Rewriting Your Story: The Power of Narrative Identity

0:04 This is Crappy to Happy and I am your host, Cas Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Hello and welcome to another solo episode of Crappy to Happy, and I promise you I will be back with guests very soon. But like I said last week, for just the next couple of weeks, I'm focusing on solo episodes while I'm quite busy with a kickoff of my Beyond Confident group coaching program.

0:56 Have a lovely group of women who have just joined me for that pro and I'm very excited to work with them over the next few months. Now. Speaking of coaching, I myself have been engaging in some professional development to upschill myself as a coach and also to learn skills and tools that I can pass on to you and to pass on to my own clients. And in the context of running your own business or running a coaching business, we were asked to do an activity which was all about telling your story, like telling the story of how you came to be where you are now. If you've ever seen any online marketers or even just people in the media, people who write books, and they always have this kind of very coherent story about how they came to be doing what they're doing, or how what they've had to overcome to get to this point which has led them to doing the thing that they're doing. So it's a very a typical kind of process I guess that you would do in this context of telling people who you are and what you do in business, but we all do this in our lives all the time.

2:02 And there is a whole theory called narrative identity theory, which is essentially the story that you tell about who you are based on your life, and how you recall and reconstruct and edit the experiences of your life to create this kind of narrative about where you have come from, where you are now, and where you see yourself going in the future. So that is something that I had already been really exploring in terms of coaching, the works that I do in coaching and the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the stories in the way that we identify with certain aspects of our story. And that's I guess what I want to talk to you about today in this episode, because I think it's really interesting and it's really useful to have some understanding of this.

2:53 So it's just interesting that it came up also in the context of business and having to kind of come up with a three men diversion of how you came to be doing what you're doing, and it is really interesting to go through that process if you've never done it yourself. It was interesting to do that in with other people, like kind of hearing each other's stories and giving each other feedback about which bits of the story seem to be more relevant or what I wanted to hear more about, and for other people to say the same thing to me, like I think that was an interesting turning point, or maybe you could say more about that. It's just a really interesting process to go through, so whether in business or just in terms of how you recall your own personal life story, and that's what I want to really focus on today. I guess the other thing that I've noticed is or I've just been recalling recently is certain people who I have met or come across, and you would have as well, who really have an identity around certain things that they've experienced in life, Like they've certain things that they've overcome, if they had a really difficult childhood, if they were in a horrific accident, or if they maybe have a disability or some sort of disadvantage. And while everybody has these experiences in their lives, sometimes people really strongly amplify one aspect of their story and it becomes really integral to their sense of who they are, where they are in life, Like when they make meaning of their life, they really give this particular

4:25 incident or experience like a lot of weight. And I think that's really interesting too, because I think that is where there is room to go in and find ways to retell that story or find different perspectives around that story that might give you a different experience or a different view, you know, of how you see yourself and what the possibilities might be for you going forward. Because the story that you tell yourself about what brought you to this point in your life, where you're at now, and where you're going, they're all really shaped by the bits of your story that you emphasize and the bits that you diminish, sure you push aside or don't give any weight to look the same story, the same experience by two different people, they could have a whole different interpretation of what that means. Or you know, what they've done with that and how they've interpreted that can give you a whole different sense of yourself, who you are and what is possible for you. Dan mccadams is an author who and a researcher in psychology who has written a lot about this, and I think he's the one who developed this narrative identity theory, and essentially it is the way we reconstruct I'm going to read this so I get it right. Narrative identity reconstructs the autobiographical past and imagines the future in such a way as to provide a person's life with some degree of unity, purpose and meaning. So, therefore, your life story, the way you

5:56 tell your life story synthesizes your episodic memory. So what has happened with your envisioned goals, where you're going, where you've been, where you're going, creating a coherent account of identity in time, So we come up with this, with this coherent narrative, this coherent sequence of events that describes and gives meaning to Basically, it's how we make sense of our life and where we are in time. And obviously it evolves and it changes over time, and it evolves because your life is continuing to evolve. The story is not over clearly, but it also evolves with the way that you revisit and reconstruct and reimagine or think about things in a different way from what you maybe have in the past. And so often this is the work of therapy for people, for people who go into psychotherapy, there's a lot of work to be done here around telling your story, recalling your life story and the meaning that you've made of that or what you think that says about you or how that's impacted you, but then being able to revisit that and pull something different from that story, take a different perspective, and have that help you to reshape where you see yourself now and your personal qualities. And it all contributes to your psychological wellbeing.

