You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

When Leon Fleisher was a small child, his older brother took piano lessons. The brother didn't much care for them. But afterwards, little Leon would climb onto the piano bench and play note for note the pieces his brother had practiced. That's when his mother realized Leon was the one who should study the instrument. Leon Fleisher made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1944. He was just 16 years old.

A New York Times music critic said this performance established him as one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists. He went on to perform with the world's top orchestras throughout the 1950s and early '60s.

Pause this story here, and Leon Fleisher's life is a triumph. But then, something unexpected happened.

He started to notice an odd stiffness in his right index finger. His fourth and fifth finger started curling under. The pain and stiffness grew steadily worse. Within a matter of months, his career as a concert pianist was virtually over.

Leon Fleisher:

As you can well imagine without becoming melodramatic, I was in a very despairing state of depression for about two years.

Shankar Vedantam:

If we were to take stock of Leon Fleisher's life at this point, we might say it was a tragedy. But Leon Fleisher still had so much music in him. So he reinvented himself, becoming a much-admired conductor and teacher.

Meanwhile, he continued to try every available measure to heal his right hand. Eventually, a combination of Botox injections and deep-tissue massage started to help. In 2003, Leon Fleisher made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall. He was 75 years old. The next year he released a CD, his first two-handed recording in over 40 years.

Today, we kick off a month-long series that we are calling Healing 2.0. We look at the nature of loss, and also a mind-bending idea about whether we should try to do away with grief altogether. Plus, we explore whether trauma really does make us stronger, and how to craft an apology.

This week on Hidden Brain, how the way we understand the ups and downs of our lives can shape the ups and downs of our lives.

As we make our way through life, it can feel as if we are buffeted by a swiftly moving series of events. Sometimes it's all we can do to keep our heads above water as we wait for the next wave to crash over us.

But research and psychology hints at a different process unfolding beneath the waves: an undercurrent that has powerful effects on our wellbeing, mental health, and life outcomes.

At Olin College, psychologist Jonathan Adler studies how our minds are shaped by this undercurrent, and how becoming mindful of it can help us better deal with setbacks and failure. Jonathan Adler, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Jonathan Adler:

Oh, I'm so excited to be here with you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan, I want to take you back to your college days in Maine. You were a capable and hard-working student, but you were also struggling with a secret. What were you going through?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah, like you said, I was a good student. I was curious and took classes in a ton of different departments. But socially, I was more reserved. I had a really tight group of friends in high school, and I was sort of angry that that chapter of my life had closed just because high school had ended. I was also struggling with my sexuality, though that's not something I was necessarily conscious of for a big chunk of college.

Shankar Vedantam:

So you came up with a solution to these challenges, and it was something of a radical solution. What was the plan you devised?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah, well, a lot of students at the college spent part of their junior year studying abroad. And that seemed to me like a rare opportunity to take a break from my regular life and figure out some things about myself. So I ended up in Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia.

Shankar Vedantam:

Wow.

Jonathan Adler:

Which it's literally as far away from my life as you could get. I mean, if you draw a line from New England through the center of the earth, you end up off the coast of Perth.

Shankar Vedantam:

And this was your way of reinventing yourself.

Jonathan Adler:

Well, it felt like an opportunity to step outside my life, and explore who I was in a context that wouldn't then have any ramifications for the life that I was living.

Shankar Vedantam:

Okay, so you fly all the way to Australia. What happens? Did you find that your social life improved, that you found deep connections with other people?

Jonathan Adler:

No. When I arrived, I knew that I was going to need to find some friends. So I auditioned for the theater department's play.

I was studying psychology and theater in college, and I knew that being involved in a show was a surefire way to make fast friends, and that it also was a place where there might be opportunities to date.

The play that the department was doing that semester was this weird post-modern adaptation of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya by the admittedly brilliant British playwright, Howard Barker.

There's this relatively minor character in the original play, Astrov, who's this brooding intellectual who just thinks but never does anything. And I figured, "Oh, that's perfect for me."

But much to my astonishment, I got cast as Vanya, which is one of the only leading roles that I'd ever had.

Shankar Vedantam:

Wow.

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah. So most of Chekhov's plays are about people who are stuck in their lives and consumed with what might have been. The joke about Chekhov is that nothing ever happens.

