1. Writing about your life
The power of your story
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Compiled by the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University

2. Your Life Story Think about your life thus far as a book.
What is the title?
What are the chapter names?
Describe 3 scenes that indicate
A high point
A low point
A turning point
Note: different types of “scenes” can be chosen. Here are the 8 commonly used scenes (e.g., McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowmwan, 2001): high point (peak experience), low point, turning point, earliest memory, important childhood scene, important adolescent scene, important adult scene, and other important scene.
Note to instructors: allow for minutes of writing.

3. Your Life Story What themes do you see in your story?
Write down at least 3 themes.
Allow for 3-5 minutes of analysis

4. Common Themes in Life Stories
Agency
You affect, control, and/or influence the positive change in your life
Connection with others
You connect with others through love, friendship, or shared experiences
Redemption
A negative experience turns into a positive outcome; something bad is salvaged
Contamination
A good event turns drastically bad
Meaning making
You learn something or find meaning from an experience or relationship
Exploration
You write about an event with a deep self-exploration and search for understanding
Positive resolution
Tensions are resolved; closure and positive endings are found
from McAdams & McLean, 2013

5. Writing about your life can...
Organize personal experiences
Create meaning and purpose
Be an opportunity for growth and self-development
Help make sense of the world and your place in it
Lead to growth, especially following adversity
Life stories help create meaning in life. They are influenced by and composed of personal goals, values, and achievements. Life stories reveal the ways in which individuals find purpose and meaning in life experiences. A narrative identity aims to provide a person’s life with some semblance of unity, purpose, and meaning (McAdams 2008, McLean et al. 2007). meaning making is a central process to developing one’s narrative identity. Through meaning making, people go beyond the plots and event details of their personal stories to articulate what they believe their stories say about who they are. People might describe events to illustrate or explain a particular personality trait, tendency, goal, skill, problem, complex, or pattern in their own lives.
How conversations shape meaning
Reason for sharing - are you sharing an important experience (meaningful) or a story purely for entertainment (not so meaningful)?
The listener - attentive and responsive listeners help people narrate more personally elaborated stories
Agree with the storyteller - the more romantic partners agree on the meaning of a shared memory, the more likely the teller was to retain that meaning over time.
Writing about your life is an opportunity for growth and self-development.
Coping: The stories we tell about our experience reveal aspects of our personal characteristics and they also are as a source of comfort and a way of coping with traumatic life events. There is an adaptive value of positively reinterpreting negative life events (e.g., Taylor, 1983, 1989). Individuals who are able to focus on the positive aspects of negative life events adapt more effectively (Taylor, Wood, & Lichtman, 1983; Thompson 1991).
Example: a woman who has cancer may write that her experience has allowed her to reorganize her priorities, to focus on the truly important things in life, etc. We might infer, then, that an effective story is one that has a happy ending.
Writing about our lives helps to make sense of the world and reaffirm beliefs that the world is a safe place. When faced with a traumatic, life changing event, individuals may generate naive theories about how and why the event occurred (Taylor & Armor, 1996).The need to make sense—to find meaning and coherence in life events—is arguably a central human need (Janoff-Bulman & Berg, 1998). When something random happens, we search for signs of meaning -- the idea that “everything happens for a reason” (Krantz, 1998). Writing about these random events through stories helps to find or create that meaning.
Example: if a woman with breast cancer traces her diagnosis to an injury to her breast, this connection may not reflect reality but provides a concrete reason for her disease.
Stress-related growth (SRG)- the subjective sense that one has grown as a person as a result of some important life event (Park, Cohen & Murch, 1996). Park et al. (1996) found that life events were related to perceived growth and that perceived growth was reflected in other changes in individuals’ personality characteristics. When the something happens that is not in line with a person’s expectations, this is usually an opportunity for development

6. Your life story and Your Personality
How does your life story fit into your personality?
The 3 Tiers of Personality
Having - personality traits, behavioral tendencies (such as Conscientious)
Doing - personal strivings, life projects, values
Being - your life story
This is McAdams’ (1995) three-level model of personality.
The purpose of this slide is to help place narrative writing into the broader picture of personality.

7. For more narrative writing...
Try writing about other chapters in your life:
Vivid childhood memory
Wisdom event: an event in which you displayed wisdom, perhaps by providing wise counsel or advice or making a wise decision
Greatest life challenge
Values challenge: an event that challenged your values