What is narrative psychology and why is it important?

Picture yourself as a hamburger.

In fact, without meaning to reduce you to the point of offence, you’re the most basic of hamburgers: one slab of meat between two buns.

You’ve got a bottom bun, a top bun, and the filling; if any of those pieces are removed, neither the piece, nor what’s left, is a hamburger, but together, they are.

On a sidenote: we shouldn’t have written a blog around lunchtime.

The premise of the life story model, which underpins the field of narrative therapy, can be considered in similar ways.

The life story model was developed by Professor Dan McAdams, who stated: “people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalised and evolving narratives of the self” (source: McAdams, 2001).

The identity you construct of yourself, in McAdams’ model, is a construct of three levels – two buns and a slab of meat, which come together to make the mouth-watering you.

Ok, the metaphor is falling apart here. We’ll move on.

The first level is ‘dispositional traits’, which are stable, global personality dimensions associated with the Big 5 personality model (if you haven’t heard of that, you can find out more at PositivePsychology.com [or Google ‘Big 5 personality traits’]), and account for consistencies in your behaviours, thoughts, and feelings across time.

Next is ‘characteristic adaptations’, which speaks to aspects such as your personal goals and motives, defence mechanisms and coping strategies, mental representations, your values and beliefs, skills and interests;

The third is ‘integrated life stories’, which lie at your core and feed the other two levels – it’s the meat between the two buns that bring everything together to make a hamburger!

Sorry, we couldn’t resist just one more pass at that metaphor.

These integrated life stories are critical.

English sociologist Barron Anthony Giddens said of this concept: “A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important though this is – in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going” (source: Giddens, 1991).

Your dispositional traits and characteristic adaptations might influence your interactions with your environment, but your integrated life stories determine the actual environment you experience.

They literally create the world you see.

You are wired for stories

We have a deep yearning and passion for stories, with storytelling a human universal, common across every culture, from every corner of the world (source: Smith et al, 2017).

That yearning follows you through life.

Think of the children who eagerly waited outside bookstores for the release of the next Harry Potter instalment, ready to plough through a 600-page epic at a rate that made JK Rowling, a woman formerly on welfare, richer than the Queen of England (Silverman, 2003).

Think of the queues that snaked around city blocks, as people lined up to watch Star Wars when it was released. Or the people who fell in love with Steve Jobs’ stories and ode ‘to the crazy ones’, and camped outside retailers for days to hand over their hard-earned money for Apple’s latest gadget – because that’s all marketing is; a story about who you should want to be.

When you catch up with friends, you don’t just say random words, or objectively outline every single event of every day that has occurred since you last saw them; you form stories and convey the most significant moments, usually in an order-chaos-order narrative arc.

In fact, everything that comes out of your mouth at any given time is either a story, motivated by a story, or embedded in a story (source: American Psychological Association).

This development of narrative understanding has been shown to begin as early as the first and second years of life (source: Stern, 1985; Tomasello, 2000), before incrementally increasing in structural complexity through childhood (source: Applebee, 1978; Mandler, 1984), booming in adolescence and young adulthood through biographical and causal coherence (source: Habermas and Bluck, 2000), and then being used as THE vehicle to create individual identity and personality throughout adulthood (source: McAdams, 2001).

You spend your entire life listening to, attracted to, engaging with, and telling stories.

You’re wired for it.

Ok, so WHY am I wired for stories?

You’re wired for stories in a way so powerful that it influences your motivational systems to a similar extent as that of some of your most fundamental motivations, like hunger and thirst.

Why? What is in stories that is so important to your survival? The answer is: information.

A study published in Nature Communications (source: Smith et al, 2016) found that “storytelling is a powerful means of fostering social cooperation and teaching social norms, and it pays valuable dividends to the storytellers themselves, improving their chances of being chosen as social partners, receiving community support and even having healthy offspring” (source: Kluger, 2017).

However, this sharing of information is not a straight-forward process of extraction, because learning doesn’t happen that way. You don’t encounter something new and instantly know how to engage with it.

Instead, as developmental psychologist Jean Piaget described, you go through a process of working out that you’ve encountered something, defining if it’s new or not, then deciding what to do with it, which results in either accommodation or assimilation.

With accommodation, you encounter something so new you can’t define it, so you instead absorb it as a replacement for your current beliefs – you accommodate it. With assimilation, your current beliefs are adequate to understand the new information, and you simply tack on the new stuff – you assimilate it (source: Beasley, 2020).

This is where stories come in.

Remember learning fractions in high school maths, and having to find the lowest common denominator so two seemingly incompatible numbers could work together?

The transfer of information in the context we’re dealing with here is similar.

Information in itself is like an incompatible fraction, so we abstract it higher and higher in the form of stories and metaphors, until we find common ground. Until we find a place where the giver and receiver of information are equally capable of transmitting and receiving it. Until both can assimilate or accommodate.

Stories are that meeting place of common ground.

This is the story of your life

So, stories are the conduits of information, and we’re captivated by information, because it helps us understand the world and the most successful ways in which to interact with – and survive in – that world.

That is why you have the same motivation for information that you do for eating (hamburgers, or otherwise) and drinking – it all helps you survive.

And that is why your Story of My Life Journal is structured the way it is, and how it is different in its approach to supporting you (check out our How It Works page).

Your Story of My Life Journal is not designed to simply improve your productivity with a glorified to-do list, or to fill your life with daily quotes that make you feel happy for a brief moment.

It is designed to use real psychotherapeutic tools to make seismic shifts and genuine, lasting change to what exists at your core.

Until you are able to tap into and alter the very stories that are driving you, all your productivity efforts, seeking of happiness, or even your analysis of values (if you don’t then use that analysis for change) will simply be manifestations of a story to which you are blind.

It would be like looking at the shadow of a person, and acting as if it was the person themselves.

But a shadow is a follower. It is the effect, not the cause. It is an expression; it is not the truth.

You find meaning in pursuing your goals. Your goals and the ways in which you pursue them are the products of your values.

Beneath every value – heck, encompassing it, enveloping it, ingrained in it, protecting it – lies a story. A story you have learnt or created, crafted, told, and reinforced.

A story that, at one point – or maybe even multiple points – benefited you, leading to your mind considering it absolutely correct, and the story establishing a foothold deep within you.

However, that story would often be detrimental to you, because it is a static, unidimensional relic of the past.

The time you got angry and defended yourself against a school bully might have led to a successful story of how to deal with aggressive authority figures, but that story is not going to go well when you roll it out to your boss in the workplace as a 30-something-year-old, is it?

There is a lot of psychological literature referenced in explaining the framework of your Story of My Life Journal.

However, the closing remarks must go to G.I. Joe.

Because now you not only know what you and your mind are doing to try and survive, you also know why you’re doing it.

“And knowing is half the battle!”

Now, where’s that hamburger?