Narrative Identity

 From On Being with Krista Tippet.  Guest, Sara Hendren:

Tippet: You said in adulthood when something really big happens to you, you either just kind of assimilate it into the preexisting story that you’ve been living by, or you accommodate and you make room for this experience, and your story shifts. 

Hendren: My dear friend and colleague John Adler studies narrative identity in adulthood. He’s at Olin College where I worked until this year. And he taught me this kind of, that we make stories of our lives as a biological imperative. We have to see our lives as coherent. And now whether that takes on a positive cast overall or a negative one is what makes a lot of the difference. But, the coherence is really powerful. We need to tell stories that do make sense over time of how we got to where we are. And in the science it’s a feature of, really, how we exist. There’s genetic factors, and there’s nurture, environmental factors, and then there’s this story-making. 

from Adler (The healing power of stories): There is a large body of scientific work supporting the theory of narrative identity, which suggests that our sense of self is best described as the integrative, internalized, evolving story we weave about our lives. While the historical facts of our lives certainly matter, the meaning we make about our experiences, captured in the stories we tell about them, is also strongly connected to our mental health. But not all stories are created equal; some of them do a better job of supporting our psychological well-being. Our work with participants in the Healing Story Sessions strives to capitalize on those aspects of personal narrative that social science has shown to be most strongly associated with mental health.

From research study by Adler:

Four themes in people’s stories were related to these different paths:

Agency: When people made sense of their lives with a sense that they were in the driver’s seat, as opposed to being batted around at the whims of external forces, they experienced positive trajectories of mental health in the following years.

Communion: When people described their lives as marked by connections with close others, they experienced positive trends in their mental health in the following years.

Redemption: When people’s stories about difficult or challenging experiences included a shift in the emotional tone towards some positivity, insight, or lesson they drew from the experience, they showed positive trajectories of mental health in the following years.

Contamination: When people’s stories had patterns wherein positive beginnings gave way to negative endings, they showed negative trajectories of mental health in the following years.

He provides one participants response:

I value that experience in that it – along with the experiences of my aunt – has given me a positive and healthy outlook . . . I’ve often said to myself through my life that if I’m ever told that I have cancer that I’m going to say to the doctor, “Okay, so what’s next? What do we do now? Because I’m not trying to die. What are we going to do to eradicate this cancer? What are my options?” That’s the position I’m going to take. It doesn’t matter what type of disease, cancer, whatever . . . I have personal experiences that I can look at that say it’s possible that I can get through that if that should ever happen in my life.

In this passage, the participant demonstrates how her highly agentic and redemptive narrative of her past health challenge has given her a foundation for approaching hypothetical future challenges that may arise. She says that she will feel empowered the next time she gets sick and values the health challenge for its ability to demonstrate how positive outcomes may result from negative experiences.