So this playwright, Barker, took this play and decided to imagine what would happen if the same characters just did whatever their impulses told them to do? In this version, there are gun battles and unconstrained sex and a whole lot of chaos. It's total liberation.

I was an anxious actor. And having to carry this play in a role that was deeply suited to my natural tendencies, it was all-consuming. I had gone looking for the kind of liberation that these characters were given by their playwright. But in finding it in this fictional world, it completely shut down my own world. I felt I had to spend my time mastering this incredibly complex and unnatural language.

I mean, the first line of the play is just the word "Uncle" repeated over and over. And I just lost all the bandwidth for everything else. It ended up being one of the loneliest periods of my life, with me actually starting to count down the days until I could come home.

Shankar Vedantam:

Oh, no.

Jonathan Adler:

What I had envisioned as a time for freedom and exploration actually became this burdened lonely time. And I think it set me back in the process of coming out.

Shankar Vedantam:

You returned to Maine after the semester abroad. You're back now in the same college where you were previously frustrated. What goes through your head at this point?

Jonathan Adler:

I think I felt profoundly disappointed in myself for not having capitalized on this rare opportunity, and stifled to be back in my old life without having figured anything out. Yeah, so I think I just put my head down and kept doing what I knew how to do: which was be a brain, not a fully integrated body.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan's time in Australia felt like more than a misadventure: it felt like a sign. He had made the trip with high hopes hoping to become a new person. When he returned no different than before, it didn't just feel the same. It felt worse.

Many of us have had experiences similar to Jonathan's. We suffer setbacks and failures, humiliations and disappointments. When these happen to us frequently enough, we start to think that we will never be happy, never be whole.

When we come back: why unhappiness can breed unhappiness, and how to break the cycle. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Jonathan Adler spent much of his young adulthood feeling unsatisfied, yearning for more. He sensed he was gay, but didn't feel comfortable coming out. He spent a semester in Australia to break free of the constraints of his college life in Maine, but found that he was just as lonely on another continent.

Sometime after he returned to the United States, however, Jonathan made a discovery. He came by the work of a pioneering scientist in a field known as narrative psychology. Dan McAdams at Northwestern University was arguing that the stories we tell about our lives have profound effects on our wellbeing.

Jonathan moved to Northwestern, became Dan's PhD student, and later, his scientific collaborator. In time, Jonathan came to see his own life through the lens of his research. He realized that he had been telling the story of his life in a way that was self-defeating. And he came to see that by telling that story differently, it could make a profound difference.

We'll get to that in a moment. First, I asked Jonathan to explain to me the basic idea behind narrative psychology.

Jonathan Adler:

You can't totally control the things that happened to you in your life. You have some more say about how you make sense of it.

And it's important to remember, we're talking about stories here. So we know from research on memory that we're not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience. For a long time, that frustrated cognitive scientists. But in more recent years, it's become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason.

If you think about why we have memory in the first place, it's not so we can hold on to every single thing that's happened to us in some heretical way. We have memories so that we can make sense of what's happening to us right now, and anticipate what might happen next.

So if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out, you don't necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear. But you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places.

So the slippery reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system, it's not a bug. And stories are an amazing tool for holding onto the meaning of our past experiences. The objective facts of our lives are what they are. But the stories are about where we draw connections between things, where we parse the chapter breaks of our lives. And those are narrative acts, not historical acts. And the way we do that can have big implications for our wellbeing.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan and Dan McAdams have found that one of the most crucial choices we make in telling our stories; and it's important to underscore that most of us make these choices unconsciously; is where we start and stop the different chapters of our life story.

Jonathan Adler:

All lives have good and bad in it. Stories that start bad and end bad don't feel great, and stories that start good and end good, those feel good. But what we find in the research is that where we draw connections between the negative and the positive matters a lot.

So stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good, we call that a redemption sequence. And stories that start good and end bad, we call that a contamination sequence.

Shankar Vedantam:

I see. So a redemption sequence is in some ways something bad happens to you. But in some ways, you're rising from the ashes, so redemption. And a contamination sequence is: things are going pretty well… But then something bad happens to you, and then everything is downhill from there. So one basically has an upward trajectory. The other one has a downward trajectory.

