological reason why I am so drawn and uplifted by his work and that is because we are compatible signs, as I’m a Pisces Sun and Donald is a Capricorn Sun, so Water meets Earth in harmony, and on top of this his Sun touches upon my natal Neptune in Capricorn in the 3rd house. His work (the Sun) literally brings a spiritual approach (Neptune) to the working of my mind (3rd house).

    An image generated with Gemini of the planet Neptune and the sign of Capricorn

    I especially enjoyed his discussion of the two realms of existence: the real, material world and the spiritual, imaginary world in which people sometimes (and trauma survivors, often) escape into. Donald Kalsched believes a well-lived and healthy life is experienced in the middle part, on the bridge between these two worlds, where our bodies can become en-souled & feel alive enough to extract meaning from the spiritual and make things tangible in the practical. He offers the autobiography of Jung as an example of such a bridged life, where the analyst had to contain many times opposing forces within himself in order to expand his consciousness and reach “aha” moments of mental relief.

    Kalsched underlines that only by accepting human suffering can the soul of the traumatized person come back to the body, and make it feel alive again. In this process, the role of the therapist (linked in the book to the image of the poet Virgil who accompanies Dante on his journey through hell, limbo and heaven) bears a great responsibility. A receptive therapist may be in certain circumstances the last good link to reality or stable anchor that a traumatized patient may have with the real world. A therapist begins to assist the patient in this struggle with the angel, to experience the beauty of the liminal space again and not to escape into the imaginary world, or remain strictly in material reality. As Kalsched clarifies:

    “(…) it is a relationship that heals the trauma. But not just any relationship. The kind of relationship that makes a difference is the kind of transformative relationship actualized in the best contemporary psychotherapy (…). Such a relationship will have one eye open, looking outward and one eye closed, looking inward. Such a relationship will re-open both intersubjective & mytho-poetic space. It will “awaken the dreamer” in the patient. – p. 20,

    And also:

    there is a simple acceptance of the human condition, made possible by the previous long journey with a witnessing partner” – p. 125, Kalsched, 2013

    While I was reading Kalsched’s book in the evening, I was also playing games in the morning (I like to face the day with a strong cup of coffee and some minutes of gaming to wake up my brain). And lately I can’t get enough of the Eldritch-inspired horror farming game Welcome to Elderfield created by Chris Cote and released on Steam at the beginning of this month. In the game, among many horrible things that your character has to go through and fight, there is one that stood out to me, probably because it stimulated my unconscious concerns. There is a fallen angel that you come across at some point in the creepy Old Woods. This Angel resides in the Pale Clearing, a mystical, white, puffy place that sits in sharp contract to the jagged, rough, cumbersome decor of the rest of the frightening woods. Even the amazing soundtrack of the game disintegrates and loops ominously when you meet the fallen angel. You talk to the creature and it tells you that it once had a soul (it felt alive) but due to having fallen (the traumatic event) it remained isolated (hasn’t seen a living soul in ages) and is now hungry (blocked psychic energy that needs to be expressed).

    Screen-capture from the game Welcome to Elderfield

    The Angel is ravenous and the only thing that may satiate its hunger is a living soul, either yours or the unfortunate one you may trap in one of your adventures. So, I caught such a living soul as a loot drop after I destroyed a Chest Mimic, and offered it to the angel to see what happens. Will my offer redeem the fallen creature? Well no, I was naive. The Angel devoured the soul in nano-seconds, accompanied by a very graphic description of the act. But then again, I am playing a horror game, so shit like this was naturally going to happen. What was I thinking? 🙂

    In the Bible, we are told that fallen angels are demons even if they present themselves by their names before the fall, they become as such mirages of evil. However, Tammy Montgomery in her book “The Angel in Annunciation and Synchronicity:Knowledge and Belief in Carl Jung” believes that the dark, fallen or somber angel can have curative properties at the same time as it delivers scary messages, as she explains:

    The presence of the somber angel, then, does not signify the presence of evil. Instead, it signals the conveyance of sobering information or insight into what once lay hidden (…) the process by which these dark contents come to light is often dreadful, painful, and inescapable. – p, 103, Montgomery, 2013

    So, the fallen angel can be seen as an aspect of the Shadow energy at work in my life, and this is what this moment in the game left such a strong impression on me. And hoards of fallen angels or a general interest in demons and demonology could be indicative of the Shadow aspect of our collective unconscious, asking for some sort of light and interpretative redemption, like the ‘fallen angels’ in our celebrity worship.

