22 December 2021
Last week I continued the discussion of Antonovsky’s salutogenesis, the origins of health. We looked at the life of a person who had left addiction behind, in favour of building a new life from the bottom up. What she found was that simple successes had much more meaning for her the second time around. With acceptance of the reality of her life, and what it required, came gratitude. Gratitude points to meaning. And meaning makes life worth managing, sewing together, and seeing holistically.
This week’s blog is about that sewing together.
In earlier blogs (Resilience #6; Sobriety v Recovery II; Mirror, Mirror; Recovery & Identity II; and Acceptance and Meaning), I’ve touched upon the ideas of Dan McAdams. He was my introduction to narrative (story telling) as a means of understanding self. McAdams (2018) sees people in three overlapping roles: actors, agents, and authors. In short strokes, the actor is about her formed and evolving character. The agent is about the goals and values she chooses through the course of her life while the author sews all the pieces into a comprehensible and coherent narrative.
For those readers who may not remember any of the last four blogs, they concerned coherence. Antonovsky’s main thesis was that to be disturbed, or knocked off course, is to experience a violated sense of coherence. Per McAdams, to have a violated sense of coherence is to experience a ruptured narrative i.e., the story you tell yourself (and others), about the course of your life, no longer makes sense.
Examples of this are not hard to imagine. A person who leaves addiction behind, after many years, has changed her narrative. There were probably two big ruptures: the first when she began using addictively and the second when she stopped. I have heard many people who have put addiction behind them say that they never expected to recover—the narrative they had created foresaw an early drug-related death.
The loss of a loved one can provoke a ruptured narrative. Without that person, your life no longer makes sense. And that sentence alone explains why I am spending so much time on Antonovsky’s salutogenesis. To have a life that no longer makes sense is to have lost coherence—the pieces no longer form a recognizable puzzle.
Narrative therapy involves rewriting your story. If the pieces don’t add up, what could you do to make them add up? The simplest analysis of a story is that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. At any age that’s still true though it is unlikely we know the end. But—and this is huge—wherever we find ourselves with that broken story, we have the enormous privilege, at least in the free West, of planning the next steps in the the plot of our own lives.
There are so many clichés associated with this: for every door that closes, another opens. Each ending marks a new beginning...problem is, they’re true. That’s the nature of a cliché. When and if we accept that truth, we begin planning the excruciating first steps out of our incoherent broken narrative and into a story we want to live.
In the spirit of Christmas past, present, and future, look at Ebenezer Scrooge after his dark night of the soul. Per Dickens, he became a new man i.e., he chose to re-write his own ending. As can all of us in large or small steps toward health.
Happy Holidays to all of you with my thanks for your readership, comments, and feedback. I’ll be back with more philosophical takes on psychological issues by mid-January.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
McAdams, D. P. (2018). The Art and Science of Personality Development. The Guilford Press.
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