Jonathan Adler:

That's right. And again, we're remembering these are stories. This is how we narrate the experience, not necessarily the objective facts of our lives. Because all lives have good and bad.

Shankar Vedantam:

I mean, your story about going to Australia, for example: you go to Australia with high hopes, you get the starring role in a play. We know many people would say that's a very good thing to have happened to you.

And then the play turns out to not be quite what was best for you, or the role turns out to be not what was best for you. You end up being very lonely, and then you can see a downward sort of spiral in some ways. And in some ways it becomes a contamination story, a story where something good turned bad.

Then you come back to the United States. And now it feels like the bad thing that happened in Australia is with you even now. That's sort of how contamination works. It has a contagious effect; it spreads and infects other things.

Jonathan Adler:

That's right. Again, I didn't know about Dan's work at that moment in my life, so I wasn't thinking about it in storied terms. But indeed, I think I was living out what I can now retrospectively see was a contamination sequence.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to talk a little bit about the effects of these sequences on our life: the effect of a redemption narrative and a contamination narrative.

What effects do these different stories have on our lives? What's the difference on our mental wellbeing and happiness of redemption stories versus contamination stories?

Jonathan Adler:

I have a nice short example of this from a participant in one of my earliest studies.

Briefly, this was a middle-aged man. He's recounting the story of the first date that he went on with the woman that he ultimately goes on to marry. The facts of the story are they go out. When he brings her home, they're standing on her front porch. He leans in for a kiss, and then her dad opens the front door and interrupts them.

In the version that this man narrated when he shared his life story as part of participating in our research, he frames the experience as a redemption sequence. He says, "It really brought us close right at the very start of our relationship, and we stayed that way ever since."

So this embarrassing moment had given them something to laugh about on their second date, and maybe it accelerated their connection. But he might have narrated the exact same sequence of events by concluding that it was this stain on the beginning of their relationship that could have contaminated the relationship in a way that they moved on from, but never could erase.

Neither version is more accurate in the historical sense. These are narrative interpretations that take on different thematic arcs, redemption and contamination. But these different ways of narrating our lives have different implications for your wellbeing.

We find over and over that when redemption sequences occur in people's life stories, they tend to be associated with positive wellbeing, good life satisfaction, lower levels of things like depression, higher self-esteem. And it's just the opposite for themes of contamination.

Shankar Vedantam:

So what's important here; and you've mentioned this before; is that the underlying facts of the story don't have to change for the story, in fact, to be a very different kind of story.

For example, in your own life, you're still a gay man coming of age at a time when homophobia is rampant. You're still lonely in college. The Australia trip was less of an escape and more of a setback. But you can tell both a contamination story as well as a redemption story built around those facts.

Jonathan Adler:

That's right. And again, the shift there is about where we draw the chapter breaks in my life. If we end that story, end that chapter when I get back to college, it feels like a contamination sequence. But if I string it together with the things that came next ... spoiler alert ... It feels like a redemption sequence.

Shankar Vedantam:

Tell me what happened next, and how it becomes a redemption story.

Jonathan Adler:

As I neared the end of college, I largely dealt with my internal turmoil by just throwing myself into my work. I was one of the top students in my class and I got some awards. I took a research job after college at Harvard, which was ... My plan was going to graduate school.

I felt like I had done everything expected of me. And I didn't really seek out any mentorship as I applied to 10 very competitive PhD programs. And then when the whole process was done, I only got into one program.

So I always tell students, "You only go to one school, so it only takes one." And that is true. But at the time, it felt like a shock. Don't get me wrong, I was actually really excited by the one option in front of me. But I had imagined that I might have more choice when approaching this next big chapter of my life.

As you said, the one school I got into was in the Midwest, a place that I had never been for more than a few days. So I was thinking a lot about what it would mean to be a gay man living in this different part of the country than I was used to.

Shankar Vedantam:

So how does this become a redemption story? It sounds actually like the contamination is getting worse here, because you apply to all these colleges and you don't get into them,

Jonathan Adler:

Right. So here's what happened. I went to campus for my interview. It was spring break week, so no one was really around. But after the formal stuff was done, I casually walked by the LGBT Student Group's office. And there was this little yellow envelope of business cards tacked to the bulletin board outside that said something like, "Questions? Email us at ..." And then some generic email address.

