Is it just me, or is “Breath of the Wild” a perfect metaphor for therapy?

I’ve been playing so much Breath of the Wild lately. SO MUCH. An amount that makes my eyes hurt and deprives me of sleep and seems to make hours of the day disappear in a snap.

If you don’t know it, don’t worry; video game knowledge is not a prerequisite for understanding the points of this piece. But to fill you in briefly, it’s an open-world game for the Nintendo Switch in the Legend of Zelda series, of which I had played exactly zero games before starting BotW. I’m not normally into the type of video game where you run around fighting goblins with swords and looking for treasure chests in dungeons, but friends (who knew me well) kept telling me I would love this game, so I finally picked it up.

I want to talk about how this game is a metaphor for the process of healing trauma through therapy, and one of the ways this is most true is that I really didn’t like the game at first. Accustomed to the more sedate turn-based combat of Pokémon games, I got anxious and keyed up trying to fight monsters in real-time. Robots were firing lasers at me, ogres were chasing after me, and I had a measly three hearts of health, so I could barely withstand any of their hits without dying and having to start over from my last save. It was so frustrating and nervewracking that I wanted to throw my Switch across the room, many times. I almost gave up on the game entirely. This is a lot like the earliest parts of the therapy process.

I wasn’t one of those people who had to be dragged kicking and screaming to therapy, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled about it either. And who could blame me? Investigating your deepest, oldest traumas is hard as fuck. No thank you. I’d rather lie on the couch and numb myself into a Netflix haze, thanks. But I knew the time had come, because the pit of despair that awaited me when I didn’t numb myself out pursued me so relentlessly that it seemed wiser to address it than to keep trying to avoid it.

Initial sessions of therapy felt like those initial play sessions of BotW: frustrating, discouraging, hopeless. (I remember when my roommate told me she’d also gotten into BotW and had already beaten some bosses, and I felt stunned and confused; I could barely get through the early areas without getting blown up.) Therapy led me down paths lined with buried landmines of emotion, forced me to throw myself on those landmines and feel their full impact. There was a lot of crying. There were a lot of times when, after saying goodbye to my therapist and hanging up the phone at the end of my appointment, I just sat and stared at the wall for an indeterminate amount of time, feeling utterly wrecked, like a novice without a shield.

It didn’t feel like it would ever, ever get easier. How could it? And yet it did. Eventually.

One of the remarkable things about Breath of the Wild is that its progression is almost entirely non-linear and up to the player. Once you get through the tutorial and some other cursory things early on, you could theoretically walk right into the scariest, toughest dungeon in the entire game – Hyrule Castle – and face the final boss, Calamity Ganon. But since at that point you only have three hearts of health, shitty equipment, minimal armor, and no allies, it would be a fool’s errand for all but the most masterful and experienced of players. (The community of BotW speed-runners on YouTube and Twitch is quite a marvel. I don’t think it’s possible to “speed-run” therapy in the same way, though.)

But as you roam around the world, completing various small side quests, fighting various minor enemies, and traversing various easy-to-middling dungeons, things start to change. You earn more hearts, more stamina. You get your hands on better weapons, shields, and armor. And whenever you successfully fight your way through one of the game’s major dungeons (known as “Divine Beasts”), you earn extra powers, and an ally who’ll help you out in your eventual fight against the big boss. In other words, you become stronger.

Therapy is like this too. You can’t rush straight into the hardest stuff unless you’ve already done extensive deep emotional work which, let’s face it, you probably haven’t done. (I think obsessively about psychology on the regs and even minored in it in university and I still found this shit incredibly challenging and painful.) But as you amble around the landscape of your mind, there’s a lot you can pick up that can help you on your way. The in-the-moment anxiety-mitigation strategies I got from doing cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), for example, are like foods you can eat to replenish your hearts in BotW – you’re still limited by the amount of hearts you have, but at least you can refill them when you need to. And strategies I’ve learned for taking care of myself when I get triggered into a dissociative state are like the potions in BotW which help you travel through very cold or very hot lands without getting hurt by the extreme temperatures.

The dungeons in BotW remind me of the emotional energy expended on maintaining friendships and other key relationships. This can be hard for people with depression and other symptoms of trauma, especially when living through a pandemic when the easy-mode ways of doing this (regular conversations at your school/workplace, regular family functions or friend-group parties, etc.) are limited. But when you put the work in, the results are clear: you gain an ally who’ll (hopefully) help you when you need them most (and of course, you'll help them too). You’ll be able to rush into proverbial battles more boldly, knowing someone is backing you up.

I just today acquired the Master Sword, one of the best weapons in the game, and it made me think about IFS (Internal Family Systems), the therapy modality that has probably saved my life these past couple years. CBT and some other modalities I’ve used are helpful in the short-term but haven’t helped me actually heal my trauma like IFS is doing. Maybe CBT is like one of the low-quality spears of wood and bone that you can access early on in the game: it’ll do fine while fighting off certain weak enemies, but if you try to use it on tougher opponents, it’ll break in short order and then you’ll be fucked. I genuinely feel that IFS is my Master Sword; it can’t be the only weapon in my arsenal, because everyone needs a variety, but it is the most powerful tool I’ve ever stumbled across and I know it’s going to help me slay a whole lotta monsters from now on.

Much ink has been spilled about the mental health effects of video games, with passionate advocates on both sides of the debate. What I can tell you, though, is that Breath of the Wild has given me a wonderful metaphor for the trials and tribulations of the therapy process, which I’m still very much in the middle of. And though sometimes fire-breathing dragons seem to be attacking me from every direction, I have better weapons, better armor, and better allies now than I had when I started, and I’m determined to make it out of this dungeon alive and smiling.