The Stories We Tell Ourselves

In which we (re)construct our narrative identity

I.

Have you ever wondered why prisoners often ‘find god’?

A clue:

…when the judge sentenced me to six years… he should have turned round and said I also sentence you to losing your home, to losing your girlfriend, to losing your child, to losing your self-respect, to losing everything you’ve ever worked for. I’m going to take everything, every single thing away from you, and that’s what I sentence you to.

This quote comes from a study that anonymously interviewed 75 male prisoners who converted to Christianity behind bars. Why did they suddenly (claim to) see the heavenly light? According to the researchers, to resolve a crisis in narrative identity. By changing their narrative identity from convict to convert, the researchers claim, these prisoners find purpose and meaning again. Imprisonment is a narrative crisis and conversion helps some prisoners jump over that plot hole onto a new plotline.

Our narrative identity, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, is one of the most powerful providers of purpose and meaning. We start constructing these stories early in life, but as we progress from childhood to adolescence, our narratives (usually) become more coherent and consistent.

Late adolescence and early adulthood are crucial points in forming our narrative identity, which might be why a lot of people struggle with their sense of self and purpose at those junctions. The self-story is strongly influenced by interactions with others — you become who you surround yourself with.

This narrative identity, which we often form subconsciously, is a key component in coping with negative events. How well you rebound depends on the story you tell. From this review paper:

In the first step, the person explores the negative experience in depth, thinking long and hard about what the experience felt like, how it came to be, what it may lead to, and what role the negative event may play in the person’s overall life story. In the second step, the person articulates and commits the self to a positive resolution of the event. Research suggests that the first step is associated with personal growth—the second, with happiness.

Actually, a lot of therapy is about reframing life stories and seeking more positive and growth-affirming perspectives. Psychotherapy patients who self-narrate heroic stories where they confront their symptoms and emerge victorious improve the most.

II.

What if the story gets jumbled, though?

Coherence and consistency are great, but not everyone has the privilege to get there easily. As any storyteller will tell you, plot and characters matter, but so does the setting (which in the case of narrative identity includes genetics, upbringing, social relations, and so on). That’s worldbuilding 101 for you.

Most psychotic disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.) emerge during late adolescence or early adulthood. Wait a sec. We’ve met those life stages before. Right, that’s when our narrative identities solidify into a more coherent and consistent story.

Guess what this recent review finds…

The narrative identities of individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are distinguished by three features: disjointed structure, a focus on suffering, and detached narration.

Disjointed equals lack of coherence, suffering-focused equals getting stuck before the redemption chapter, and detached narration equals a disconnect from purpose. Here’s how the researchers tie all that together:

Cowan, Mittal & McAdams (2021). Narrative Identity in the Psychosis Spectrum: A Systematic Review and Developmental Model. Clin Psychol Rev.doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102067

Interventions ranging from deep-brain stimulation, medication, and psychedelics might paradoxically help by temporarily ‘removing meaning’ (think of it as breaking the arrows in the figure above). But, an important caveat: this only works when the patient is involved in the decision-making — personal agency is key for any engaging (and engaged) character.

Here’s an inspiring case study about an athlete named Ben who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early twenties. The short version:

For Ben, serious mental illness profoundly disrupted a pre-existing athletic identity by removing agency, continuity, and coherence from his life story. By returning to exercise several years later, Ben reclaimed his athletic identity and reinstated some degree of narrative agency, continuity, and coherence.

Even for those of us without diagnosed mental health issues, our narrative identity is closely linked to our eudaimonic well-being — not only pleasure and happiness but also living in pursuit of our potential and according to our values. Living and doing well (thanks, Aristotle).

III.

It is hard to quantify, and many sociocultural factors complicate getting accurate numbers of diagnoses, but we are (likely) facing a global mental health crisis.

From the WHO:

… there has been a 13% rise in mental health conditions and substance use disorders in the last decade (to 2017). Mental health conditions now cause 1 in 5 years lived with disability. Around 20% of the world’s children and adolescents have a mental health condition, with suicide the second leading cause of death among 15-29-year-olds.

Is there something wrong with our life stories?

Follow me into the realm of speculation for our grand finale.

There’s no shortage of challenges that we can use to construct our redemption arc. Climate change, the degradation of the living world, inequality going up, a political climate of hate, (mentally) recovering from a global pandemic, having more and more parts of our lives shuffled into an online arena full of trolls, misinformation, and snake oil salespeople. Plenty of choice, thank you very much.

Because these challenges are all connected and transcend the (illusion of, but that’s another post) national boundaries, every little action we take in our personal self-narrative feels like drops in a boiling ocean — evaporating the moment we add them. Bye-bye, feeling of agency.

What has happened (in my hypothesis, so add salt liberally), is that our redemption arc has become a contamination sequence.

I’m not making that up.

One of the world’s leading experts on narrative identity, psychologist Dan McAdams, has this to say about ‘contamination' stories:

… you have a really wonderful scene in life, and then it goes rather dramatically and suddenly bad. It can be psychologically debilitating if you have a lot of contamination stories, because there is a sort of fatalism that goes with them. For instance, research suggests that that's a strong predictor of depression, neuroticism and high anxiety.

Depression? Anxiety? Care to guess which mental health diagnoses have gone up by 25% (!) in the past year alone? Yup…

Here’s my hypothesis: we have stumbled into a collective contamination story that, true to its name, has contaminated the narrative identity of so many of us.

Support for the hypothesis: McAdams sees a few crucial components of a healthy, well-being-promoting narrative identity: agency, growth, and communion.

• It’s hard to feel personal agency when facing global, interconnected challenges.

• It’s hard to grow when surging distrust, hate, and short-sightedness make others knock you down (out of their own insecurity and feelings of helplessness).

• It’s hard to build a community in a world that drives us into an increasingly individualistic mindset with selfish values. Hand in hand with mental health diagnoses, loneliness is on the rise.

We need a new story and to get it, we don’t need to find god; we need to find ourselves.

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Recent thoughts:

Social Media Fragmentation and Engagement Fatigue

Blindsight and (the Lack of) Artificial Meta-Cognition

Are We the Faulty Algorithms?

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