So when I got home, I sent this email saying, "I'm thinking of coming here for graduate school. I've never lived in the Midwest. What's it like to be there and be a gay person, both on campus and in the surrounding community?"

We didn't even have internet at the house that I was renting with some friends, so I had to sneak into the computer lab at the nearby college to check my email.

So a few days later, I got a perfectly nice and very thorough email reassuring me from a senior undergrad about what it was like to go to school there and live in the town. I'm sure it was a copy-and-paste of an email that he had sent many times before.

Shankar Vedantam:

Sure.

Jonathan Adler:

But I appreciated how clear it was, and the bits of humor sprinkled in. And I wrote back to say, "Thanks. That was so super helpful."

And then this student said, "I'm actually graduating early, but I'm going to be hanging around. I'm handing off the listserv, but if you have questions, just send me an email."

So quite a bit of time goes by, and I did commit to going to school there. And when it was time for me to start looking for an apartment, I reached out again. And more than 20 years later, we are now married and have two kids and a dog.

So those first emails weren't even remotely flirty, but they were attuned and connected and kind and funny. Eventually they did get flirty, as did my responses.

So I look back at this turning point in my life with a profound sense of, first of all, gratitude, but also redemption. What at the time felt like close to failure; that all my work in college, and all my ignoring of my personal life for the sake of my intellectual life had presented me with only one option; now feels like the universe trying to make sure that I found my way.

And within a year I was having a more gratifying intellectual experience than I had ever imagined, and I was in love.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering in some ways if the narrative changing played some role in sort of these things happening in your life. Is it just that you had a series of bad luck and bad events happening to you, and then you had a series of good luck and good events happening to you?

I mean, that might be the case. But that's not particularly interesting from a psychological point of view. Do you think that the way you were thinking about your own life and your exposure to Dan's ideas had reshaped your ability, or your willingness to be open to thinking about a relationship in a different way? Or thinking about flirting on email with someone?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing that up. Because indeed, one could say, "Well, the objective facts were things were bad and then things were good." It really matters where we draw the chapter breaks in our lives.

So yeah, one could say, "Well, that horrible chapter is over, and this new chapter is just a good chapter." But I actually think it is the way I have woven those two experiences together in my life story where it feels like redemption.

Instead of being a story where it was bad and then it was good, this is a story that is about a shift from loneliness and compartmentalization to professional and personal fulfillment and identity integration.

Shankar Vedantam:

Notice where you start and stop Jonathan's story makes a profound difference about whether the story is a redemptive story or a contamination story.

If you draw a connection between his unhappiness in college, his setbacks in Australia, and the fact he got into only one graduate school after working so hard in college, that story looks like an endless loop of setbacks.

On the other hand, if you tell the story of a lonely closeted gay kid who just happens to get into the one school where he's going to be professionally successful and personally happy, then it looks like the heavens have parted and a star is pointing the way forward for Jonathan.

The objective facts of the story don't change, but the way you think of the story changes profoundly. You can see how powerful this is in a study conducted by William Dunlop and Jessica Tracy. They were researching the stories told by people fighting addiction.

Jonathan Adler:

They looked at the relationship between personal narratives and the maintenance of sobriety among people navigating alcohol dependence. So they asked people involved in Alcoholics Anonymous support groups to tell the story of their last drink.

They actually had two samples: one of people who had remained sober for four years or longer, and another sample who were in the earliest stages of sobriety. In both groups, they found that people who told redemptive stories of their last drink were more likely to stay sober than people whose stories didn't contain redemptive themes.

For example, they talk about one participant who felt like the last drink for him really symbolized the low point. And it was the moment when he committed to really turning his life around, which he then goes on to do. And that is emblematic of many findings in the field: some that look at behavior, some that look mostly at mental health outcomes, where we find that the stories that we tell about our lives are strong predictors of how we're doing.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan has also found that the way we tell stories about our lives can have biological effects. In one study, Jonathan tracked a group of parents experiencing chronic stress. His co-author on the study, Ashley Mason, was interested in the science of telomeres.

Jonathan Adler:

Telomeres are the end caps on our chromosomes that protect them from getting frayed or tangled each time a cell divides. Because each time the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter. And eventually, the cell is left unprotected and it dies.