    Reading Kalsched’s text in parallel with playing this game jumpstarted my brain and something became illuminated. Trying to understand how the self-care system ‘s personal protection mechanism of keeping a victim trapped inside of themselves in a world filled with so-called angels, helped me see how emotionally attached I too had been in the past with this sugary, stereotypical understanding of divinity as purely “love and light”. In reality, the true presence of God exists in every rushed decision, act of self-sabotage or hellish day. As the zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said at some point ‘no mud, no lotus’. So beware the presence of paradise for it could contain more evil than obvious evil could actually engender.

    This is why I believe women are so drawn in our current landscape to romance-fantasy books in which they make love to monsters. Because a monster can show you who he really is from the beginning, while an evil prince charming first has to deceive you and then destroy you. And it is the deception that amplifies the trauma. But more on this in another post…

    I’m told by a quick Google search that the phrase “the better angels of our nature” was coined by Abraham Lincoln desperately trying to avoid a civil war and it was a call to solidarity and compassion during a period of division (The Dis in Dante’s Hell running amok in the nascent American collective unconscious). For Jung the main problem of the 20th century was the problem of the human soul, and the continuous pressure it has to withstand to remain whole and not be broken into two sides: the deeply materialistic one or the completely spiritual one. He believed mental health lies in the liminal space between the two, on the psychic bridge which would lead a person to moments of tension followed by moments of growth and then consciousness expansion.

    Jung had Saturn in Aquarius and because he was a visionary he could pre-empt the movements of the psyche under the guidance of the planet Uranus, the very same movements which are transforming society during this decade and the next under Pluto’s transit through innovative Aquarius.

    I was struck after finishing Kalsched’s book on the story of how the soul can be lost due to trauma by sinking into the depths of a profound depression or it can be invaded by anxiety, two very common mental health concerns during a time in which we have collectively lost our faith in a Higher Power. I don’t think there’s a coincidence that as God is no longer worshipped, individual psychic content is emerging as sheer madness out on the streets and on social media. My teacher, Mihaela Minulescu discusses how the human psyche has a symbolising function and a dia-bolising function: the first one helps brings thing into union, into a cohesive whole, while the latter severs, cuts, separates. It is the psychic equivalent of “the devil” within us all. The one who comes out when we choose to struggle with the angel, as we lose hope in life, ourselves and other people.

    But the unconscious is always concerned with our adaptation to the social world around us and it will continue to send us dreams, moods, symptoms, synchronicities and will pull us into people who can help us in our healing journey. The important thing is that we stay open to it all, so that life can work through us rather than leave us. Communicating and checking in with one’s soul is as vital as brushing teeth, and can be part of the everyday hygiene of life. By having this constant inner dialogue with our spiritual nature then maybe we can bring some magic into our surrounding reality or at least enjoy and notice the magic that already exists in plain sight.

    With universal love,

    Lexi

  • Escapism

    As the year draws to a close, I want to reflect on some of the most memorable and emotional gaming experiences I had in the last 12 months. 2024 has been a year in which I was gradually introduced to a variety of new games, after Stardew Valley took me ‘hostage’ since I started playing it in 2021. The gaming platform and provider, Steam played a major role in this change in my gaming, since it began to notify me of new games and offer a variety of impressive discounts. So, I gradually started looking into these new adventures and I was surprised at the range of emotions I experienced while playing them. Some of these games touched me on such a deep level that I felt transformed after I played them, and I wanted to share my impressions, in case I may inspire you to give them a try.

    1) Strange Horticulture (2022), Bad Viking

    A game with probably one of the most haunting atmospheres you could envision, Strange Horticulture is about a mysterious shopkeeper who is trying to keep her mind intact. She is putting clues together and identifying new plants, cataloguing and dealing with the townsfolk odd requests, while also trying to keep a rising depression at bay. As the shopkeeper, you also get to travel to collect plants and gather information. The plants are poetically named and the collection is large. The pervasive sense of dread that looms over the entire game matched by the constant rain, smoked oaky graphics and flowing controls make it such an engrossing play! It’s like nothing I’ve ever played before; kind of like a weird blend of Murder, She Wrote meets Plants versus Zombies meets the constant gloomy weather of Blade Runner and the heavy sadness engulfing Dark Water. The only downside of this game is that it ends too soon, as I think I finished it in roughly 4 hours. The highlight is that it has a number of alternative endings so you can play over and over again and meet a different conclusion. The same creators are now preparing a new game called Strange Antiquities, and if it’s half as good as this one, then I’m already excited about it. If you don’t enjoy daylight and like plants (which may sound like an oxymoron), give this sullen gem a try.

