The Commitment Story

I have been lucky to have mentors throughout my life. As a young adult, there was one family friend in particular who took me under his wing. His name was Scott Gorman, and he died a few years ago. In his obituary, he is described as a humanitarian, arts organizer, writer, activist, and the first person without a college degree to win a Fulbright scholarship. Scott was what some psychologists would call a “highly generative” person — that is, he made a positive, lasting impact in his community, particularly among its younger members. And his life offers a lesson in how we can use storytelling to become generative people too.

This is the third in a sequence of three posts about what I’m calling our “personal myths,” the stories we tell about ourselves, how we came to be, and where our lives are headed. The first two were about crafting and editing our personal myths. Here I will describe a set of common narrative patterns in the life stories of highly generative people like my friend Scott. These patterns in personal myth-making deeply shapes our lives. 

The narrative patterns of highly generative people are, briefly: (1) a sense of being advantaged in early life, (2) witnessing the suffering of others, (3) moral steadfastness and continuity, (4) redemption, (5) conflicts between power and love, and (6) a pro-social vision for the future. We’ll come back to them in some detail soon. 

Like a lot of generative people I’ve known, Scott was an amazing storyteller. His most powerful tales starred himself, as an unrelenting, engaged citizen, who worked for fairness, beauty, and peace. Scott once told me that his parents were both dead by the time he was a teenager, and that because he had overcome some substantial hardships in his youth, he felt compelled to help others, especially those more vulnerable than himself. 

Turns out that the way Scott related his life story is typical of a highly generative person, at least according to Dan McAdams. McAdams is the author of a 2006 book called The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (which I will draw on heavily for my discussion here). In a body of research spanning almost 30 years, McAdams has shown that highly generative adults in the United States tend to tell uncannily similar stories about their lives, which feature the six themes I mentioned above. 

In the year I took off between graduating from high school and enrolling in university, I moved back to my hometown of Anacortes, WA, where Scott lived. I renovated Scott’s garage into a livable writing studio and stayed for six months. On the day that I had my wisdom teeth removed, Scott picked me up from surgery, drove me back to his house, brought me a pot of medicinal tea, some ice cream, and set me up with Lawrence of Arabia on his television, which he knew I hadn’t seen yet. So while I recovered on his couch, I also mended a significant gap in my cultural education. This is just the kind of mentor that Scott was: he was there when you most needed him, and he anticipated your needs before you were even aware that you needed anything. It genuinely made him happy to take care of his friends.   

McAdams’ research helped me put a finger on something I’d only suspected about Scott: that his ability to communicate his life in narrative terms helped him to achieve his goals. In Scott’s personal myth, he was a hero (a narrative role), working to create a better future for his community (a narrative outcome), and he always framed obstacles as temporary and surmountable (providing narrative tension). This kind of personal myth has the power to sustain generative people, giving them the confidence and commitment to make continuous contributions to their communities. And across a wide range of individuals, generative people’s life stories are remarkably similar to one another, to the point that McAdams has coined a term for the genre: the commitment story.

Redemption

A common narrative pattern -- the most common, in fact -- in a commitment story is redemption. Redemption, or what McAdams calls a redemption sequence occurs when a person transforms their suffering into a higher and more positive mental state. For example, when they transform fear, guilt, anger, or shame into happiness, joy, or excitement. Generative adults, McAdams found, create these transformations much more often than their less generative peers. Scott did too. When his wife of ten years left him for another man, he somehow managed to interpret the ensuing divorce as a favorable turn of events. 

This tells us something important: the number of bad things that happen in a person’s life matters less than whether those bad things are interpreted in a good way. Redemption sequences are not synonymous with simply telling happy stories -- a highly generative person’s story does not avoid accounts of suffering, but tends to construe suffering as leading to some sort of benefit. People who do more good in the world are better at turning lemons into lemonade. 

Five Additional Common Themes

Yes, yes, adding some positive twists to your life story seems like an obvious place to start in your process of becoming a better citizen. If you feel better about yourself, you will likely have more creative energy to put towards helping others. But McAdams’ research suggests that the path is less straightforward than that. Not only do generative people’s stories have a marked prevalence of redemption sequences, they are highly likely to contain five additional common themes. And to me these don’t seem immediately evident. They are: 

1. A sense of being advantaged early in life. The story begins with a blessing, or some sort of privilege.

2. Witnessing the suffering of others. There is an early recognition that the world is not safe, and life is not fair. 

3. Moral steadfastness and continuity. As older children and adolescents, the generative person internalizes a set of core values. Throughout the person’s life, these values remain constant and unquestioned. As McAdams puts it, “Their narrative identities rarely give the starring role to the searching, self-doubting existentialist hero.” 

