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.

Obama's Failure to Explain the Market Crash

What story is Obama telling about the Market Crash?

Why, in America, do poor and disenfranchised people stay so loyal to right-wing politics in the face of their ever-decreasing share of the pie?

It seems to me that many of the people who are into the Tea Party would be better served by some kind of equality movement where the goal is to distribute wealth better. What would make sense, be more reasonable would be people working together to improve their lot -- not making it easier for the rich to get richer in the off-chance that, somehow they might stumble on to some money themselves.

Since I've been thinking about narrative/story-mind, American politics makes a lot more sense to me. It's not about reason vs irrationality, ignorance vs knowledge. It's about storytelling. Stories are the true drivers of meaning, motivation and action in our lives -- and in politics. We can't get around it, (or at least that's the hypothesis of this blog). That's the way our minds work, that's what makes meaning. So, it makes sense that you're not going to convince people to do things differently by using 'reason'.

Frontier Stories, Rugged Individualism

Hands-down, for the last few decades the right has told better stories. They've tapped into the American Dream, New World, Rugged Individualist narratives. They've told a story that government is bad. Religious narratives. These are powerful stories. The American Dream is an archetypal success story that is very hard to resist. They are clear stories, well told (and oft-repeated).

And, those narratives have a lot to offer. Even if you're poor. Because it is not really about how big your house is or how new your car is, or if you can afford Organic. Those things are less important than having meaning, having the world and your life make sense. 

If there's a different story -- a different way of seeing the world that works better for everyone -- it would be good to learn how to tell it. Tap into a rich mythology, a tapestry of stories that gives a person a complete vision of what, say, a more equal society would look like. Tell stories that are more internally consistent, that, like a good movie, build excitement about the future and make people want to take action.

I went digging online to see if I could find a more learned person saying the same kind of thing: I found an  article in the New York Times, by Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

The article, "What Happened to Obama's Passion?" muses on the missed opportunity of the market crash, where Obama could have told a great story about greed, corruption, going after the bad guys who ruined the world economy. Instead, he kinda said, well, nothing. Shortly after, that void was filled by Tea Party. Here's the story Westen had wished Obama had told:

“I know you’re scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn’t work out. And it didn’t work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can’t promise that we won’t make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again.”[Read Full Article]

Not a bad story. It's a little thin, and sounds a bit too much like the standard lefty rhetoric. But it's a start. At least it has a bad guy.

Meet Emo Boy

I found him on Google Images. The picture is named emoboy.jpg. Obviously the person who shared the image has a story about 'Emo'. It's not just how Emos look. There's a lot of stuff going on in the Emo Story. What Emos generally value, dating practices, where they like to live etc...

A picture is worth a thousand words. So is a tattoo. So is a funky pair of jeans that seems to be falling off. Or a big belt buckle. Or a lean body with 2% body fat. What story do these things tell you?

What's the story he tells himself about his choice to get a giant heart on his chest? Hopefully it's not ironic. That would be serious commitment to irony.

Someone on the 'outside' is saying he's an 'emo'. What's his version of the story?