Repeating the Stories

Why does this "identity" discussion matter (at least to me)?  Identity is a significant element in the psychology and theology of hope.  It is part of what C. R. Snyder labels as "agency"--the self understanding that I am a person who can actually do something to make my way into the future.  I separate out identity because identity issues revolve a great deal around questions of self-worth and meaning.  Am I worthy of love?  Am I capable of doing well?  Am I part of meaningful relationships?

Positive answers to these questions ground our identities in healthy reality.  The answers to those questions come from how we tell our personal narratives to ourselves and others.  Jennifer Pals, in "Narrative Identity Processing of Difficult Life Experiences: Pathways of Personality Development and Positive Self-Transformation in Adulthood" writes about the identity tasks that face people who deal with significant changes and challenges.

"...a growing literature within personality psychology...asserts that (a) identity in adulthood takes the shape of a coherent narrative or life story that integrates interpretations of the past with the present self and provides life with meaning and purpose, and (b) the processes of constructing, revising, and living in accordance with this narrative identity over time are central to personality functioning, development, and well-being..."

Grieving people tell their grief stories over and over.  One of the real keys to effective grieving, I think, is to find people who will listen to those stories over and over without complaining or suggesting that we might want to get a new story.  I find that I don't ever tell the story the same way twice.  It may sound the same to others, but a close listening would document differences and development in the story.  The re-telling is part of how we integrate the loss into our lives and a method for reintegrating our identities and reconstructing our life paths.  The goal of such story-telling is, as Pals notes, "resolution."

"The term resolution does not refer to the objective resolution of difficult circumstances in a person’s life. Many events never get completely resolved, and their effects may linger on in various ways. In contrast, coherent positive resolution refers to a sense of narrative completion that releases the person from the emotional grip of the event and allows the life story to move forward."

In fact, resolution is really what "recovery" looks like from the outside.  That resolution requires a couple of elements.  First, we need the "willingness to explore and reconstruct one's current life story."  Second, we need "the ability to bring some subjective resolution to the loss event as part of the current life story."  What can I learn from life and how does that learning make me a better, deeper, happier and more mature person in the long run?

Pals and others in this field have noted experimentally what we all know experientially.  Good and positive experiences will make us happier and more satisfied with life.  We should accumulate all of those joyous and blessed experiences we can manage.  Difficult and challenging experiences, when narrated to subjective resolution, will make us wiser and deepen our sense of the meaning and significance of life.  

We don't need to accumulate such experiences.  They will find us.  The opportunity that such experiences present to is re-tell our own stories in such a way that we are not defeated by the challenges, the losses, the roadblocks and dead-ends of life.  When we can do such re-storying work, we find ourselves different and deeper, healthy and hopeful.  And we find this joy, not in the absence of loss and pain, but in the midst of such real life.