The Power of
Coherent Narratives
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship—it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Salman Rushdie
HUMANS GATHERED TO share stories far back into prehistory. This impulse to gather and gossip has served to maintain and transmit culture across individuals, generations, and cultures. Be it tales of ancestors, strategies for successful hunting, or to just pass the time with friends and family, the stories of tribes have served to strengthen relationships, coordinate group behavior, and advance the development of abstract thinking.
Thus, our social brains coevolved with storytelling, narrative structure, and the tales of heroic journeys still told throughout the world. Stories are, in fact, so ubiquitous in human experience that we hardly notice their existence. Just think of all the energy we invest in gossiping across every new medium of communication. This constant information exchange is likely a large part of our adaptation capacity that allowed Homo habilis to survive dramatic climate changes while many other lines of primate evolution became extinct.
As a medium for the articulation of personal experience and shared values, stories connect families, tribes, and nations, generate culture, and link us to a group mind. These connections, in turn, support the functioning and well-being of each individual brain. It is no coincidence that storytelling is a cornerstone of what we call the talking cure—psychotherapy. It is very likely that our brains have been able to become as complex as they are precisely because of the power of narratives to integrate both our brains and social groups.
Culture and Identity
The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
Stories are a central aspect of individual identity and in many ways we come to live the stories we, and others, tell about us. They describe our experiences, strengths, and aspirations as well as our past failures and negative self-attributions. As children we are told who we are, what is important to us, and what we are capable of by our families. We then take these stories out into the world and continue to edit them with teachers, peers, and cultural input. The impact of stories on the formation of self-identity makes them powerful tools in the creation and maintenance of the self. Positive self-narratives aid in emotional security while negative ones perpetuate low self-esteem, anxiety, and pessimism. In this way, our stories become blueprints for our future.
Every culture has stories, myths, and fables born before the written word and shared via storytelling and song. The Vedic song poems of ancient India were memorized, sung, and passed on by a class of scholars dedicated to the preservation of ancient wisdom. The accumulation and advancement of knowledge was completely dependent on the compulsion to hear and tell stories and the brain’s ability to remember. This is probably why we possess a limitless capacity for remembering stories and songs while it is often hard to remember what we had for lunch. This is because stories have been far more important historically to our survival than remembering specific details.
It has always been the job of the elders to tell stories, passing them on to the younger members of the tribe. A wonderful window to this deep history is reflected in the way elders and children relate to stories. As people grow older, they have a tendency to tell more stories from longer ago, as if the distant past becomes increasingly salient with age. Now think of who likes to hear the same stories again and again and again in exactly the same way. In fact, they will even correct you if you get a word or fact incorrect. If you guessed young children, you are right. They demand that you tell them the same story every night for days, weeks, or months before they are ready to move on to the next one. Children do naturally what ancient Indian scholars turned into their life’s work—remembering ancient wisdom.
What we are likely witnessing in these parallel processes is a preprogrammed process in both adult and child to transfer the stories, knowledge, and wisdom across the generations. This impulse near the beginning and end of life to repeatedly tell and listen to stories appears to be a lock-and-key mechanism of the intergenerational transfer of knowledge.
Hemispheric and Interpersonal Integration
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
Rudyard Kipling
As the human brain evolved, an increasing number of specialized neural networks emerged to handle the vast amount of information required for complex social interactions, abstract thinking, and imagination. Keeping this growing bureaucracy of neural networks integrated, balanced, and running smoothly became ever more challenging. The increasing complexity that eventually allowed for the emergence of storytelling also assisted in keeping the government of neural systems running smoothly.
The structure of any story contains two basic elements: the first is a series of events grounded in the passage of time, and the second is some emotional experience giving the story meaning. In order to tell a good story, the linear linguistic processing of the left hemisphere must be integrated with the centers in the right hemisphere that process sensory and emotional information. Thus, a coherent and meaningful narrative provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of brain and mind across the two hemispheres. In fact, the understandability of our narratives is related to the quality of our attachments, self-esteem, and emotional regulation.
Stories not only integrate and connect our cerebral hemispheres, they also connect us to each other. Have you ever noticed what happens in talking to a group, when you transition from talking about facts to telling a personal, emotional story? Eye contact locks in, distractions decrease, and a series of expressions on the faces of listeners reflects the emotions within the story. Listening to stories is a form of learning that goes back long before the invention of reading, writing, or arithmetic, containing all of the elements to stimulate neuroplasticity and learning.
