Several years ago, I read a book by Dan P. McAdams on narrative psychology, describing identity as a personal myth we create in order to construct a sense of meaning, unity and purpose in our lives. In The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, McAdams argues that we consciously or unconsciously compose a heroic narrative that integrates our remembered past, our perceived present and our anticipated future in a way that illustrates essential truths about ourselves. For much of the past year, I've been wrestling with a revision to the story I make up about myself, as I iteratively recalibrate my self perceptions in response to the feedback I've received from others. Throughout this time, I have been increasingly reminded of McAdams' insights – and becoming aware of other related insights – and thought it might be helpful (at least to me) to compile some of them here.
According to McAdams' story, storytelling is not just a way for us to make sense of ourselves, it is the primary vehicle through which we communicate with others. Stories provide a way for others to make sense of us – "what's your story?" – and a way for all of us to make sense of the world … which may help explain why our predilection for primary sources of stories – e.g., Fox News vs. MSNBC – can lead to such radically different perspectives of reality.
One of the most valuable insights I gleaned from the book was McAdams' discussion of human motivation. Some theories posit a single, grand motive that explains why we do the things we do, whether that motive be religiously inspired or more secular in nature (e.g., Carl Jung's notion of self-actualization). Other theories propose a panoply of potential impulses that prompt our behavior (e.g., William James' list includes fear, sympathy, sociability, play, acquisitiveness, modesty, nurturance and love). A middle way casts motivation as a fundamental conflict between two opposing forces, e.g., power and love, or agency and communion. I've encountered this dualistic tension in my own experience and in a wide variety of other accounts of human behavior (e.g., intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation and acceptance, striving and interdependence), and this characterization by McAdams really resonates with me.
Power and love are the two great themes of myth and story. Protagonists and antagonists are striving, in one way or another, to do one or both of these two basic things: (1) to assert themselves in powerful ways, and (2) to merge themselves with others in bonds of love, friendship and intimacy. … Characters in stories [desire] to expand, preserve and enhance the self as a powerful and autonomous agent in the world, and to relate, merge and surrender the self to other selves within a loving and intimate community. …
This motivational duality in human existence is probably best described by the psychologist David Bakan, who distinguishes between agency and communion. According to Bakan, agency and communion are the two "fundamental modalities in the existence of living forms", organizing a great variety of human wants, needs, desires and goals. Agency refers to the individual's striving to separate from others, to master the environment, to assert, protect and expand the self. The aim is to become a powerful and autonomous "agent", a force to be reckoned with. By contrast, communion refers to the individual's striving to lose his or her own individuality by merging with others, participating in something that is larger than the self, and relating to others in warm, close, intimate and loving ways.
McAdams proceeds to offer a timeline for how the stories we make up about ourselves tend to develop throughout the arcs of our lives: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age and the later years. As we age, we have increasingly more fodder for our stories … and a keener awareness of the importance of the stories that – we hope – will eventually outlive us: "good lives, like good stories, require good endings". We want to live not only a memorable life, but a memoirable life.
To a large extent, the good life is justified by the good story. And the good life story is one of the most important gifts we can offer each other.
For those who are concerned about crafting memoirable accounts of their lives, McAdams identifies six features that are present in good identity stories:
- coherence: the characters, their actions and motivations, and the events in which they participate unfold in a way that makes sense, although a good story often accommodates ambiguity
- openness: the characters change and exhibit growth over time, often accommodating some measure of ambiguity
- credibility: although creative imagination and biased interpretation is inevitable, the story is grounded in reality
- differentiation: the story has a rich characterization, plot and theme, and becomes both more complex and better differentiated from other stories over time
- reconciliation: a good story raises tough issues and dynamic contradictions, but harmony and resolution must ultimately prevail amid the multiplicity of self
- generative imagination: the best personal myths represent an integration with a social world that is larger and more enduring than the self, enhancing the mythmaking of others; "Ideally, the mythmaker's art should benefit both the artist who fashions the myth and the society that adorns it."
