Narrative Flexibility
Posttraumatic growth involves the powerful experience of narrative transformation. The secret to achieving narrative transformation, and ultimately posttraumatic growth and resiliency, is learning how to assign appropriate meaning to life’s events.
- Disrupted!: Resiliently Reintegrating After Stress & Adversity
COVID-19 has invaded our collective consciousness. I can’t remember any event capturing our imagination on a global scale as much as this pandemic. As a phenomenologist, I traffic in the lived experiences of those I’m fortunate to conduct my research with. The power of story has fascinated me since my childhood in Zambia, where the fabric of our history is woven deeply into our stories and narratives.
As I look at the landscape of our world, it’s clear COVID-19 is seared in every one of our stories. The difference, I believe, lies in how we process this experience and what value we place on this experience. Calhoun and Tedeschi are researchers who coined the phrase “posttraumatic growth” about 20 years ago. This is an umbrella term for the positive transformation that can occur in the aftermath of trauma, stress, and adversity.
An important part of posttraumatic growth is narrative transformation — how our stories and narratives change because of our experience with trauma, stress, and adversity. As a resiliency expert, I’m interested in discovering protective factors against stress and studying the factors that allow us to augment our resiliency. In my research, I’ve found that nothing augments our resiliency more than narrative flexibility.
In simple terms, without narrative flexibility, trauma, stress, and adversity knock us off our feet such that we’re worse off after the experience. When we’re able to flex in the middle of trauma, stress, and adversity, we’re better off after the experience because we mitigated the impact of difficulties and developed our resiliency muscles for the next trauma, stress, or adversity we’re going to face.
Narrative flexibility allows us to escape the prison of a singular narrative so that we can write epic stories with our lives.
TWO TIPS FOR NARRATIVE FLEXIBILITY
- Give yourself permission to be disappointed by the obstacles to your current narrative: Being human and feeling is better than being numb.
- Give yourself grace in the middle of your storm: Sometimes we beat ourselves too much for not doing something about a situation we had no control over.