Emotional Regulation
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories—and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Alice Munro
During the first 18 months of life, the brain’s right hemisphere experiences a sensitive period of development as the physical and emotional aspects of interpersonal experience begin to take shape. These early experiences, vital to our future relationships and emotional health, are stored in systems of unconscious, implicit memory. As the left hemisphere enters its sensitive period during the middle of the second year, spoken language slowly begins to take shape and integrates with the emotional aspects of communication already organized in the right hemisphere. As the language centers mature, words are joined together to make meaningful sentences.
By four to five years old, the brain has matured to the point where words and feelings can begin to be linked in meaningful ways. Putting feelings into words and using them as a component of ongoing experience contributes to the ability to regulate anxiety and fear. Putting feelings into words and sharing them with others is an ability modeled and shaped by the skills of those around us. Parents who don’t talk to their children about feelings deprive them of a valuable source of emotional regulation.
Having a conscious narrative of our experience helps us remember where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. In other words, our stories ground us in the present, within the flow of our histories, and provide a direction for the future. This linear blueprint helps us to avoid feeling lost in an external present while reducing anxiety triggered by uncertainty. Within the brain, the cognitive processes involved in creating a narrative activate frontal functioning that downregulates amygdala activation. Essentially, having a narrative that creates a sense of control puts us in a state of mind that prepares us to think while reducing our anxiety and fear. Believing you are an efficacious person stimulates frontal activation that makes you a more efficacious person. There actually is power in positive thinking.
Having your clients write about their experiences in diaries and journals supports the same top-down emotional regulation as telling their story to others. Journaling increases a sense of well-being and reduces things like physical symptoms, physician visits, and missing work. Putting our thoughts and feelings into words through stories and journaling is also believed to stimulate prefrontal cortical areas that inhibit amygdala activation. These changes in neural activity result in a cascade of positive physiological, behavioral, and emotional effects, such as boosting immunological health (greater T-helper response, natural killer cell activity, and hepatitis B antibody levels) and lowering heart rate.
Secure Attachment and Integrated Narratives
Stories in families are colossally important. . . . Knowing them is proof of belonging.
Salman Rushdie
Narratives begin to be co-constructed in parent-child talk during the first year and continue throughout life. When verbal interactions include references to sensations, feelings, behaviors, and knowledge, they provide a medium through which the child’s brain is able to integrate the various aspects of experience and the array of different neural networks that process them. For example, the optimal organization of autobiographical memory, which includes input from multiple neural networks, enhances self-awareness while increasing our ability to solve problems, cope with stress, and maintain our connections with others.
From primitive tribes to modern families, coconstructed narratives are at the core of human groups. Group participation in narrating shared experiences organizes memories, embeds them within a social context, and assists in linking feelings, actions, and others to the self. As mentioned earlier, the repetition of stories also helps children to develop and practice recall abilities and influences and shapes their memories through relationships. This mutual shaping of memory between children and adults can serve both positive and negative ends. Positive outcomes include teaching the importance of accurate memory, imparting cultural values, and shaping the child’s self-image. Negative outcomes include the weaving of the caretakers’ traumas and prejudices into the children’s narratives.
When caretakers are unable to tolerate certain emotions, those emotions will be excluded from their narratives or shaped into distorted but more acceptable forms. In this way, the narratives of children will come to reflect the parents’ unconscious editorial choices. Whatever is excluded from the child’s narrative will be more difficult to process and comprehend in the years to come. This is one mechanism through which we pass our unresolved issues to our children. At its extreme, parents can be so overwhelmed by the emotions related to unresolved trauma that their narratives become disjointed and incoherent. There also appears to be a causal relationship among the complexity of a child’s narratives, the nature of their self-talk, and their attachment security.
Securely attached children generally engage in self-talk during toddlerhood and more spontaneous self-reflective remarks at age six. They tend to make comments about their thinking process and their ability to remember things about their history. These processes of mind, which insecurely attached children often lack, reflect the utilization of narratives in the development of self-identity and metacognition. As you might expect, children who are abused are usually insecurely attached and less able to think about their thinking or engage in self-reflection. This suggests that the ability to reflect on the self and one’s thoughts plays a role in emotional regulation, memory integration, and executive functioning.
