This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: May 22, 2007

The way people talk about their pasts reveals a lot about how they approach and write the future.

This is a pretty interesting article I just read in the NYTimes
While reading it, I partially analyzed it from a psychotherapy perspective, and then also saw it from another perspective as an artist and storyteller.
Psychologists and social scientists of all kinds have written numerous articles and books on the subject of art and storytelling- why we do it, what benefit we receive from it, what its purpose is-- such inquiries and hypotheses are endless.
Direct quotes from the article are in italics.

In the article, the scientists suggest the therapeutic power of narrative in recovery from trauma, general talk therapy etc:

At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences....
The findings suggest that psychotherapy, when it is effective, gives people who are feeling helpless a sense of their own power, in effect altering their life story even as they work to disarm their own demons, Mr. Adler said.

However another study, psychologists at OSU interviewed college students about traumatic high school experiences. They had half the students tell the story in a 1st person narration, and had the other half of the students recall the story in 3rd person.
The study showed that the students who recounted their high school embarrassment in the 3rd person were more sociable and able to feel like they had grown and learned from the experience:

Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.

And their behavior changed, too. After completing the psychological questionnaires, each study participant spent time in a waiting room with another student, someone the research subject thought was taking part in the study. In fact the person was working for the research team, and secretly recorded the conversation between the pair, if any. This double agent had no idea which study participants had just relived a high school horror, and which had viewed theirs as a movie scene.

The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”

Of course its been an often noted belief that acting and storytelling allows you to step outside yourself, put yourself in a more objective place, and telling your own story in the 3rd person perhaps allows yourself to have adequate distance in order to see your overall improvement, or maybe to just see the positive in general.
There is something about storytelling which so cathartic and undeniably therapeutic.
I find this study reassuring, because it helps to reinforce the ideas of how helpful self-expression and the narrative process can be in establishing yourself and your identity.