Some scientists see telomere length as a biological marker of aging. And we know that under conditions of chronic stress, telomeres wear down faster. So in this study, we had a group of chronically stressed participants. These were parents who had children with quite severe autism spectrum disorders. And we compared them to parents of neurotypical kids: which, as a parent of neurotypical kids, is still a stressful experience. But the degree of chronic stress is different.

So we had their stories at the beginning of the study. Then we had measures of their wellbeing, and also data about their telomere length at that first time point, and then again 18 months later. And what we found was that among these chronically stressed parents, their stories mattered a lot.

What was interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption. It was a theme of integration, where we think about the extent to which participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and integrating that into their own life story.

We found that among the chronically stressed parents, stories of integration were associated not only with their self-report of lower levels of psychological stress, but also with significantly less telomere shortening over 18 months.

As far as I know, this is the only study to show a connection between the themes in people's narratives and biological markers of stress and aging. But it suggests that there may be biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones.

Shankar Vedantam:

What did the parents say in terms of the kinds of stories they told? In terms of stories that were effective or less effective?

Jonathan Adler:

One of the parents in the study talked about the ways in which parenting is the ultimate life test, is what she said. She said, "You can read a ton about all this stuff. But ultimately, you have to learn from your kid."

And for her, that taught her a lot about who she was as a person: how she was open and not open. And how she felt like having this challenging parenting experience really helped her reshape who she was as a person, and what it meant to her to not only be a parent, but a human in relation with this other human who she loved dearly.

Shankar Vedantam:

Now, when you hear someone tell a redemptive story and you see that they are experiencing better mental health, there is a question that arises, which is: in which direction does the arrow of causation run?

Are they telling redemptive stories, and therefore feeling better about their lives? Or are they feeling better about their lives, and therefore telling redemptive stories?

At one point, you followed a group of patients as they worked with a psychotherapist. You charted both the changes they experienced while in therapy and the stories they told about their lives, and also which preceded which. What did you find, Jonathan?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question. In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people, adults ranging from ages 18 to 92. They were seeking individual therapy for a huge range of problems. There were folks with really significant psychopathology like depression, anxiety, eating disorders. But there were also people just wanting to do some work on themselves.

There was a woman who wanted to think through her own childhood as she was about to become a parent. There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement. So before they started with their therapist, we collected their stories and we measured their wellbeing, user standard measures. Then on the other side, we had nearly 600 narratives from across all these participants. And what we found was, first, people got better over the course of treatment. Which is good, because decades of research on psychotherapy suggest that it works.

And we found that people's stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of treatment. And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in wellbeing, and not the other way around. Because it was as if people were narrating a new version of their lives, and then a week or two later, their wellbeing would catch up with the story.

Shankar Vedantam:

As we go through our lives responding to ups and downs that come at us unpredictably, it can feel as if we are hostages to life events. This is why many people see the hand of fate in the things that happen to them. But everything looks different once we realize that we are not simply a beleaguered character in our life story; we are also the author.

When we come back, four principles to tell wiser stories about our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us constantly construct stories about our lives. Most of the time, this happens under the surface. We are not mindful about the narrative choices we make. Every so often, however, something happens in our lives that causes us to revisit our stories: a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a close friend. All of these take time to assimilate into the narrative of our lives.

At Olin College of Engineering, psychologist Jonathan Adler has studied what happens when events come along that challenge our preexisting narratives.

Jon, I want you to tell me the story of a physician named Annie Brewster. Can you describe what Annie's life was like when she was in her late 20s?

Jonathan Adler:

Annie was one of these unbelievably driven, successful students. She had done extremely well in medical school, landed a great residency, was working a million hours.

But she had started to experience some tingling on one side of her body. She went to get it checked out. She was very well-connected in the medical sphere and waited to see the uber-specialist, who quite brusquely told her that she had multiple sclerosis.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to play a bit of tape here from Annie herself, talking about how she reacted to the news from her doctor.

Annie Brewster:

It took me a long time to come to terms with that diagnosis, to accept it into my life. Really, it was difficult for me because I had always thought of myself as somebody who was really strong. My body had always worked for me, done what I wanted it to do. And to think of myself as someone with an illness, I really had to redefine myself and get over some denial.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan, you say that Annie was engaging in an internal process of accommodation. What do you mean by this? And is accommodation a good thing?

