Man is Made of Stories
God made man because He loves stories. ~ Elie Wiesel
Man has been called “the storytelling animal”. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. Stories are how we communicate with others.
You are your story. The stories we construct, the stories well tell ourselves, reconcile who we imagine we are and who we really are. They are how we tell what happened to us and therefore our stories change over time, as we do. In this way, the stories we tell are a snapshot of our personalities in time.
There are six basic story qualities both anthropologists and psychologists agree guide humans in constructing their stories.
(1) The Self is Storied
We start telling stories as young kids and as we grow, and change, form relationships, and win, and lose, and love, we collect material. This material is ordered in a narrative fashion in our minds. We fictionalize and rationalize the past in order to face the future. Every event, every relationship, every incident, is framed in our heads by our personal narrative. We are memoirists in our own heads. What is a memoir? It’s not fiction, but it’s not the truth. It’s our story as we choose to remember it.
(2) Stories Integrate Lives
One of the most important things that stories can do is a process called integration, which brings together disparate ideas, characters, happenings and other elements of life that were previously set apart. We try to find meaning in everything from a minor event to major life experiences. Psychologists call this “autobiographical reasoning.” Events become a narrative with beginnings, endings, characters and themes.
(3) Stories Are Told in Social Relationships
Stories, of course, are not told in isolation. As we tell our stories to others, we edit them based on feedback. Simply put, if the listener is distracted while the speaker is telling their story, the storyteller tells a shorter more dramatic story. A single friend told me his complaint about dating was telling his life story over and over.
(4) Stories Change Over Time
People also adjust their stories depending on their audience. Psychologists refer to two types of internal storytelling: dramatic and reflective. Dramatic storytelling is just like it sounds, emphasizing gesturing, vivid words and other dramatic efforts to recreate the scenes. Reflective storytelling is much less about the story details and more about the meaning. The person talks about what the event meant to them or how it made them feel.
Our memory of personal events is largely unreliable. With time, we tend to misremember the details. I was recently shocked to realize I had mis-remembered much about one the most important achievements of my life, the development of the animated movie “The Lion King”. I’ve recently realized it was much more complicated and nuanced than I remembered. In my mind, I had simplified the story of the movie’s development around the characters and moments I thought were the most important, in order to tell the story. And those elements are and were important, especially to me, but there were other elements that I discarded from my story because it was a better simpler more dramatic story without those details. Not just to tell others, but also to tell myself. That’s how the good intentions of honest people create stories that are, well, closer to fiction than fact.
(5) Stories Are Cultural Texts
The most interesting stories are different. They surprise us. They offer universal insights. Without outsiders looking at us, we could not see ourselves objectively, we could not evolve, we could not innovate or improve our stories. This is where the arts are particularly helpful. We see heroes struggle, overcome obstacles and then succeed. The heroic journey is our guide to how it can be done. This is primal. These heroic stories date to our most ancient times. They instruct us how to create narratives in which we ourselves are the hero in our subconscious mind to better understand the universe and our place in it.
(6) Some Stories Are Better Than Others
Many professionals have come to view psychotherapy is a process of story reformulation and repair. When we are unable to see patterns, or themes, passions, in our lives, we can lose our way. We become trapped in a bad story, a story that needs to be rewritten so the plot can continue. People often turn to religion to help resolve negative aspects of their stories and turn them into positives. In this way, great pain and misfortune can lead to rapture. Everything has a reason. Psychology can help in the same way. Life is a quest to improve our stories. The better our story, the better we feel about ourselves.