4. A perceived conflict between agency (power) and communion (love). The trick here is that the more power the hero gains, the more able the hero will be to make a larger positive impact in the world. This ongoing back and forth between power and love drives the plot and gives the hero’s life story much of its narrative suspense.

5. Articulating pro-social goals for the future. The story has a hopeful ending, in which the hero’s good work will live on after the hero dies. 

The six themes of a commitment story function in concert to create a certain type of individual, one who feels especially compelled to help others. For example, McAdams suggests that the contradiction between 1 & 2 sets up a moral contrast in the generative person’s life, which goes something like this: “I was blessed, but others suffered. Because I was fortunate and because others were not, I should make the most of my good status and work hard to make the world a better place.” The highly generative person is what McAdams describes as a “blessed protagonist who ventures forth into a dangerous, unredeemed world.”

To be honest, I’m not sure if all of these themes were there for Scott. I don’t know whether he considered himself to have been privileged at an early age. And did Scott perceive a conflict between power and love? I wish he were still alive so I could ask him. Scott’s personal myth might not have perfectly fit McAdams’ model, and this reminds us that model is just that: a model. But generally speaking, these are patterns that we can consciously insert into our own life stories, in the interest of leading more magnanimous lives.   

Is There a Pattern for Less-Generative Life Narratives?

While I was doing research for this post, I wondered if there was a similar model for less generative people’s life stories. So I wrote to McAdams and asked. His answer, in short, was no. He wrote:

“There is no clear prototypical narrative for people low in generativity. Part of the reason for that is that people can be low in generativity for so many different reasons — from economic hardships to trauma to mental health issues to just plain being selfish.” 

Although there is no prototypical life narrative for the less generative person, McAdams went on to point to two common themes in their life stories: the presence of contamination sequences and vicious cycles. The opposite of a redemption sequence, a contamination sequence is coded for when positive events have negative outcomes. And a vicious cycle occurs when the protagonist struggles with issues early on, and then continues to struggle with those issues, and they never get resolved. These are patterns that we can consciously avoid when we’re crafting our personal myths, lest they lead us down a less generative road. 

Towards the end of those six months that I lived in Scott’s garage, he gave me a silver whistle in a small black box, and told me that if I ever needed anything, I could blow the whistle, and he would come to my aid. I haven’t used the whistle yet, but I know someday I will, when I need his particular brand of guidance.  

Just as we look to mentors, like Scott, for personal examples of how to live a profound and satisfying life, we can also look to research like McAdams’ for more generalizable guidelines. I think it’s wise to diversify the venues from which we seek life advice, because gosh darnit, great mentors like Scott can just up and die on us. Though their legacy lives on…

Change Your Story, Change Yourself

Let’s consider an unfortunate hypothetical situation in which a person reaches his or her mid 30s or 40s, and things aren’t going so well. This person’s self esteem is low, they are having a hard time finding work, or a romantic partner, or whatever… there are so many ways that things can be less than perfect in mid-life. What should this person do if they’d like to make some serious changes in the way they experience the world? 

One suggestion is succinctly summed up by Maria Popova, who, in a review of psychologist Timothy Wilson’s newest book, Redirect, suggests that we approach life changes as narrative challenges. “Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves,” Popova writes, “and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation.”

Last week I wrote about the creative process of formulating our lives as stories, which starts to occur during that torturous and twinkly era of early adulthood. This week I’ll focus on how narrative psychology is applied in a more therapeutic context, especially during the later part of adulthood, when we can find ourselves in the doldrums, feeling stuck in unhealthy patterns, and wanting to make edits to the stories we’ve already spun about ourselves. As I mentioned in my previous post, the narrative layer of our identity is continually evolving, and it is possible to intentionally make changes here. This post is about techniques for doing so. 

Therapy

Seeking professional help in any kind of transformational process can really speed the process along. If you take this first approach, and seek the help of another, well-qualified person, you will likely find yourself telling a lot of stories about yourself to this person. As narrative psychologists McAdams and Adler write, therapy of most kinds is easily understood in narrative terms: our stories about ourselves reflect our personal struggles, and therapy involves working with these stories in order to revise and edit them. To change a person’s story is in effect to change the person, and many therapists are aware of this.

Some therapeutic methods, such as narrative therapy, make editing and revising a client’s personal stories explicit. In their book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, White and Epston, grandfathers of narrative therapy, propose a therapeutic process in which the editing and revising of one’s personal stories is undertaken literally, using letter writing and a variety of other exercises, such as co-authoring a certificate of Graduation from the Blues.  