Jonathan Adler:

Most of what we do most of the time, we call assimilation. We go on living our lives, and when new things happen, we just assimilate those experiences into the story that we've been telling, whether we do that consciously or not.

But sometimes something happens that really makes us question the story we've been telling. In those instances, the story itself needs to change to accommodate that new experience.

And what we call accommodative processing is a key narrative variable in supporting our wellbeing. But it doesn't support our wellbeing in exactly the way redemption does, for example. But accommodative processing, it helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it, even if it doesn't always feel good.

Annie tells this story that once she did finally start to accommodate this experience, when she did really start to reshape her identity to include this idea of herself as having an illness, she stepped away from her very prestigious medical career. She went down to part-time and she founded a nonprofit organization called Health Story Collaborative.

I met Annie about a year into that process. She was going around and collecting other people's stories and curating them. And 10 years later, we have worked really closely together, developing programs that leverage the science of narrative in order to support storytelling in the highly fragmented and fragmenting medical ecosystem.

Shankar Vedantam:

When we modify our life stories to accommodate new life events, those events no longer feel random and aberrational. The less we feel buffeted by random events, the more we feel like we are in control of our own lives. This leads to the next idea.

Jonathan has found that stories that give us a feeling that we are in charge of our own lives are linked to higher wellbeing.

Jonathan Adler:

Agency is a theme in people's stories. We assess it along a continuum: from being able to direct your life, and then down at the other end of the continuum, you're batted around by the whims of fate. Again, these are themes and stories. No one is completely in control of their lives, so it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e. you.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Layla.

Jonathan Adler:

In the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development among people who acquire physical disabilities. And Layla was a participant in one of my studies.

She tells this story of having these horrible headaches, which gradually intensified to the point where she couldn't function. She spends time in three different hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives. And no one can figure out what's going on.

She decides to fly to India to see a specialist, and he sends her right into surgery. When she wakes up, the pain is gone, but she also can't see. The surgeon had been able to alleviate the unexplained swelling in her head that had been pressing on her optic nerves, but the nerve was also irreparably damaged. So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return. But Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't.

She said, "I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad." And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her, Layla gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person.

She shifts careers. She moves to the United States to get training and computer science, where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind and low-vision people.

Shankar Vedantam:

I want to play a clip of Layla talking about her experience. Here she is.

Layla:

I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me. Even right now, if a doctor came in and told me they have a cure, I would not take it. Because I think for me, it made me understand myself, and it gives these new challenges every single day. It presents me with something. And through those challenges, I'm able to understand myself.

Shankar Vedantam:

That's a remarkable account, Jonathan. But as I hear Layla talking, I feel like I've heard the same thing in the deaf community. Many deaf people today say, "The real problem is not with deafness. I just happen to speak sign language. I speak a different language than you do."

Now we can all debate how and whether something should be considered a disorder. But I think the point you're trying to make here is that the stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or put us in the passenger seat. And Layla is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat.

Jonathan Adler:

That's right. Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach, where disability is a problem to be solved or eradicated. Social models of disability or relational models really push back on that and say, "Disability is in the interaction between my body and the built and social environment around us."

In Layla's story, like you said, there's also this sense of agency. "Now that this is part of who I am, what am I going to do with it? How can I take control of this and use it for things that matter to me?"

Shankar Vedantam:

You can see a theme emerging here. As you tell the story of your life, do you see yourself as a passive subject, someone to whom things happen? Or as an active protagonist, someone who is directing the course of her own life?

Now, as Jonathan says, every life offers lots of evidence that allows you to draw either conclusion. Given this, Jonathan is saying, choose narratives that put you in the driver's seat.

Most of the narratives we have discussed so far have championed the idea of the individual. But it's also the case that no man is an island.

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah, right. In our conversation so far, we've been very focused on individuals. But of course, we aren't these isolated individuals. We're all connected. And communion is a theme that captures the quality of people's connections to others.

In my research with people who have disabilities, there's often a lot of talk about their connections: not only with family and friends and coworkers, but with the broader disability community.