7:14 And there are particular themes if they come up in your narrative identity story, then they are associated with higher levels of psychological well being and That's what I want to share with you today because I want to you to go away and think about your story and where maybe you could reimagine some things, or reconsider some aspects of your story and think about things in a different way to give you enhanced psychological wellbeing, increased sense of your own agency and personal power, and you know, just a stronger sense of self and your own resilience, your own personal qualities. Yeah, so useful, useful stuff. So our narrative identity starts to develop in late adolescents. I think it starts a little earlier with girls. I'm not across all the research. I'm the first to admit that I'm not an expert in this, but I think there are some key ideas which are just generally useful to understand.

8:10 So our story, I guess, our personal story, our life story, starts to evolve during adolescence and late adolescents. You know, as little kids will probably tell stories about ourselves. But this whole sense of self, like who I am in the world, that really starts to emerge in late adolescence and into our early twenties. And I guess that is when we have to start telling people. People start asking us, where do we want to be in a few years time, or what are we envisioned for ourselves? Or who are we and wherever we come from? And what's brought you to this point? And we have to start telling our story to people. And therefore, each time we tell our story to people, we're constructing it in our own mind, and we're choosing all of the time which bits are important, which bits are relevant, which parts make sense in this story, or which are irrelevant. That was the interesting thing about the business exercise for me, like which bits of this story are relevant? Because as you know, we have a long, complicated, messy personal history and lots of tangents, and picking out, pulling our key points and building it into like this neat, little, succinct story is really challenging because none of us have got a neat little story that just makes perfect sense.

9:17 So we're always privileging certain parts of it and emphasizing certain parts and kind of you know, downplaying other parts of it. But it is kind of interesting to reflect on which are the parts that we pull out and emphasize on, which are the parts that we that we don't that we kind of diminish or wash over a little, you know, gloss over. But the stories that we tell integrate our lives and they give us a sense of who we are. And our story can be like I said before, it can be edited and it can be revised all the time. And part of that is a social process. It comes from having conversations with other people, sharing your story, getting feedback, having people ask you questions, having people whether it's just socially in your personal relationships, or if it is in something you know very directly self reflective like therapy or like coaching or something like that, where you intentionally take the time to reflect on your story, then it can be shaped and reshaped over time. But your life story is a psychological resource. If you have a positive life story, a positive sense of yourself, of where you've been, particularly if you've overcome challenges, you know, what you've achieved in life, it's brought you to where you are today, what you have established in your life, and a positive sense of where you're going. That's really a great psychological resource. It really bolsters your well being.

10:31 Like I said, but you know, sometimes we have had negative experiences, and then how you make sense of those negative experiences can really have a big impact on your happiness, your well being, your sense of personal agency, where you're going on your health and well being overall. And I did look at some of the research, but if you were to sit down with somebody, or if you even sit down yourself, and if you were to draw the timeline of your life from birth until now into the future with where you potentially see yourself going in the future, and if you were to kind of plot the timeline of your life up until this point, not minute by minute obviously, but even some people will ask you to identify key positive experiences and significant negative experiences, So the ones that really jump out at you as being moments of achievement or success or happiness, big milestones in life that are positive. And then also things were really difficult or challenging, crisis that you might have gone through, challenges that you went through, you might plot those as well, and you start to form a story. Another way to do it is to kind of look at your life in as a series of chapters, like almost like a little subheadings of periods of time in your life and whether they were overall positive or negative, or what the theme or the flavor was of that particular period. Of your life. And the way they do this in therapy and research is they will have you tell your story and then they kind of code the language that you use. So,

12:04 but you can do this yourself. I mean you can do it with journaling. You can do it just in your own mind. I think journaling is a really helpful tool to use for something like this. Obviously, if you've got a therapist or a coach, then this can be a useful thing to do. And if you're in my coaching program, you can bloody be sure that we'll be doing some of this work. This will be my new favorite tool that I want to use. So you plot these plot your life and you pull out the key themes and then you talk about what happened and what that meant to you, and so the particular kinds of theme. So the kind of language that somebody will be looking for will be first of all about agency. So how much you express a sense of personal agency in the things that you have gone through, in where you see yourself now, where you'll see yourself in the future. If it's clear that there is a lot of evidence that you you have seen yourself as having a lot of personal control, sense of feeling empowered in your own story, being able to be self determined, make your own decisions and choose what you want to do and the decisions that you want to make in life. That is associated with really high levels of psychological wellbeing. So if you don't have that, if there's a theme or a flavor in your language or and how you tell your story now or how you look back on your life, and it's a lot of it is about feeling out of control or powerless other people making the decisions, or being a bit of a victim in your own life, well

