Step Out of Your Story. Kim Schneiderman
approaching resolution.
RESOLUTION: The conclusion of the conflict, when stock is taken and the story ends.
MORAL OR THEME: The underlying message of a story.
EPILOGUE: After the resolution of the conflict, a description of following events that often ties up loose ends.
Applying the Novel Perspective
When you superimpose this “novel perspective” onto the story of your life, you change the way you value and find meaning in experiences.
After all, the human mind is wired to search for patterns, to organize what it notices in its environment into a digestible coherent form. This is how we extract meaning from what could seem like random events. Our minds can be like messy desks, and we may struggle to process all the information we absorb — to know which fragments are worth holding on to and how to properly file them so that the categories make intuitive sense and help us flourish. While there are as many organizing systems as there are frameworks for understanding the world, few are as familiar or ingrained as the story structure. The story is “a natural package for many different kinds of information,” explains Dr. Daniel P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives. “When we comprehend our actions over time, we see what we do in terms of a story. We see obstacles confronted, and intentions realized and frustrated over time. As we move forward from yesterday to tomorrow, we move through tensions building to climaxes, climaxes giving way to denouements, and tensions building again as we continue to move and change. Human time is a storied affair.”3
We might even say that suffering can sometimes partly be due to a storytelling deficit, a failure to find a good filing system that organizes the details of one’s life into a meaningful cause-and-effect narrative, which results in an incoherent or distorted story.
For example, let’s say you’re unemployed, and you tell yourself the story that this is just another crappy situation that defines your very difficult life. You ask yourself, “Why does this always happen to me?” Then you finally land a job interview. What happens? This negative story may lead you to wonder, “What’s the point?” And this negative vibe may lead you to botch the job interview, which causes more suffering and only confirms your negative story.
However, what if you saw the antagonist (in this case, unemployment) of the current chapter in your life (a chapter you might entitle “A Thousand Resumes”) as the necessary force that is pushing you to resolve your main conflict: perhaps that you are in fact ambivalent about this career path or that you tend to get easily discouraged. In a way, this antagonist is like a personal trainer, and this conflict is the force challenging you to develop your confidence or to become clear about your career direction. Suddenly, as you exercise control over how you view your situation, the time between jobs becomes an invitation to work on yourself and build your muscles. Through this lens, you might say to yourself, “If I were reading this chapter in a book about the story of my life, I might appreciate that unemployment is nudging me — the protagonist — to get more organized and keep persevering in the face of adversity. I can choose to embrace that challenge, and forge ahead, or drain myself of valuable energy by sinking into discouragement.”
Cast in this light, the power of interpretation via the story lens on life offers a powerful elixir for heartbreaks, disappointments, and existential angst.
Jill’s Story: Defining Happily Ever After
Take Jill’s story. From the time Jill met Tom in her senior year of college, they were practically inseparable. The native New Englanders seemed like the perfect match — they were both politically active and shared many interests, including the outdoors, vegan cooking, science fiction, and a dream of living out west. Following graduation, they moved to San Francisco, where they landed decent entry-level jobs in their respective fields. Three years later, as their friends began getting engaged, Jill broached the subject of marriage and children with Tom. While Tom seemed receptive to marriage, he told Jill that he didn’t want to have children.
Jill, who always dreamed of being a mother, was devastated. She had sensed a certain apprehension from Tom whenever she mentioned children, but she had never pushed him, partly because she feared confirming her suspicions. They tried counseling, but Tom, who had been somewhat neglected as a child and had strong political views about global overpopulation, was adamant about his position.
Jill was in crisis and confused. Her parents and friends were pressuring her to break up with him and move on. She had never lived entirely on her own, and the thought of being alone, without Tom, so far from her close-knit family, scared her. Should she stay with Tom, the man she loved and considered her soul mate, and give up her lifelong dream of having children?
How can embracing the story lens on life help Jill? Well, it won’t prevent her from experiencing sadness, anger, guilt, confusion, and fear — or all the natural, understandable human emotions that arise during difficult times. Nor should it. From a psychological perspective, feeling our feelings is an important part of emotional maturation, as well as a prerequisite for intimacy.
Yet thoroughly considering each of the story elements in her life’s current chapter can help her figure out the best way to move forward. All the story elements — San Francisco (the setting), their childhood dreams and experiences (exposition), the plot (the love story), and the conflict (the disagreement about having children) — are interacting with one another to create a crisis that is pushing for a resolution. In the world of stories, that’s a good thing. The conflict between the protagonist (Jill) and the antagonist (Tom) has led to tension that must be resolved to move Jill’s story forward. To move forward, Jill is compelled to look within and make courageous choices informed by a deeper understanding of her needs and values.
Imagining her life in the third person can help give Jill the necessary critical distance to meet and resolve this dilemma, which is really a test of her courage, faith, and inner truth. Is this conflict an opportunity to push past her fear of being alone? Or is it about accepting that her life’s priorities have changed — that her love for Tom and her life with him is now more significant than her childhood vision of having children? Either way, Jill has taken charge of her story, so that she will experience her choice as life-affirming, transformational, and ultimately in her best interest.
In this way, looking through the story lens can help reframe difficult life events without creating unnecessary drama. Obviously, if you lost your job, caught your husband cheating, or you lost your job on the day you caught your husband cheating, the point isn’t to say, “At least I have a compelling story to tell. My soon-to-be-ex-husband sure makes a vivid character!” But if we can place our stories in a recognizable context, understanding that all the story elements are conspiring toward our ultimate benefit, we have a better chance of making wise decisions and finding the meaningful silver-lining narrative in whatever plot twists life throws at us.
Imagine walking into a neighborhood bookstore and discovering a novel with a familiar picture on the cover. Flipping through the pages, you are struck by the eerie sense that you’ve read this before. As you recognize characters and scenes, wincing at some and smiling at others, you realize this is the story of your life. If this happened, would you feel love and compassion for the main character, or would you scrutinize the character’s every word and action?
According to the latest research, you are more likely to view your life favorably at a distance than up close. Psychological studies suggest that reflecting on your life, both in the past and present, as a third-person observer can help you see yourself and the things you’ve overcome through fresher and more compassionate eyes.
That’s