Creating and Re-framing Your Life Story

To cultivate positive mental well-being, in my view, we can choose to look at our lives from a perspective of the clinical model, e.g., the disease model of health care, in which the focus has inevitably been on "fixing problems" particularly through the use of medications, or we can look at our lives from a positive, holistic, and person-centered standoint. And certainly the more informed we are, and aware of essential developmental issues, conflicts, and stages, for example, the psychosocial stages laid out by Erik Erikson (which have become foundational in modern psychological thought), the better we are able to manage stress, transition, and change in our lives.

However, in my view embracing the notion of life-story and of learning to reframe our lives from a positive, holistic,and person-centered perspective is critical to well-being. Reframing is making a choice to see situations in productive, positive, and life-affirming ways, as opposed to seeing them in destructive, life-alienating ways. The reason reframing is so important is because our perspective on our lives makes a huge difference in the quality of our lives; our thoughts create our well-being. McAdams puts forth that the way we view each of the important challenges faced from our pasts, interestingly, also makes a big difference on our overall well-being today, and how we deal with our present life and future challenges.

This "re-framing of mind" is fundamentally how we perceive who we are as individuals: it is our sense of self, including self-esteem and self-efficacy. In other words, we each have a choice of how we want to view our past and what led to the creation of the present "I" or self. Until we are able to make some sense of the past, and learn to reframe it in a useful and positive way, we will inevitably have difficulty accepting ourselves as individuals, and have difficulty moving forward. Most of us have hurts from the past; some, of course, worse than others. For many it is difficult to forgive, to move on, to re-initiate the process of living. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that the only person we hurt by not being able to reframe the past is ourselves. The power of story helps us learn to do that. We can learn to view our lives within the bigger context of story by imagining and creating stories of challenge, and ultimately, triumph.

It has been said that, "our biography becomes our biology." And, Dr. James Pennebaker has performed research to show the benefit to our health of disclosing one's most difficult, deepest, intimate life experiences through the mere act of writing such thoughts and feelings in a journal for minutes a day. In one of his studies of college students, only six months of such disclosure through the use of journal writing, students showed significantly fewer visits to the university health center. (McAdams, 2006, p.31). McAdam says the reason is because inhibiting and holding onto such feelings requires physiological work, though it is subtle, and we may not be aware of it. The reality is suppression of feelings becomes exhausting to us. When we disclose either verbally or in a journal, we are letting go of the armor needed to hold onto or suppress painful, dark feelings. It also allows us to begin gaining insight into these events and begin seeing them in more solution oriented ways, if we choose so.

References

McAdams, D. P. (2006). The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. New York , NY: Oxford University Press.