The Capacity to Be
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
Socrates
Many men that I’ve worked with wake up in the middle of their lives feeling like strangers to themselves. Often, they have spent their lives living up to the expectations of others but never took the time to explore their own desires, passions, or interests. Perhaps this is part of midlife crisis, but it feels deeper to me. It isn’t the recognition that you aren’t young anymore; it’s the recognition that you no longer feel alive. It might be that you were tracked to medical or law school when you were 12 and never explored your interests in music or the arts. Or you got married and started to have children in your early 20s, and there was never the time, money, or conscious space to think about what might be important beyond taking care of other people.
Years ago, I was planning a vacation with a group of friends to Moorea, a small island a few miles south of Tahiti. We started talking about it in January, and by May, we had our reservations booked for August. As the time approached, one after another of my companions backed out. I considered canceling myself, but I needed a vacation. So on August first, I found myself boarding the nine-hour flight on my own.
For this story to make sense, you have to know that, up until this point in my life, I was never a good or willing vacationer. I generally worked seven days a week on one project or another and measured the quality of my life by accomplishments. If I wasn’t working with clients, I was fixing the house, writing papers, reading, or being productive in some other way. The only time I realized that I had forgotten to take time off was when I would develop an intractable headache that signaled a need for a break.
When I got off the plane in Tahiti, I took a cab to the dock and boarded a ferry bound for Moorea. Once on Moorea, a bus that circled the island dropped me off in front of my hotel. I checked in, found my little hut on the beach, unpacked my things, put on my bathing suit, and sat on the deck to stare at the ocean. After 30 seconds, I began to get fidgety and wondered what there was to do. I went to the front desk to ask for a suggestion, and the local girls all agreed that the tour of the pineapple factory was by far the most interesting thing to do there. Really, it was the only tourist attraction on the island. So I went, saw how pineapples were processed and packaged, and half an hour later was back at the hotel. So I went back to my hut and sat back down on the deck to relax and stare at the ocean.
I had landed in Tahiti at 4 A.M., arrived in Moorea by 7 A.M., was at the pineapple factory by 9, and back to the hotel by 11. It had been a very long day and I still had a while to wait for lunch. I felt like I was in a time distortion zone where every minute was an hour long. After a few more minutes (hours) of relaxing, I felt like I might go crazy, so I walked over to the bar to get a mai tai with a little umbrella in it. Sensing my desperation, the bartender may have added a splash of extra alcohol, because it almost immediately put me to sleep. Awakening a few hours later with a sunburn and a different kind of headache, I slowly struggled to regain my wits. I realized that back home, the days raced by as I tried to complete my lists of things to do. In my day-to-day life, it seemed like breakfast came every 10 minutes. It was now almost three o’clock on the day of my arrival, and the day felt like an eternity. I felt as if I had already had enough vacation, thank you very much. What was I going to do for the next three weeks?
One advantage of being a therapist is that, in times like these, you eventually remember that you have an unconscious. Next, you remember that when you feel like you are losing your mind, some emotion is getting activated that you don’t understand. The next thing to do is to consider the feelings, free associate, and be open to whatever comes to mind.
In the face of this home remedy, my first association was to my childhood, and I began to remember how slowly time appeared to pass. I remembered how long summer vacation seemed to be, how long it felt from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and how endless Sunday afternoons visiting with relatives seemed to be. I shuttled to the present moment and realized that the three weeks ahead of me felt like a vast expanse of time. And I began to realize that time is a matter of being emotionally present. One of the prices I was paying for being so “productive” was that I had forgotten how to be. It turned out that I had such a good time on my vacation that I returned the following year.
The Hero’s Journey
A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
Christopher Reeve
What makes for a good story, and why do we feel compelled to watch movies like Pretty Woman or A Few Good Men over and over again? There is a formula, and any screenwriting class can teach it to you. Every story needs a hero with whom the audience can identify, a good hero simultaneously facing an external challenge and struggling with some inner wound that causes persistent pain. For the characters played by both Richard Gere and Tom Cruise, this pain came from estrangement from their fathers—a common dilemma of adolescent males who face the challenge of becoming an adult without the guidance and support of a nurturing father. Not surprisingly, this is my story and likely drives my fascination with both films. The challenge for Gere is to face his vulnerability, while for Cruise, it is living up to his father’s reputation. Does Gere have the guts to fall in love with Julia Roberts? Does Cruise have what it takes to go toe-to-toe with Jack Nicholson?
