Narrative identity
By exploring the theories that underpin our participants’ experiences, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of how these frameworks apply in practical settings.
Summary
- People make sense of their experiences, emotions, and events by turning them into stories with a plot and characters. This helps them find meaning instead of seeing things as random.
- Listening to people’s stories is key to understanding who they are and what matters to them. In healthcare, this means looking beyond symptoms and considering the patient’s life story. It also highlights the need for healthcare professionals to have good listening skills.
- Storytelling is a social activity. People change their stories depending on who they are talking to—for example, they might tell a different version to a friend, a child, or a doctor.
- A person’s identity is shaped not just by their own stories but also by the larger cultural stories about the groups they belong to, such as their religion or ethnicity. These cultural narratives influence how people see themselves and share their stories.
- Others can help or hinder how we express our identities through storytelling. They may listen and acknowledge us, or they may ignore us. We can support people in building a strong sense of self, but we can also make it harder for them to do so.
According to narrative identity theories, humans can be seen as ‘story-telling animals’. The answer to the fundamental personal identity question “who am I?” is thus a narrative, a story, according to this theory. People bring order to events, experiences and emotions by shaping them in the form of a storyline with a plot and characters, so that they no longer appear as random, but they can make sense and experience meaning in what they encounter in their lives. People cannot help but understanding and presenting their lives in the form of stories. Listening to their stories, then, is a very important way of learning who people are and what they consider important in their lives. This is a relevant insight in the context of healthcare, because it implies looking beyond people’s symptoms and understanding them against the background of the stories that constitute their identities. It also stresses the importance of attitudes and skills of listening for healthcare professionals.
It should be stressed that narrative identity is a social endeavour, not an individual creation. Narrativity is a social practice, people tell stories to others and adapt the according to their public. What they tell their children or friends may be a different story than what they tell their doctor. Narrative identity is also always co-constituted by the cultural narratives that exist in society about the groups people feel they belong to. For example, someone’s religion or ethnic background can be very important in how they understand themselves and present themselves in narratives, but these narratives will be coloured by the cultural narratives existing about these religions or ethnicities.
Other people can play a good or a bad role in expressing our identities through stories because they are responsive (or not) and provide recognition (or not). We can assist and support people in maintaining an identity that leads to their personal flourishing, but we can also impede their identity-constituting process. For example, by keeping them captive in narratives that are damaging or restrictive for them, as is the case when older people are seen and treated as dependent and frail only, overlooking their capabilities for meaning-making and resilience.