13:35 then you can imagine that that's probably not great. So having a look at whereabouts did you have choices or do you have options? Like that can be a really useful exercise to go through to enhance your sense of your own personal agency. I mean, we know that that's well known that one of the keys to psychological wellbeing is a sense of personal agency, particularly in the workplace as well, but just in life generally. So it's really crucial that we all feel a sense of empowerment and agency and like that we're in control of our own destiny. If you feel like you're not well, then you know, obviously that can be a big reason why people feel really anxious and depressed and hopeless and probably go and see a therapist, because if you feel like you are not you don't have choices, or you don't have agency, then that's really distressing. Another one is the amount of reference to belonging or communion or community, so personal relationships.

14:29 How much did you feel that you have the support of other people? How much did other people factor into you know, periods in your life, positive or negative. How much did you lean on friends, How important were other people? How much did you feel people were there for you? How much of that social connection do you experience now if you tell your story, how much of it is about having a sense of belonging or community. That's another theme that is really associated with high levels of personal wellbeing. Another one is the redemption story. So it's that kind of heroes journey. All of us have experienced difficulties and challenges in life. But there's some evidence that as we get older, the people who are the most generative, like really wanting to give back to the community, leave a legacy, be socially proactive, that those people tend to have a really strong redemption story of having a sense that they have gone through a challenge, but they have come out of it stronger, They've come out of it better, wiser, stronger, they've learned lessons, even if it was a really difficult, challenging experience, to the degree that you can feel that there was some sort of positive benefit in it. I've talked to you before in this show about journaling and about the Penny Baker journaling protocol. You can go back through the catalog if you don't recall that, but there was evidence about four days of journaling. James Pennabaker came up with this protocol for journaling. This is just a little bit of a tangent, but it's relevant. Where the whole group of men, and this is way back in

16:00 the day, everybody was a man in a working in an automobile factory. They all got laid off from their jobs a factory closed down, and they assigned them to different groups, and some of them were assigned to the journaling activity. And for four days, for twenty minutes a day, they journaled about being laid off from their job and what that meant to them. And they were able to process their emotions and then they were able to look for making meaning of that, et cetera, et cetera. And then eight or nine months down the track, the men who had not done the journaling were still quite angry, bitter, many of them still unemployed. The people who had done the journaling were often re employed. They were happier. They could look back, have a sense of perspective, could see some sort of lesson learned, wisdom gained, or some positive outcome from just a sense of perspective about the experience.

16:53 So journaling in that way was able to give them that insight, that reflective capacity, and that ability to be able to reflect and make meaning and draw something positive from a difficult experience. Now, you're probably not going to do that when you're right in the middle of a really difficult experience, though you might that might be helpful for you. But after an event, being able to look back on that and make sense of it and look for those positive threads, I guess can be really really important, because the alternative is that it just was bad, and it was still bad and it led to everything bad in your life. And you know that, you can see how you can really fall into that victim mentality and nothing ever goes right. And you know, I lost everything.

17:39 It might have been a divorce, for example, and you know, lost out financially, or lost contact with kids, or riffs in the family and all of that kind of stuff. And you know, you can see how people end up very bitter and very unhappy and ended up going down a really dark path if they're not able to get some sense of perspective or make meaning or find a way to turn that into a story of redemption where they been able to learn a lesson and take that learning into doing something positive with their life. And this all comes back to how you look at the event like it all comes back to Lots of people go through the same really difficult, challenging circumstances. Lots of people experience divorce, grief, loss diagnoses, really painful loss of a partner, loss of a child, loads of people experience tragedies in life, really difficult experiences. All sorts of things happen in our lives.