A recent post by Valeria Maltoni on ConversationAgent reviewing 3 books on leadership, a vision of life as play and acting on what matters includes a brief summary of James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, a generative and inspiring book that I first read when it was published in 1986. I periodically re-read the book during different life chapters, each time finding new insights that speak to my new context. In re-reading it this time, after being prompted by Valeria's post, I came upon a quote that also speaks to the power and generativity of stories … and storytellers.
True storytellers do not know their own story. What they listen to in their poiesis [creative activity] is the disclosure that wherever there is closure there is the possibility of a new opening, that they do not die at the end, but in the course of play. Neither do they know anyone else's story in its entirety. The primary work of historians is to open up all cultural termini, to reveal continuity where we have assumed something has ended, to remind us that no one's life, and no culture can be known, as one would know a poiema [artifact, or product of creative activity], but only learned, as one would learn a poiesis. [79]
Great stories cannot be observed, any more than an infinite game can have an audience. Once I hear the story, I enter into its own dimensionality. I inhabit its space at its time. I do not therefore understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story. Stories that have the enduring strength of myths reach through the experience to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result of this generative touch, not its cause. So far as is this the case that we can even say that if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us. [95]
I first encountered McAdams' book (first published in 1993) while reading and reviewing Sam Gosling's book about the story our stuff tells about us – Snoop, an investigation into possessions, perceptions, projections and personalities – in 2008. More recently, I viewed and wrote about Brene Brown's TEDxHouston talk on Wholeheartedness: connection through courage, vulnerability and authenticity, and started reading the associated book – The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are – in which she talks about the importance of not just composing but embracing our stories:
If we want to live fully, without the constant fear of not being enough, we have to own our story.
I was also inspired by a recent tweet by Seb Paquet,
The stories we tell ourselves can serve as straitjackets for stagnation, or scaffolding for transformation.
This confluence of stories – and microstories – about the power of stories, coupled with own struggle with stagnation and transformation, prompted me to revisit McAdams' book, and share some of the insights he shares about narrative psychology.
Returning to The Stories We Live By, toward the end of the book, McAdams offers a roadmap for identifying, living and perhaps even changing our personal myths, based on the intimate interviews he and his colleagues have conducted over the years. The central element of his approach is interpersonal dialogue: the telling of one's story to a sympathetic listener, a witness who is willing and able to be enthusiastic, affirming and nonjudgmental (someone I would call a speed dial friend). The Life Story Interview process [available online] involves the elicitation of life chapters, key scenes, future script, challenges, personal ideology, life theme and reflection. I have not participated in this full and formal process (yet), but do plan to delve into some of these issues in an upcoming post about the latest life chapter I am currently drafting.
Comments
10 responses to “The Stories We Make Up About Ourselves”
Looks like typepad ate my comment – you should use WordPress! 🙂
Excellent post, as usual. You have a thoughtfulness and link-richness that is very rare these days on the web.
As a reference: In Taleb’s Black Swan, he talks in the early chapters about narrative fallacy, a kind of cognitive bias, where we project stories and narratives into data where there isn’t any sort of story at all. Narratives have potency, but they also have flaws.
@Scott: I’ve experienced some frustrations with Typepad, myself, and am sad to learn it’s also affecting you (and probably other prospective commentators). I have reserved gumption.wordpress.com, but am resistant to migrating … and losing whatever Google juice I’ve built up over the years here at Typepad.
Thanks for the pointer to The Black Swan. I saw Taleb – along with Nouriel Roubini – interviewed by Paul Solman on the PBS Newshour several months ago, and was intrigued with the theory. I forgot to add the book to my reading list, but have now.
Your description of narrative fallacy reminds me of the definition of apophenia – “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”. I first discovered the term through danah boyd’s blog (“apophenia: making connections where none existed”), and as someone who [also] regularly experiences this phenomenon, I was somewhat disheartened to discover later that the term is generally used as a descriptor for a mental illness … i.e., it is seen as a bug rather than feature in the medical community.