    2) Sally Face (2016), Portable Moose

    If Strange Horticulture grazed the surface of a potential depressive episode taking over our main character, in Sally Face issues related to murder, disfigurement, soul snatching, suicide and involvement with a satanic cult are tackle in such a direct way that it packs a powerful emotional punch. The difficult themes and gore present in the game are somewhat softened by the caricature-like drawings of the main characters and difficulty of some of the puzzles involved. Needless to say, the game begins with a night-marish situation and continues very much so for the entirety of 5 episodes. Just as a heads up: it gets worse for the main characters rather than easier for them, as they find themselves involved in a plot that is bigger than the building in which you are initially conducting your personal investigation. Time passes, characters grow but so too does the darkness and it is this passing of time and watching how they developed from deep childhood trauma, that makes the game so emotional as well as the fate of its main character and the way he manages to somehow be forever connected to the girls of his dreams (it’s not what you’d expect!).

    To be honest, Sally Face had me crying towards the end, after I compulsively played through all the episodes in just two days because I really wanted to know what was going on with Sal and his group of friends. Again, it’s not a game I would recommend to everyone as it will only please a select few, but if you have any Scorpio/Capricorn/Pisces energy in your chart and you grew up in the post-communist 90s environment listening to Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ on repeat, then you are going to love this game. And on a final note, I would say that escaping into a game in which you need to keep your character alive and to care for their depression, well this temporarily takes your mind off your own; and it’s a liberating feeling.

    3) Paradise Killer (2020), Kaizen Game Works

    At the polar opposite to Sally Face is Paradise Killer, which in my humble opinion is the best game I played in 2024! You play as the exiled investigator Lady Love Dies, a heart-adorned goddess of the law who is called back from her exiled state after serving 3M days because there was a problem in the creation of the latest version of Paradise Island, that problem being that the entire ruling council was murdered by a common citizen, one Henry Division. Until the crimes are solved, no one can escape this version of the island in order to be updated/uploaded into the new one, a more perfect version of Paradise, also known as sequence 25. What follows is sheer beauty as you get to explore paradise, collect clues and blood crystals, order funny drinks from vending machines and chat with some criminally over-developed characters.. all while enjoying some vapour-wave, synth music in the background and preparing your incriminatory case for the Judge. It’s colourful, smooth, esoteric, funny, brash and pleasant, it’s the perfect game to play during a summer holiday. And despite being a walk’n’talk adventure it never gets boring, as you always feel like there is more to discover in the kitschy-cool environment or more conversations to be had with the usual suspects. Plus Shinji is the best antidote to any creeping sadness or melancholy you may be feeling. Please, do yourself a favour and play it over the upcoming holidays.

    4) Botany Manor (2024), Whitethorn Games

    This game is the lighter, brighter and breezier alternative to Strange Horticulture. You play as botanist Arabella Green who is writing a book on the special and peculiar behaviours of rare plants. In the process you get to explore an English countryside manor, gather clues and cultivate magical flora until you grow specific plants. Even if you may feel green with envy at the gorgeous environment of Ms Green’s homestead, at least you get to practice your green thumb (ok, I’ll stop now) and escape your immediate reality in this beautifully sunlight game replete with inventive puzzles (my favourite was making the apple cider to water the seeds of the Pixie Tears pot). The graphics and game mechanics take a little bit of adjusting to, but the game leads to such a subtly heart-breaking and yet oddly empowering conclusion that you may just miss it if you don’t pay attention. Like an unfolding rose, this game is filled with minute, pretty details that will make you want to re-play it several times. I know I will.