At first, the hero avoids or fails the challenge, leading him to question his ability to succeed. The challenge is repeatedly questioned and even rejected before it is eventually accepted. During the journey, the hero leaves behind old definitions of self and travels into uncharted territory before discovering his own meaning and place in the world. Some inner transformation takes place that allows him to face his demons, succeed in his worldly challenge, and solidify a new and expanded adult identity, which now includes previously unintegrated thoughts, behaviors, and emotions.
This narrative structure, seen in stories around the world and throughout time, has also been called the myth of the hero by Joseph Campbell. It is a core theme of ancient mythology, contemporary literature, and most children’s stories. It is the story of the adolescent struggle toward adulthood, the overcoming of fear and trauma, and personal transformation and redemption. The universality of this story is likely the result of the commonality of brain evolution, shared developmental challenges, and the fundamental emotional similarities of human development. Despite our cultural differences, all humans share the fight for growth, survival, and actualization. Below, I outline some common aspects of the heroic journey in more detail.
Key Aspects of the Hero’s Journey
The Journey Begins
The hero has an outer challenge to be faced and an inner brokenness to be healed.
Accomplishing these goals requires taking a journey to new and unknown places.
The journey offers a promise of growth and redemption.
The Challenge
The present system and the current self are insufficient and cannot save you.
You must venture forth beyond the safe and familiar confines of your life and beliefs.
Past rules will be broken in the cause of finding what can only be found elsewhere.
Finding the Guide
The guide acknowledges and respects the brokenness and shame that lurk in the hero’s shadows.
The guide sees beyond the hero’s limitations.
The guide presents an invitation and a challenge to take the heroic journey.
Attaching to the Guide
The guide has something and believes the hero can have it too.
The hero becomes aware that the guide sees something real in the world and in him.
The hero comes to gradually share the guide’s vision.
The Heroic Discovery
Limitations exist only in the mind.
Confronting fear and pain are gateways to new worlds.
Power is discovered in vulnerability; freedom is found in commitment.
Carl Jung said that the answers to our most important questions are to be found in the shadow. The shadow is the repository of our pain and shame—the horrors of our families and the demons of our inner lives. Because you can’t completely banish the shadow, you must learn to develop a relationship with it. If the shadow can be acknowledged and included in the therapeutic relationship, the therapist becomes transformed from a source of information to a guide on the path to wisdom. Wisdom is a form of knowledge delivered with compassion and shaped in a manner that helps the seeker to heal and grow. Put in a slightly different way, wisdom is knowledge in the service of others.
In order for therapists to become guides, they need to be familiar with their own shadows, which allows them to identify, approach, and confront their clients’ inner demons. Like shamans, therapists have to have a clear vision so that their client can come to believe that they see something real that they can share in. The message is, “I know something you don’t know, something you don’t have, but I am committed to sharing it with you and helping you along on your journey.” Sometimes, therapists need to tell their clients stories of what is possible, stories that connect us to the unconscious, our tribal histories, and to potential futures. These stories can become the road map to a better future.
Therapists have to be able to acknowledge the pain, suffering, hypocrisy, and lack of fairness in the world. They have to have faced it for themselves and come out on the other side with their own sense of purpose and meaning in order to be a guide for someone else. Therapists also have to acknowledge their own shadow and make it a part of the therapy. A therapist invites clients to take a journey out of the narrow confines of their lives into a new world beyond the limitations of their neighborhood, family, culture, and current narrative.
Everyone has a story. In the absence of self-awareness, our story is a simple chronology of events and our judgments about them. Psychotherapy is a metacognitive vantage point with the potential to add self-awareness to our story. This bit of objective distance provides us with the ability to think about our story, reflect on our choices, and consider editing some of the outcomes. Sometimes you have to make some suggestions about alternative narrative arcs and outcomes to get them started. Would my family really disown me if I followed my own dreams? Would it kill my father if I told him the truth about who I am? Is there a possibility that I could be successful and happy?
As therapists, we hope to guide our clients to the realization that they are more than a character in a story dictated by external circumstances. Often, a large portion of a client’s story has been unconsciously imposed by past generations of their families. What makes it especially hard to edit is that much of this origin is unconscious. We would love to instill in our clients that they can make choices, follow their passions, and become the author of a new story—their story. The narrative process allows us to separate story from self. It’s like taking off your shirt to patch a tear and then putting it back on. When we evolved the capacity to examine our narratives and see them as one option among many, we also gained the ability to edit and modify our lives.