I used to LARP fairly frequently in college, mostly in single-session games lasting 4-8h, but occasionally in longer formats. I enjoyed it but also found my experience sometimes confusingly different from (how I interpreted) the self-reports of many other LARPers.
In particular, taking on the role of a character was typically a fairly intellectual or “analytic” exercise for me; I could read a character sheet and internalize a character’s motivations and character traits, and attempt to behave in the ways I believed that character would behave, but it typically involved a moderately-explicit internal thought process of “Okay, how would this character behave? What are their salient motivations or backstory here? How does that influence them?” In contrast, I got the sense from talking to friends that they were often “becoming” their characters in a somewhat deeper sense: actually feeling (to some degree) that character’s emotions or feelings, internalizing them, and assuming that persona to some greater extent where they could “just act” and be acting with that character’s identity to a larger degree.
This was all very much my inferences and interpretations of the ways others described their experiences; I cannot attest that I am faithfully describing anyone else’s experiences in the way they would or that they would necessarily endorse.
Because I am who I am, I sometimes likened this in my mind to “emulation” vs “virtualization”; I was “emulating” the characters I was playing more-explicitly by modeling them explicitly in my head, while (I got the impression that) others were modeling their character by mapping larger fractions of their decision-making and mental and emotional states directly onto their own cognitive hardware, in a way reminisicent of “virtualizing” a guest machine by executing most instructions directly.
Over the last few years I’ve been reading more about Internal Family Systems, or IFS, on the weight of numerous recommendations from friends. To vastly oversimplify, IFS models individuals’ psyches as containing multiple different “parts,” each of which can be viewed as a somewhat-independent actor with their own goals and motivations, and which interact and inform our experience and emotions in various ways. IFS asks us to get to know our parts, and learn what goals they are working in service of, or what traumas they are reacting to, and so on.
IFS literature often conceptualizes this as an internal conversation between your “Self” and a part, in which you will ask the part questions, listen to its answers, and otherwise mentally “be with” the part in various ways.
I have found IFS often very insighful and informative about my own experiences and struggles; the models and paradigms I see in IFS books often resonate and have provided me with useful insights or perspectives. In my judgment, experienced IFS practitioners appear to understand important true things about the range of human experience that are not always well-captured by other sources.
At the same time, the “core conceit” of IFS, of accessing a part, and conceptualizing it as another entity inside your head, often including identifying facts like what age it is, or how it is behaving or presenting itself, have fallen almost entirely flat to me. I have maybe once had the experience of “accessing a part” in a way that seem recognizable to me from the vignettes in (say) Self-Therapy.
But the framework has nonetheless often been very useful to me, as an analytical tool! I have certainly identified emotions or narratives within me, conceptualized them as a “part” of me that is a component of but distinct from the whole, and expressed curiosity about its origins and motivations and function, and sometimes found it useful. But when I do so it feels much more like an intellectual detective game, thinking about my experience and my life and the circumstances under which I have felt a given feeling. I can ask questions like “Given what I understand aobut that part, what might make it feel more heard, or safer? When would I expect it to be triggered?” and arrive at useful answers.
… which, finally, brings me to my long-winded point and the connection I am trying to draw. This experience reminds me a lot of my relationship with LARPing a character, except that this time it is a part of myself I am attempting to understand or role-play. My reading leads me to believe that authors expect me to “inhabit” the part in some fuller way, to draw on my own emotional capacity and experiential abilities to “have a conversation” with the part and “ask it questions” in such a way that the answers to those questions appear to “just arrive” from that part, instead of from a considered analysis of “what that pat would say.” But instead, my experience is not that, but is one where I arrive at at-least-somewhat-similar results, but via a much more laborious and analytical path; and in which I find the results useful, but also less … mystical(?) … than I am lead to believe.
This may all be a long-winded way of saying that I am an overly-intellectualizing nerd with somewhat-stunted emotional development and access to or awareness of my own feelings and emotional experiences. That’s certainly true, although it’s something I’ve made immense progress on over the last 5-10 years. And I have noticed that as I’ve done so, I’ve gained marginally more access to “the experiences I understand other people to be saying they are having” in both domains. But it doesn’t feel like the only thing going on here, to me, as best as I can discern, albeit with low confidence.