Practitioners of narrative therapy liken themselves to investigative reporters, whose aim is to uncover the events in their clients’ past, and to help their clients externalize problematic stories in order to consider them as entities distinct from themselves. A therapist can also function as a mirror of sorts, as someone who can reflect your stories back to you, and help you see things that you otherwise might not see. By encouraging clients to draw back from their stories and reflect critically upon them, narrative therapists empower their clients to re-author their stories in ways more conducive to personal well-being. 

In giving clients a safe space to talk about difficult experiences which they may have avoided in the past, therapists provide opportunities for making sense of those difficult experiences and integrating them into their evolving sense of self. McAdams and Adler argue that on a meta-level, therapy can do much more: if the experience of going to therapy is retrospectively added to your personal myth as a turning point, when things in your life changed for the better, it can add a positive twist to future developments in your story. 

DIY

Therapy is not for everybody. A second approach is to use a narrative toolkit for undertaking the hard work of personal transformation on your own (it is personal, after all). If you are interested in coming to a new understanding of a particular set of difficult or traumatic events in your past, and doing it by yourself, Timothy Wilson, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, has proposed a set of story editing techniques that do not require one-on-one sessions with a therapist to achieve their effect. He outlines these techniques in the book mentioned above, Redirect.  

As the title suggests, Wilson’s book outlines a set of techniques designed to redirect people’s narratives about themselves and the world in more positive directions. He places his strategies into three categories: story-editing (making desirable changes to life stories), story-prompting (this one requires a second person, who uses subtle prompts to help you redirect your interpretation of traumatic events in more positive directions), and the do-good, be-good principle (start by making positive changes to your behavior, then your narrative will change to match your behavior, and your happiness will increase). 

Wilson proposes that story-editing is most useful for people who have recently experienced an important event, maybe an event that is still unpleasant to think about, or doesn’t make sense yet. These DIY techniques are helpful for creating a coherent interpretation of such an event. Here’s how the first writing exercise works: 

Find a quiet place to write. Recount the situation, move away from it in your mind, and watch it unfold from distance. Try to see yourself in the event, and try to understand your feelings (as if observing yourself). As Wilson says, ‘Don’t recount the event, take a step back and reconstrue and explain it.’ Write about what you see and why you felt what you did. Do this for 15 minutes, three days in a row. 

Like White and Epston, Wilson claims that this writing exercise works best when people are able to gain some emotional distance from the difficult event, so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm them, and they can analyze the event with a degree of dispassion. This will allow them to better reframe the event, and to find new meaning in it. Wilson calls this the “step-back-and-ask-why” approach, and claims that through fostering greater emotional distance, this technique can help to blunt the event’s traumatic impact, and help people avoid similar situations in the future. 

The same goes for pleasant experiences: if you can understand why something happened, you will be in a better position to make these things happen again. Pursuers of pleasure beware: Wilson warns the step-back-and-ask-why approach can also have the effect of blunting your experience of happiness.

A second story-editing exercise proposed by Wilson is the Best Possible Self Exercise. Here’s how it works: 

Think about your life in the future, imagine everything has gone as well as it could and you have achieved success in all your goals. Now write about what you imagined. Write about how you got there. This exercise is intended to help you create a more optimistic story about your future, which can help you cope better with obstacles as they come up.  

Narrative Choices

Let’s turn back to our hypothetical friend who’s not doing so well. Maybe they will seek a therapist to help them review and reflect upon their past experience, and by doing so they will feel more empowered to make changes to their personal myth. Or, perhaps they will take the DIY approach, and do a story-editing writing exercise on their own. In either case, what they’re doing is creating change in themselves by exploring and changing the story they feel themselves living within. Stepping back from their life, they will realize that a lot of what happens to them is determined by circumstances which they cannot control, but within any circumstance, they can make choices about who they are and who they want to become. 

Those choices are in large part narrative. Living life well, with meaning and purpose, is not just something he will stumble upon, but a deeply creative act, which will require a certain amount of imagination and artistry. 

Crafting a Personal Myth

Crafting a Personal Myth 

I love telling stories about other people’s lives, but when it comes to telling stories about my own, I usually get embarrassed and flustered. Part of my dilemma is that I have had a disparate mix of life experiences, and sometimes it’s difficult for me to string them together into a single, coherent narrative. 

Depending on who I’m speaking with, I tend to narrate different versions of my past. And, usually, the story I tell becomes a dramatized version of events, with heightened ups and deepened downs, lessons learned, and projections about how my past will continue to shape my future. And slowly, as I creep into adulthood, these narrativized versions of my past are becoming smoother, more consistent with one another, and easier to tell. 