Shankar Vedantam:

At Olin College, you help organize a yearly event called the Story Slam, at which students perform renditions of their stories, tell about the events in their lives. And in advance of one year Slam, you worked with a student named Antonio. What was his story, Jonathan?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah. Antonio was really interested in thinking through what it meant to him to be a first-generation Latino student at this small engineering college. He described feeling isolated during his weekend on campus as a prospective student. It wasn't the conversations about science that made him feel left out; it really was the small talk.

He has this great line in the story where he says, "I'm definitely not fluent in cheese." What he means is that disconnection gets coded into even the most mundane experiences, not just the grand low points of our lives.

Shankar Vedantam:

But as isolated as he was feeling. Antonia honed in: not on his isolation, but on a moment of connection.

Antonio:

I think I finally found somebody who understood. Diego was a person who had also danced at quinceañeras, who had also brought lunch in a repurposed sour cream container, and applied to the same college scholarships for low-income students. One would even think we had done all these things side by side.

Shankar Vedantam:

I can hear the theme of positive communion here, Jonathan. Antonio is telling a story that says, "I'm not alone."

Jonathan Adler:

Exactly. In this room full of people who did not look like him, Antonio found someone who did, and they really connected. He says, "Diego threw down this challenge. If you think there should be more people like us here, then come and fix it."

And Antonio says, "I'm a competitive guy. And the next fall I was on a one-way bus trip to Olin College."

Shankar Vedantam:

So Jonathan, one final feature of a constructive story is that it generates meaning for the person who tells it. You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us. But we can try and tell a meaningful story. And there are benefits to telling such stories. Can you explain what you mean?

Jonathan Adler:

Yeah. To pan back for just a second, when we think about the broad study of wellbeing, it tends to cluster in two domains, which get their cumbersome names from Aristotle.

On the one hand, we have what's called hedonic wellbeing, which means it feels good. On the other hand, we have a kind of wellbeing called eudaimonic wellbeing, which means it feels meaningful.

These two domains of wellbeing are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other. If we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense. We all do plenty of things that feel good, but don't feel particularly meaningful. We might binge-watch TV or something. We can all think about experiences that feel meaningful, but don't feel particularly good.

So in my work with Health Story Collaborative in particular, we find that feeling good is not always an option for people. Telling redemptive stories, or stories high in the theme of agency and communion; that's not always possible.

In those situations, we're often interested in the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that. Even if the meaning doesn't ultimately feel good in that sort of happy sense, that meaning is still incredibly worthwhile.

Shankar Vedantam:

I am trying to imagine how someone who is going through a rough time might hear this episode, Jonathan. And I worry that that person might say, "I've just lost my job, I've just gotten divorced. I've just lost a close family friend. And now Jonathan Adler comes along and tells me that if I'm unhappy, it's because I'm not telling the right story about my life." How would you respond to that?

Jonathan Adler:

I want to say three things to that person. The first thing is, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now. Of course they're hard, and of course you're not feeling good.

The second thing I want to say is there are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences. And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion. If you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids? Or if something challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it? So we might explore those themes.

But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem. In the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin. We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it. I call this the press for redemption.

And in my work with Health Story Collaborative, we often find that people feel like they're having this double whammy experience where, "I'm sick and I'm not telling the right kind of story about it. My cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter, or that people love me more than I ever would've realized if I never had cancer." No, some people say, "This just sucks."

And I think in those instances, we want to acknowledge that, and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck. Let them know that there's a reason they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story, because our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story. And then to help them find other kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't make you feel better.

Shankar Vedantam:

Many of the examples we've talked about here have involved individuals. But as we've started to see, I think towards the end of this conversation, we're slowly broadening out beyond the individual. Because of course, these ideas are relevant outside of individual minds as well.

Societies tell themselves narratives. Nations tell themselves stories all the time. Do you think ideas of narrative psychology speak to how nations talk to themselves, and perhaps how they ought to talk to themselves?

Jonathan Adler:

I do. And this is really at the forefront of the field. My colleagues, Kate McLean and Moin Syed have written really compellingly about what they call master narratives. These are the dominant storylines in our culture that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort of rigid and powerful. And we are always in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts.

Families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold. And as you said, countries certainly do. Again, narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level, and they're not all good or all bad at the national level, either. But these national narratives are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell.