The issue of truth and fallacy also reminds me of the specific Carse quote that Valeria Mantoni had included in her blog post about his book:
Kia ora Joe e hoa,
Interesting thoughts as always. I suppose we all have a story to tell, and would all love to be the hero and ride off into the sunset with the girl in the end. I know in my own place in this virtual world where I try to share a love of the mountains and wilderness, the one aspect I sometimes forget about out here in the hindsight and comfort of my home are the moments of doubt, or the times I simply don’t want to climb anymore, or find the route down too steep, ect. Of course I have to to get past that, but sometimes those moments are very real and perhaps add to the story. For instance I just returned yesterday from the mountains where a day and a half from the roadend I took a bad fall off a rock in a river and badly sprained my ankle. It was a real journey down the rest of the river to the hut, a restless and painful night, then a further 5 hour hobble to the car. There didn’t seem to be much connection to the story I tell on my blog. But today, in hindsight, I guess there is. And that is in wilderness there is also risk as well as reward. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thanks for your place here Joe, just wanted to also wish you and yours a very peaceful and healthy new Year. Ti hei mauri ora e hoa! Kia kaha.
Aroha,
Robb
Robb: I am always inspired by the stories of the mountains you tell on your blog.
I often find it challenging to decide which details to include in or omit from a story, and the challenge increases with the scope of the story, e.g., deciding what to include in a story of my life vs. deciding what to include in a blog post about a conference I’ve attended.
Your reference to wilderness, risk and reward is very relevant to the next blog post I plan to compose, in which I will be making some choices about which details to include in the latest update to the story I make up about my life (and the choices I’ve made) … which involves risks and rewards in a metaphorical wilderness, reminiscent of Dante:
Thanks for new year wishes. I particularly like – and am not surprised by – your choice to not offer the traditional “happy” new year salutation. I’m increasingly coming to see happiness as overrated, and am more concerned with meaning – and peace and health – than happiness, so I wish you and your family a meaningful new year.
“For much of the past year, I’ve been wrestling with a revision to the story I make up about myself, as I iteratively recalibrate my self perceptions in response to the feedback I’ve received from others.”
So, Joe, I would call this a bit of a teaser line — unless you’ve addressed it someplace else. (It sounds very much like the beginning of a good story). Care to disclose more?
Best to you!
Dan: I was initially tempted to broaden and deepen my subsequent post – about joining the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Institute of Technology – to include more of the story I make up about myself. Given the time constraints of getting up to speed in this new life / work chapter, I decided to limit the backstory for that post to a single paragraph of preemptive self-disclosure.
I remember an invitation to disclose you passed along as part of a blogosphere meme four years ago, to which I responded by disclosing 5 things blog you might not know about me (or, more properly, 5 things other blog readers might not know, given that you know me pretty well). I found that reflection and writing exercise to be very rewarding, and passing the meme along helped open up and/or strengthen other relationships … exemplifying Rene Brown’s ideas about enhancing connections through embracing vulnerability. However, the post represented 5 mini-stories rather than a “heroic narrative” that pulls together the remembered past, perceived present and anticipated future.
I welcome yet another invitation to stretch. I wholeheartedly intend to reflect further on – and disclose more about – the story I make up about myself … as soon as I can carve out the time, amid all the demands of my new role.
Thank you, Joe. I’m sure you are very busy and I, too, want to offer my congratulations to you for achieving this next “chapter.” Per my last blog post an interesting side topic might be the stories (and dreams) about ourselves that we lose along the way. [Or as I heard Oprah say one day to a guest disappointed in her life, “It’s time to get yourself another dream…”] All the best in your new position. They are so lucky to have you!
Thanks, Dan – for the kind words and the pointer to your post about the alchemy of lost dreams & renewed resolve. I do think some of my dreams – or goals – have shifted from chapter to chapter, and I seem to have come around full circle on at least one of them … and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that when I write [more] about the story I make up about myself.
Nice article, thanks for the information.
Joe, thanks for introducing me to McAdams, I was unfamiliar with his work. You read a blog on my Green Psychology website: http://greenpsychology.net/2012/05/discover-your-personal-narrative/ and in response you suggested people who are interested should read your blog. I agree. You provide a robust perspective on how one creates and is influenced by their personal narrative. On my website I am approaching this from a similar point of view, but I focus on 7 areas that contribute to a healthy narrative. I don’t think any of them conflict with what you are presenting here. Thanks for sharing.