This post isn’t about one story in particular; it’s about the stories that we all tell about ourselves, who we are, and how we came to be. This post raises the stakes in our discussion about craft, because the same skills required to tell a good story in general (eg on the radio) also enable us to formulate what some have called a good strong story about who we are. Research has linked high levels of narrative complexity in a personal myth to correspondingly high levels of ego development, and openness to experience. So, what are some ways to better craft your own personal myth?

Narrative Psychology

There is an entire wing of psychology, narrative psychology, dedicated to the study of similarities and differences in people’s life stories, and the varieties of narrative identities created through their construction. Reading some of the research in this field has helped me to understand what’s happening when I’m telling stories about myself and my cheeks get all red. It has also helped me to become more self-aware, confident, and articulate in these situations. I will summarize my findings here, in hopes that, in the course of mythologizing your own life, you might find these pointers as helpful as I have.

Prominent narrative psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University puts forth a model in which a person’s identity develops sequentially in three layers: actor, agent, and author. This model provides a framework for understanding how and when our personal myths are first constructed, how these myths play into our evolving sense of self, and why the mythic or narrative layer of our identity is generally considered to be more amenable to changes than layers that develop earlier in life. 

The first layer, actor, comes to the fore in early toddlerhood. Studies have shown that as children we begin to recognize themselves in mirrors as early as 18 months, which probably corresponds to the time when we begin to develop a sense of self-awareness. McAdams calls these little self-aware toddlers actors, because this is when we start to gauge our behaviors and form traits based on the feedback we receive from our caregivers. 

Perhaps because traits are established at such an early age (or perhaps because we are born with them), they are pretty stable over time. Even and by the age of ten, most kids will have a pretty solid description of themselves. By the age of thirty, I can now safely report, traits can feel as if they are set in stone (though even stones can be lifted!). 

The second layer of identity begins to develop around age five or six, when a child begins to see herself as a motivated person, with goals and plans to achieve them.This little kid with an agenda is what McAdams calls an agent.

The third layer of identity starts to take shape in our late teens and early 20s. There is a lot going on in these years, obviously, but chief among them is that we are expected to become more adult-like. McAdams calls these young adults authors, because this is when we first start to narrate our lives as stories. Young adulthood is when we first begin to craft a personal myth, which explains our origins and our destiny.

A commonly held notion, according to McAdams, is that we choose our goals and have our traits. In other words, we feel as if we can change our goals without too much fuss, but our traits seem like an essential part of ourselves. The underlying assumption here is that the outer layers of our identities are progressively more pliable than the inner layers, because our identities develop in a tree-like fashion wherein the newest layers form in the outermost rings. We develop our life narratives after our traits and goals are already in place, so this outer layer of our identity feels much more plastic.* 

Crafting a Personal Myth

There’s nothing objective about a personal myth. There is no impartial storehouse of autobiographical information that magically morphs life events into myth-shape. Rather, crafting a personal myth is an interpretive operation, which draws on a highly selective and reorganized version of the past. Our personal myths are full of biases, distortions, and mistakes. These mistakes aren’t necessarily conscious, it’s just that certain embellishments are inherent to the storytelling process. In order to narrativize the past, we have to smooth things over a bit, sharpen pivotal transitions, add drama, tension, resolution… these are just features expected of good stories! And why not tell good stories about ourselves?  

At the heart of the literature surrounding the personal myth is a liberating suggestion: it is not through experience alone that we become who we are, but through the creative act of storytelling that we glean a sense of meaning, identity, and power from our past experience. Of course, the quality of our attachments in early life is very important in determining aspects of our characters, but even if our past experience has bestowed us with certain traits, the narrative part of our identity is open to constant reinterpretation. McAdams likens this part of ourselves to a revisionist historian, who uses the selective, creative, and adaptive powers of the storyteller to create an evolving sense of identity. In an email to me, he wrote,  

“People are constantly editing and amending their stories as they go through life, through conversations with others, introspection, and many other means. Many forms of psychotherapy — from psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy — aim, in one way or another, to alter the person’s narrative of life.” 

That’s good news for all of us. In crafting our personal myths, McAdams writes, we can go so far as to make new facts about our lives, draw new conclusions about ourselves, derive new themes, motifs, causal connections, meaningful insights, and life lessons. 

As time goes by, your personal myth will probably start to feel more cemented, and yet, at any given moment, you have the opportunity to make changes. This moment, right now, is as good as any to look back and reevaluate which experiences have been the most formative for you, and the meaning that you’d like to draw from them. In focusing your attention on the creative act of narrating your life, you’re giving yourself permission to craft the story you want to be living in. 

*After this post was published, McAdams wrote with a correction. In contrast to my portrayal of dispositional traits being set in stone by adulthood, research has shown that traits can change quite a bit over time. However, he added, it is true that they do become somewhat more stable as we grow older.