10/14/2025
This whole episode is wonderful on relationships to others and our needs in a sociocultural context, but I really love the 2nd half on narrative psychology and the way we narrate our lives. In regards to Narrative Identity, the guest, Jonathan M. Adler, talks about:
- Redemption Stories (Turning something negative into something positive - and the cultural pressure to do so even when we may not want/need to. But also that it can help people survive/thrive to transform the story. And that redemption isn't the only option in the wake of negative experiences.)
- Contamination Stories (Positive that turns negative or a state of well being that ends in tragedy. I think this is a place of deep pain and grief and we need people who can sit with the pain with us and not try to see the sunny side prematurely... or maybe there is never a sunny side.)
- Exploratory Processing to make meaning (Some things are just awful and we just need to acknowledge their role in our lives without needing to transform them into something positive. But even when feeling good isn't an option, we can find meaning and that active search for meaning is exploratory processing)
- Agency stories (You can't always control what happens to you, but you can control the story you tell about what happens to you and why. So we can have agency to tell stories that support our locus of control to self define in helpful and adaptive ways.)
- Master Stories (I see this frame as correlating to the idea of schemas in Schema Therapy in which we are often unaware of a potent master story that hardens into a fact and a lens through which we look... that can distort new and/or corrective experiences that offering something different than we expect.)
- Integration (He also discusses integration and how we can take parts of our stories, and ourselves, and integrate them into our being and narrative... hopefully in a way that is more helpful/skillful to the self. This is a lot of how I see Internal Family Systems being helpful.)
Podcast Episode · Hidden Brain · 10/13/2025 · 1h 36m
