How narrative identity can change your life.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion published this sentence — one of her most quoted — in "The White Album" back in 1979. Now, in 2024, people are formulating a deeper understanding of exactly how right she was. And they owe much of this understanding to Dan P. McAdams, Ph.D., a personality psychologist and a leading researcher in the field of narrative psychology.
McAdams has made it his life’s work to develop a more nuanced science of personality. As the author of nearly 300 scholarly articles and eight books on the topic, he specializes in human narrative — specifically how people define their identities by constructing, telling, and retelling personal stories. This “narrative identity” plays a role in every aspect of life, including relationships with other people at work, home, and the world.
If your life is defined by the stories you tell, can you edit them to shift your outcome? Can you tell stories of success, love, and empathy in order to live more fully? Equinox+ spoke with McAdams to find out.
For readers unfamiliar, could you speak briefly about the concept of narrative identity?
“Narrative identity is the story, or stories, you have in your mind about how you have come to be the person you are becoming. In our late teens and 20s, most people begin to think of their lives in narrative terms — as stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future. Like novels in the head, these stories contain chapters, plot lines, key scenes, high points, low points, turning points, heroes, villains, and so on. Narrative identity evolves in our minds over time, as our experiences change and our views of the past and future change. Narrative identity provides our lives with a sense of meaning, purpose, and temporal continuity. It explains, for ourselves and for others, who we believe we were in the past, who we are now, and who we may become in the future.”
Can someone become the author of their own life by changing the stories they construct?
“Yes, of course. This is the fundamental tenet of my work.”
What if people don’t know what they want their story to be?
“Yes, this is a problem for many people. I don’t know the answer, but one possibility is that it is connected to imagination. Many people have a hard time imagining alternatives to what they are experiencing at the moment. For me — and many would agree — opening your mind up through reading great fiction — think: Tolstoy, George Elliot, Toni Morrison — or psychologically powerful drama and cinema, even some of the great television series that have been produced over the past decades (e.g., "Breaking Bad"), can help to jumpstart personal storytelling. Research has shown that reading great fiction enhances empathy and self-understanding. Even if these practices do not directly address our need to develop our own story, they help us understand the stories of others — which is just important, maybe more important.”
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Many people go through phases in life when they feel “stuck” — what is the psychology that’s at work here? Based on your research, how much of getting “unstuck” is a matter of thought versus action?
“Being ‘stuck’ can mean many different things. To think this through, we might consider the person and their personality from three different standpoints: the actor, the agent, and the author.
“From the standpoint of the social actor, each of us plays many roles in life, and we each do this in our own unique way. The style of our performance is partly determined by our dispositional personality traits. To be stuck from the standpoint of the social actor is to feel that we can no longer perform our roles effectively. We feel incompetent, or we lack energy, or we feel that the demands of our environment are too much for us to handle and that we don’t have the skills or traits needed to meet the challenge. We know what we need to do, but we feel we can’t do it.
“From the standpoint of the motivated agent, each of us pursues valued goals in life. We strive to accomplish certain ends. Being stuck at this level is more about not knowing what our goals are, or no longer feeling that we value what we once valued. This is a motivational problem in the sense that we no longer have the kind of agenda of goals and values that give our striving a direction. We can’t decide what to do next. We are unable to choose.
“Finally from the standpoint of the autobiographical author, we are each constructing a story about our lives, which is our narrative identity. To be stuck here is to feel that we no longer understand the story, or we don’t have a story, and we no longer understand who we are or what our lives mean. This can be a profound crisis in identity.
“I don’t have simple solutions for any of these examples of being stuck. Everybody’s life is unique, and anybody who thinks they can offer easy advice that will automatically get people unstuck is mistaken, I believe.”
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How important is it to share the story of one’s life with others? How important is it to make an effort to listen to and draw out other people’s stories?
“Important for some people, for sure. But others go along fine in life, developing their own story in their minds, and they don’t necessarily feel the need to tell many people. That said, I think wanting to be understood by others may be a human universal, given that we are fundamentally social animals. But you can be understood on many levels — as a social actor, for example, who performs roles in an effective way, or as a motivated agent who pursues important goals and values in life, or as an autobiographical author who has an important story to tell.”
Are there any simple practices people can implement to help them focus more on storytelling and narrative identity?
“As I think you can tell already, I am not one for quick fixes or simple advice. Life is complex. However, I strongly agree with you that the language of narrative is preferable to the language of medical diagnosis when it comes to understanding our lives. The medicalization of psychology encourages people to think about themselves as case studies rather than human beings. For many people, rather than trying to determine, ‘What is my mental illness?’ it may be more valuable to ask themselves, ‘What story am I living?’”