Shankar Vedantam:

A number of years ago, Jonathan, when you were still living in Illinois, the junior senator from your state gave a memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I want to play you a clip from the speech that first put Barack Obama in the national spotlight.

Obama:

I'm not talking about blind optimism here: the almost-willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't think about it, or the healthcare crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something more substantial.

It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire, singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores. The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta. The hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too.

Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope. In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation: a belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

Shankar Vedantam:

I'm wondering, Jonathan, as someone who has studied narrative psychology for a number of years, how do you hear that speech?

Jonathan Adler:

So then-Senator Obama was tapping into the American master narrative of redemption, right? Each of those images includes this shift from negative to positive. Like all political speeches, this was a strategic communication with very particular aims focused on stirring the public to support this speaker's preferred candidates and issues.

Appealing to entrenched master narratives is a very strategic thing to do. And many, many politicians adopt redemptive themes in their speeches. Obviously, there are many wonderful aspects of that storyline, and as we've discussed, problematic ones too. But we see evidence of leaders serving as narrators-in-chief. They shape our narrative ecology as they model storytelling for us.

Shankar Vedantam:

We started this conversation, Jonathan, by talking about ways in which you came to understand the life events in your own life, and to tell stories about those life events in a way that was more positive than negative.

I'm wondering, after all these years of studying narrative psychology, do you do this on a regular basis now? What are the stories you tell yourself today, in terms of where you are, where your life is, and where you want your life to go?

Jonathan Adler:

It's not that I am consciously going through my daily experiences and editing them into the kinds of storylines that I have learned are likely to support my wellbeing. But when difficult things happen in particular, I think I do pause. And I remember that there are different kinds of wellbeing. And that the way I make sense of those experiences will lead me to different kinds of wellbeing.

But I think for a lot of people, just the awareness that you are not only the main character in your story, but also the narrator, and that the way you choose to tell the story of your life really matters. That can be an empowering insight.

Shankar Vedantam:

Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College. Jonathan, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Jonathan Adler:

Oh, it's been an incredible pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

For today's Unsung Hero, we bring you a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. The story comes from listener Rich Addison.

Rich Addison:

When I was young, I was very shy. I was an only child who was pretty comfortable talking to adults, but I never had any brothers and sisters to practice on. So I wasn't very good at mixing it up with the other kids. I remember being very anxious about going to school. On Sunday nights, I would not be able to sleep just worrying about what would happen with the other kids.

So now, flash forward a few years. I'm in high school, and I realized that I had to be different, that I couldn't keep being so shy. So I went about developing a quick wit and a sense of humor that would keep other kids off balance so I wouldn't have to feel powerless.

You know how sometimes people say the best defense is a good offense? Well, that was what I was doing. But the sense of humor I developed was kind of biting and kind of critical. So now my hero is about to come into the story. And this was my friend Holly.

One day Holly and I were talking and she said to me, "You know, Ritch, sometimes you really hurt people's feelings."

At first, I was just shocked. I said to myself, "That can't be true. I was entertaining. I made people laugh. I liked people. These were my friends. I didn't want to hurt them. I couldn't be hurting them."

But I kept thinking about what Holly said. I kept turning it over in my mind. And eventually, I realized that she was absolutely right. I started paying attention to how my humor was affecting other people. And I changed it.

It didn't happen immediately. It didn't happen overnight. But I changed. And I wanted to be more compassionate towards people. I wanted to have a different kind of relationship with them than always keeping them off balance.

After, I went on to become a clinical psychologist. And in my role, I try to help other people have generous interpretations about themselves and others. And I've also made a career out of training physicians to do that. I really am so grateful that I made that shift in my life, and I really owe it to Holly.

I think back to that time so many years ago, when she cared enough to say something to me: something that probably wasn't easy to say. But it was something that changed the direction of my life in a very significant and very gratifying way. So thank you, Holly. You're my Unsung Hero.

Shankar Vedantam:

Ritch Addison lives in Santa Rosa, California. Recently, he was able to reconnect with Holly and tell her how much her comment has meant to him some 50 years later.

If you found this episode to be interesting or useful, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it. If they don't know how to find us, either on podcast apps or their local public radio station, please show them how to do so. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.