Integrative Life Stories and Narrative Therapy

I've been thinking about my life story. Or, rather, my complete and utter lack of a life story. If I do have a story that I'm telling myself it is not something I could coherently string together on paper or in conversation with a friend. If someone asked me the most basic questions about my story:

1. Where have you come from?
2. Where are you now?
3. Where are you going?

I'd be hard-pressed to answer them. They are deep questions. It would help if I had a religious tradition to draw upon (especially for #1). I grew up in a household of scientistic athiests, who fit in well with the 20th Century project of forgetting the past and dismissing tradition.

Furthermore, my family was one of those families that never talked about anything: not the past, not their parents, not mistakes that were made or successes. There wasn't a lot of storytelling going on in my household. I never really picked up the habit or the skill.

Having answers to these questions, having a 'story',  I expect, would be a powerful thing -- aside from making sense of my life satisfactorily, they would also help in real-world scenarios. People can't help you if they don't know where you're going. Persuading people that you are worth investing time/money etc. into would be easier if you had a clear story.

I found a paper by Dan P. McAdams, The role of narrative in personality psychology today (PDF), while searching for work on how narrative shapes meaning in our lives. McAdams uses a concept in the paper that seemed to fit what I've been talking about: integrative life stories.

McAdams describes integrative life stories as "those internalized and evolving self-narratives that people construct to make sense of their lives in time." "....we live in and through our stories."

Where do these stories come from? Do we create them? McAdams thinks they are drawn from a 'menu' that is provided by our culture. We select from the 'menu' stories that help us make sense of events and emotions that we experience in our lives.

The paper also had a nice run-through of the history of personality psychology. Excited by the fact that someone was doing similar work I looked him up and found that he had a book out, published by Oxford University Press. The book, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, didn't really hold up to the promise of his essay. Drag, since I bought it.

McAdams should probably hit the books and think a bit more about stories and narratives because his knowledge of story forms is so limited that it makes his book almost useless. I'm really surprised that Oxford editors didn't say something. I'll do a review of the book in an upcoming post.

In my travels I also found a branch of therapy called Narrative Therapy. Wikipedia summarizes it thus:

Narrative therapy holds that our identities are shaped by the accounts of our lives found in our stories or narratives. A narrative therapist is interested in helping others fully describe their rich stories and trajectories, modes of living, and possibilities associated with them. At the same time, this therapist is interested in co-investigating a problem's many influences, including on the person himself and on their chief relationships.

So, I'm not alone in thinking that narrative is important. I'm going to look more into narrative therapy and integrative life stories. Although I'm interested in how deep narrative runs in our perception of the world, it is work on identity and meaning which has the most emotional resonance.