18:31 And the way it impacts one person compared to the way it impacts another person could be you to a range of factors, also to do with genetics and family history and social environment and privilege and all of those. There's lots and lots of things that impact that. I'm not trying to be overly simplistic here, but the way you personally make meaning, the way you personally reflect on and create a story for yourself, an identity story out of those experiences, the way you recall and retell that story makes a massive difference to your psychological well being because the other part of that, the opposite of a redemption story is a contamination story, and that is a story of things going really well and then suddenly, you know, turning really bad, like having a really big win but then having something really terrible happen as a result of that or at the same time, and to be honest, I'm not really across what the downstream effects are of if there's a lot of kind of contamination stories in your personal history, but I imagine it's not good just to highlight that that is also something that can be a theme that you might pull out of a personal narrative.

19:40 And so I talked a bit about meaning making, and meaning making is obviously it's the degree to which you learn something or glean a message from an event, and that meaning making is clearly associated with good things. Good things in life psychological wellbeing, happiness. And then the other really interesting thing is just how coherent you're stilly is, like how much how much your story just makes sense, how one thing leads to another, and then that led to this, and then this happened, and you know, it's just the coherent narrative of your story, a sense that there is a beginning and a middle in it, and the story there's obviously not an end, but the story is still unfolding. You know. It's kind of the extent to which the themes or the plot lines in your life as you recall your story, have some sense of resolution or integration or closure, you know, as opposed to being all these like open open wounds or unfinished business, that kind of thing. So even if things have not been good, even if you've had difficulty in your life, when you talk about that suffering or that struggle, the degree to which there is a level of self exploration and that the degree to which there are there is an expression you're able to express lessons that you've learned or insights that you've gained, or relationships that have formed the bonds that you've made with people you know, these or countries to enriching your life in the long term.

21:02 So it's not the degree of suffering and struggle, it's how you've made sense of it and how you're able to tell that story. Psychological maturity tends to be constructed from stories that emphasize learning and growth and positive personal transformation. And like I said before, it's through repeated interactions with others that our stories are processed, edited, reinterpreted, retold, and subjected to a range of social and discursive influences. So basically, we ourselves as the storyteller of our own lives, we develop a broader and a more integrated narrative identity. So you guys, I'm going to keep this one fairly short and sweet. I think that is really bloody interesting. And I think if we all look back at our own story, and as I said, journaling can be really useful for this.

21:49 And if you look yourself or you know yourself about which parts of your story are you giving weight too, Like which parts of the story do you privilege and that you really hold on to and see as sort of integral to your personal identity, And which bits do you diminish or downplay, Like which bits could you potentially look at and actually give a bit more weight too, if they are themes around agency, communion, belonging, redemption meaning making personal growth as opposed to how much you're looking at suffering and struggle and really highlighting that as a key theme, but without the personal learning and growth it might have come with it, or the positive outcomes that might have come from that. And I guess I remember, way way back when I was first training as a coach.

22:41 I don't even remember who I heard it from, but I remember hearing. You know, if you were to write the story of your life you and cast yourself as the victim, you could probably do that. You could probably tell a really really great story, like a really interesting story about all of the suffering and the struggle and the things that you've gone through, and you could be the perfect victim in that in that story. Equally, you could tell the exact same story and cast yourself as the hero, and it would be the same story. It would just be where you choose to put the emphasis and the bits that you choose to highlight and emphasize and hold on to. And so I think that, and I've always remembered that. I've always thought, you know, no matter what you go through, you can cast yourself as the victim, where you can cast yourself as the hero.

23:28 The story is the same, what happened is exactly the same, but how you choose to tell the story and your role in it, that can make all of the difference to not only how you see yourself. That then impacts how you express yourself to others, how you interact with others. It helps, It influences the decisions you make about your life, what you see as a being available to you in the future, what you're capable of. It can make a profound difference, is what I'm saying. And so I think that that is useful, and I hope that you found that helpful, and so maybe you can and ll go off and reflect on your narrative identity, the story that you tell yourself about yourself and your life, where you've been, how you came to be here, and where you're going in the future. I want to make the point that I have talked to so many people recently who have told me that they really enjoy this show that they wait for new episodes to drop. It made me so guilty for the weeks that I have missed an episode, thinking, oh, nobody will notice, they won't care, and in fact, people are out there. You are out there, and you are listening, and I'm so grateful for that. If you love the show, please share it with a friend, Please leave a rating and a review on Apple or Spotify, and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And I will absolutely be back next week with another episode of Crapy. A happy