Personality Psychologist Silvan Thomkin’s described humans’ dynamic state of experiencing their emotions in a complex world as fundamentally rooted in stories.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves…
These stories, globally termed life stories, are internalized and evolving narratives of the self that we construct to integrate the past, present, and future and provide life with some sense of unity, purpose and meaning. Fundamentally rooted in reality, telling life stories can give us a sense of cohesion. This has proven beneficial for reducing negative emotional states and daily stress by helping us conceptualize one event in many different ways – depending on the story we are telling.
Using Narratives to Cope With Negative Life Events
Post-traumatic growth is a positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. The end product of this process is an increase in an individual’s overall resiliency, a core social emotional learning domain crucial to an one’s ability to cope with future experiences of negative or upsetting emotions.
Research has found that having people actively write about negative events through exercises that use a narrative approach like journaling or telling life stories, is a reliable method to diminish acute stress in times of overwhelming crisis. Furthermore, journaling contextualizes traumatic events in terms of personal experiences, fostering adaptive coping skills including resilience.
Remember that growth occurs in the context of trauma and coping. Individuals who have undergone the process of post traumatic growth emerge from the event with more sophisticated emotional capacity, and a variety of other psychological benefits including a:
- Greater appreciation of life
- Changed sense of priorities
- Warmer, more intimate relationships
- Greater sense of personal strength, and;
- Recognition of new possibilities for one’s life.
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