1: The research is clear.
“Social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life,” David Brooks writes in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Yesterday, we looked at how David has consciously decided to strike up conversations with strangers. We studied the different types of questions he asks.
During these conversations, David has trained himself to listen for certain specific things.
“First, I’m listening for the person’s characteristic tone of voice,” David notes. “Just as every piece of writing has an implied narrator—the person the writer wants us to think he is—every person has a characteristic narrative tone: sassy or sarcastic, ironic or earnest, cheerful or grave.
“The narrative tone reflects the person’s basic attitude toward the world—is it safe or threatening, welcoming, disappointing, or absurd? A person’s narrative tone often reveals their sense of ‘self-efficacy,’ their overall confidence in their own abilities.”
David believes our inner voice is “one of the greatest miracles in all nature. Life itself can often seem like a blizzard of random events: illnesses, accidents, betrayals, strokes of good and bad luck.
“Yet inside each person there is this little voice trying to make sense of it all,” he notes. “This little voice is trying to take the seemingly scattershot events of a life and organize them into a story that has coherence, meaning, and purpose.”
2: Next, David listens to understand who is the hero of the story.
The research of psychologist Dan McAdams suggests that we have “an imago, an archetype or idealized image of oneself that captures the role that person hopes to play in society,” David explains.
“One person, he finds, might cast himself as the Healer. Another might be the Caregiver. Others maybe be the Warrior, the Sage, the Maker, the Counselor, the Survivor, the Arbiter, or the Juggler.”
David asks himself, what archetype does the other person inhabit? Because as Dan writes, “Imagoes express our most cherished desires and goals.”
The third thing David asks himself as people share their stories is: What is the underlying plot?
“Children don’t really have life stories,” he notes. “But around adolescence most people begin imposing a narrative on their lives. At first there’s a lot of experimentation.”
Dan asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their lives. Then, three years later, he repeated the exercise with the same group of students.
“Only 22 percent of the scenes were repeated on the second list,” David writes. “The students were in the early process of understanding the plot of their lives, so they had come up with a different list of episodes that really mattered.”
By adulthood, however, most people have a narrative for their life. Many of which are selected from predominant cultural plotlines. In his book, The Seven Basic Plots, Journalist Christopher Booker outlines a series of plotlines that show up consistently in our culture.
“Some people, for example, see their lives as ‘Overcoming the Monster, in which the hero defeats some central threat, like alcoholism, through friendship and courage,” David notes.
“Other people view their lives as ‘Rags to Riches,’ in which the hero starts out impoverished and obscure and rises to prominence. Or they see their lives as a ‘Quest,’ a story in which the hero undertakes a voyage in pursuit of some goal and is transformed by the journey.”
Through his research, Dan McAdams has determined that many Americans tell redemption stories where difficult things happen but emerge stronger and wiser from these battles.
One particular story that David admires? “I’m always intrigued by people who see their lives as a surfing story,” he observes. “‘I caught a wave and rode it, then I caught another wave. Then another.’ That’s a relaxed acceptance of life few of us can muster.”
The next insight David listens for is: How reliable is this narrator?
“Some people tell evasive stories,” he writes. “Some people tell you life stories that are just too perfect. . . Such people describe one triumph after another, one achievement after another in a way that’s just not real.”
Psychotherapist Stephen Cope details the stories his mother told about her life. “Here was the rub: She left out almost all the hard parts. So actually her narrative was woven from pieces of the truth, but when it was all put together, it turned out to be a kind of elaborate cover story. It was a wish. The shadow side was left out.”
Because confronting her pain wasn’t part of her story, she also was not able to engage it in real life. One day, Stephen called her, weeping following the sudden death of his best friend. “She barely knew what to say or how to comfort me,” he recalls. “After all, who had comforted her? She couldn’t wait to get off the phone.”
3: Lastly, David listens for narrative flexibility. “Life is a constant struggle to refine and update our stories. Most of us endure narrative crises from time to time—periods in which something happened so that our old life stories no longer make sense.”
In these cases, we have to rewrite our story to align with how we live our lives now.
“Therapists are essentially story editors,” David observes. “People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong. They blame themselves for things that are not their fault, or they blame others for things that are. . .
“By going over life stories again and again, therapists can help people climb out of the deceptive rumination spirals they have been using to narrate themselves. They can help patients begin the imaginative reconstruction of their lives.
“Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story,” he writes, “a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in which they can see themselves exercising control.”
David takes a similar tact in these conversations where he’s asking someone about their life story. “I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. . .
“For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative.”
We can do the same. We can give someone the opportunity to take a step back, construct their story, and perhaps see themselves in a new way.
When we go back and tell our life story with honesty and compassion, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr writes, “We understand what we remember, remember what we forgot, and make familiar what had before seemed alien.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How often do I engage in a conversation with someone about their life story? What are some benefits of listening to the way David describes it?
Action: Ask someone about their life story and listen for some of the insights David outlines above.