In an effort once again to avoid sitting down to write, I decided to watch a DVD on “Writing Great Fiction,” a presentation from The Great Courses that I purchased a while ago, because isn’t there at least one novel in each of us? The lecture was interesting and was working perfectly as the distractor I’d hoped for until the lecturer began to say that good fiction is about characters trapped in situations not of their own making which force them to deal with the situations as best they can.
He said that fiction usually begins in the middle of things, and differentiated “story,” which is the chronological listing of events, from “plot,” which is the story plus causality and motivation. He went on to say that writers bring meaning out of meaninglessness. They make order out of chaos. They select facts and order those facts a certain way.
I realized that is exactly the way we live our own lives and that lies at the heart of narrative psychology. And suddenly I was back to writing a blog entry, although not the one I had planned.
Freud wrote about dream narratives; Jung about universal life myths. But neither they nor any classic theorists from the early part of the 20th century imagined people as storytellers and their lives as stories to be told. In the past 20 years or so a number of psychologists have suggested that the elements of personal narrative are important in understanding personality and also as a focus of psychotherapy.
How do we develop the stories of our lives?
Viewing one’s life as storytelling is by definition a retrospective activity. Even though we may tell a chronological story, we do so through the eyes of the individual we are at that moment. So, how did we get to this moment in order to tell the story just this way? What influences shape today’s “me?”
First, our parents tell us a story: whether the world is basically good or bad and how to act in either circumstance; whether we should trust anyone or have loyalty to anyone outside the family; whether we’re lucky or unlucky. We hear what kind of person we are: “you’re just like …;” “oh, you’re such a (scaredy-cat, adventurer, bookworm, athlete, genius, etc.);” “you’re (a sneak, a thief, a good girl, totally special).” They alert us as children about what things to pay attention to – either good or bad – and encourage us to ignore the other things. That’s the beginning of our personal GPS, as it were, which may be why people seem so comfortable having a disembodied voice saying, “Recalculating. Turn left in 100 yards.”
But that story isn’t written on the child as a tabula rasa. There is an intersection of the family story with the inborn temperament of the child. Any parent of more than one child will tell you that each child was different from day one or even before birth. One of my 2 children tap-danced and kicked my ribs frequently during pregnancy while the other one was more modest in activity. And that characteristic held true in childhood and even now that they are adults.
Starting in 1956 and continuing over several decades, Alexander Thomas, MD, and Stella Chess, MD, studied a cohort of children from birth, including direct observation and interviews with parents (the New York Longitudinal Study.) The team came up with nine separate “qualities” associated with personality and temperament that were present from birth and rather stable over time. These traits were:
- Activity level
- Regularity or rhythmicity
- Initial reaction, also known as approach/withdrawal
- Adaptability to new things
- Intensity – the energy level of a negative or positive reaction
- Mood
- Distractibility or focus
- Persistence and attention span especially through frustrations
- Sensitivity, also known as sensory threshold.
Thomas and Chess found that not only did the parents influence the child, but the child’s temperament traits affected and influenced the parents. This was most apparent in the instances when there was a major mismatch between parental and child temperaments and the parent(s) reacted with antagonism or anxiety. In general, the study found that even with a mismatch of temperaments, if there was congruence of a child’s behavior with the parent’s “goals, standards and values,” the nature of the parents’ response was more positive.
So, the quiet, shy child born to a family that likes to roughhouse and play touch football, hears that he isn’t fitting in and develops a life story of not-good-enough and expecting the world to be critical. The child with a high activity level and intense reactions to events, born to quiet academic parents, also hears a story that sets her up to feel like a misfit in social situations. The child with the good enough fit with her parents’ temperaments and expectations still absorbs story lines from parental admonitions and from watching her parents interact with the world, and begins to weave her own story of her life.
Dan P. McAdams, PhD, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and author of the 2006 book The Redemptive Selfformulated a “life-story model of identity” which held that by adolescence, we begin to understand our lives as evolving stories that incorporate the parental stories into our own narrative. He theorized that we are continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave. If we can come to understand how our life stories are built, we may be able to alter our own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.
Isn’t helping patients revise their life story what therapy is all about?
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