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How to Work With the Story in Therapy
Read Part 1 of this 2-part series: Writing Our Lives as Fiction
To recap: Dan P. McAdams, PhD, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and author of the 2006 book The Redemptive Self, formulated 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.
Sometimes that narrative treatment isn’t coherent. Researchers have found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of receiving an award is spoiled when a friend makes a sarcastic remark. The anniversary party was “perfect” until a guest ruined it by being drunk. A note of disappointment seems to close each story.
The coherence of a narrative — whether it follows a clear cause-and-effect path — may be a hallmark of good storytelling in both the artistic and the psychological sense, according to Jonathan Adler, PhD. In his research, he investigated the stories of 104 adults in outpatient psychotherapy. He found that the patients who told coherent stories tended to report the largest gains in well-being and ego development.
However, the strongest predictor of improvement was when people saw themselves, rather than the therapist, as the central actors in their stories and, that people began feeling better after they began telling stories in which they took control of their lives and situations in which they found themselves.
"You tell the story first and then you live your way into it," Adler says. "There is a certain amount of ‘fake it ’til you make it.’"
At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Adler said.
This view of therapy helping people revise their life story is like the Tom Robbins quote, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”
References
Robbins, T. Still life with woodpecker. New York, NY: Bantam Books; 1980.
Leslie Durr, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC is an advanced practice psychiatric-mental health nurse with a private psychotherapy practice in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors.