    5) Pools (2024), Tensori

    ICONIC. This game is so innocent looking at first glance that you may be mysteriously sucked into giving it a random chance to ‘see what all the fuss is about’, only to be faced with such deep primordial fears that you feel like pushing the lid down on your laptop and seeking professional help. On the surface pools is a beautifully design minimalist, liminal masterpiece in which you get thrown from a ladder onto an odd and super clean environment in which you just walk around splashing in pools. You don’t know how you got there; you don’t know who put you there, you don’t even know how you look, nor can you look out the windows that populate the space because they are brimming with powerful white light. Are you on a spaceship? Are you an alien? Are you a person who bought a ticket to an underwater adventure-land only to be met with this string of water-filled rooms? How do you get out? And what even is out in this context? The game is advertised as “rooms filled with pools, a game which has no monsters but can invoke fears of getting lost, the dark, and tight spaces”. And wow! those fears can become so palpable: from being met with a deep howl or whispers in the dark, to walking in an unlit room knee-deep in water and randomly being touched by large inflatable ducks, to finally finding a light under the water only to see a ladder going down into the pool and a pair of human hands reaching out from below towards you.

    The worst was probably the ending to chapter one in which you have to walk on a thin sliver only to reach a small diving platform but the trick is that there is not water around you just pitch-black darkness, literally encouraging you to jump from a great height straight into the unknown/the pitch-black darkness around you. I had to gather all the courage I had to jump and once I landed into the next chapter, I went out for a run just to emotionally self-regulate. Without a doubt this game is free therapy, if you are brave enough to slide on its glistening, wet tiles and you enjoy random, self-induced thrills. By the way, at the time of writing this, I am still trying to find my way out of level 2 and I am reliant upon game maps made by more experienced players.

    6) Grim Fandango Remastered (2015), Double Fine Production

    A classic game, not only in the genre it is part of (noir adventure) but overall, a classic as part of the string of awesome Lucas Arts Entertainment Games that were released during the 90s and that populated many of our after-school hours. The first time I played it, I think I was about 14 -15ish and I was so captivated by the story and the graphics (I always had a thing for art deco and El Dia de Los Muertos, and this game combined them both!!) only to be disappointed by the game mechanics. I got perpetually stuck in the first part of the game, not really understanding how to throw the rope made of ties to the other side of the building in order to make it stick (see, this was in the dark ages, a time before the existence of play-throughs). The game was also clunky to play on an old-fashioned computer keyboard and the rising frustration that I felt eventually made me abandon the game since I had other hobbies to focus on (like painting my bedroom door while listening to Garbage or Creed). Cut to 26 years later and here I was on a cold October day when I suddenly received a notification from Steam that Grim Fandango (the remastered version) can now be purchased for 3 dollars. I clicked all the way until I heard Many Calavera’s voice enticing me to pick up the note in his info-tube and never looked back.

    And this is how I managed to fulfill a teenage dream, to finally play this game and find out exactly what actually made the fandango so grim. Oh boy, and the story is actually EPIC. It spans across years and continents, somehow driven by our main character’s (travel agent to the dead, Manuel ‘Manny’ Calavera) capacity to transform every opportunity thrown his way into a lucrative business operation: he owns a restaurant, he sails and leads a ship and all throughout it, he never stops searching for his sweetheart, a woman with a heart of gold called Mercedes ‘Meche’ Colomar. On his adventures, Manny is helped and somewhat also perturbed by his close friend, the gentle giant Glotis.

    It is a deeply funny and life-inspiring game, despite the grim nature of the proceedings with many adorable little details that give you food for thought: such as seeing skeletons transform into fertile soil for flowers once they are killed. Grim manages to tell a sweeping story about difficult topics such as death, divorce, betrayal, exile and exploitation without ever falling into melodrama and always, always making fun of itself and this is why it’s such an amazing game that reaches your heart at the same time. It’s like watching a movie, a beautifully designed, cleverly scripted, demented movie that borrows elements from Casablanca, Key Largo and the Maltese Falcon (all those Humphrey Bogart classics, which true fans will appreciate). It took me 26 years to see Meche and Manny together in that amazing final cut scene, but I think in this case the wait was certainly worth it!

    I wish I could extend this list to 10 games but that would be untrue as I only played and loved the 6 ones above. Honourable mention goes to: Potion Craft – The Alchemist Simulator, a game that is pretty decent and fun but a bit repetitive; Melatonin – a game which sounds and looks better than it actually is to play, as passing to new levels is strangely difficult and the story is uninspiring; and The Unavowed, a dark game I enjoyed playing but simply hated the ending, so it didn’t make this list. All of the above-mentioned games will be included in gameplays on my second YouTube channel The Eden Nearby, so it’s worth subscribing in order to be notified when I upload each clip. Comment down below and let me know what games you played this year, if at all, and what games have made it into your top 10.

    With universal love,

    Lexi