The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  As Emeka adjusted to his new life, he spent a lot of time asking himself some big questions: “What is my life about? Am I going to get married? Will I have kids? Will someone love me? How will I support myself?” Before his injury, he had a clear sense of who he was: he was a football player; he was the life of the party; he was a college student with a future full of opportunities. Now he had to come to terms with the fact that the future he had always imagined for himself—the person he thought he would become—was gone.

  To make matters worse, he came to see that the person he had been was seriously flawed. As Emeka evaluated who he had been before his injury, he realized that there were aspects of his identity that he did not like. “The truth is,” he said, “I was really into who I was: I was a guy who partied a lot and didn’t think a lot about others. I thought, ‘You only live once, so do whatever you want to do right now.’ I was living a purposeless life.”

  Emeka’s identity was unraveling, but he started weaving a new one—a positive one. He told himself that he was better than the drifting and self-absorbed man he had been. In the spring of 2010, nearly a year after his injury, he began to volunteer at his church as an adviser to junior high school and high school students. Being a mentor helped him take his focus off himself and his circumstances and turn his attention to other people who needed his help and wanted to learn from his life experiences. “It wasn’t until I started serving people that a light came on,” he said, “and I realized who I really am—today, I’m someone who tries to put other people first.” Two years after he began volunteering at his church, he went back to college. He graduated in 2015 and enrolled in a master’s program for counseling. Emeka is still paralyzed and does not know whether he will ever walk again, but he is confident that the life he is leading now is far spiritually richer than the life he was leading before.

  In the months after his surgery, Emeka spent a lot of time trying to make sense of his injury—of the moment when the story of his life took an abrupt turn. Before his injury, he said, “I was climbing up the wrong mountain.” When he broke his neck, he fell down that mountain and “hit rock bottom.” Then he discovered another mountain—the mountain he was supposed to be climbing all along, the mountain that contained his true path. He has been slowly climbing that mountain ever since.

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  The story Emeka tells about his injury is inspiring to the teenagers he mentors. But psychologist Dan McAdams would argue that it’s even more important to Emeka himself. McAdams is a psychologist at Northwestern University and an expert on a concept he calls “narrative identity.” McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself—a personal myth, as one writer puts it, “about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means.” Like fictional stories, it contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges that we overcome, and suffering that we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story in turn.

  It’s important to understand that an individual’s life story is not an exhaustive history of what happened to him. Rather, we make what McAdams calls “narrative choices.” Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events of our lives, good and bad, because those are the experiences that we need to make sense of, those are the experiences that shape us. But our interpretations of those events may differ wildly. For one person, for example, a pivotal childhood experience like learning how to swim by being thrown into the water by a parent might explain his sense of himself today as a hardy entrepreneur who learns best by taking risks. For another, that same experience might explain why he hates boats and does not trust authority figures. A third might leave the experience out of his story altogether, deeming it unimportant in the larger narrative of his life. For Erik Kolbell, an ordained minister and psychotherapist, his daughter’s accident at first challenged and then affirmed an idea that is critical to his vocation, and therefore to his very self: that redemption is possible in a world where good people suffer unjustly.

  McAdams has been studying life stories and meaning for over thirty years. In his interviews, he asks research subjects to divide their lives into chapters and to recount key scenes from their lives, such as a high point, a low point, a turning point, or an early memory. He encourages his participants to think about their personal beliefs, values, and philosophy of life. Finally, he asks them to reflect on the story’s central theme.

  After analyzing hundreds of these life stories, McAdams has discovered some very interesting patterns in how people living meaningful lives understand and interpret their experiences. People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, all share a common pattern: they are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. In these stories, the tellers move from suffering to salvation—they experience a negative event followed by a positive event that resulted from the negative event and therefore gives their suffering some meaning.

  There was the man who grew up in dire poverty but told McAdams that his hard childhood circumstances brought him and his family closer together. There was the woman who told him that caring for a close friend as the friend was dying was a harrowing experience, but one that ultimately renewed her commitment to being a nurse, a career she had previously abandoned. And there was the father who shed his cynicism as he discovered the inherent kindness and generosity of the many people who helped his son when the child was diagnosed with a brain disorder: “As awful as the experience was,” he said, “in retrospect we gained more from it, learned more about life and human nature and how many good people there are in the world.” Erik, for his part, found redemption in how the hospital staff responded to Kate’s survival. The redemption “doesn’t make the crisis worthwhile,” Erik said, “but it makes it worth something.” These people, and others whom McAdams has studied, rate their lives as more meaningful than those who tell stories that have either no or fewer redemptive sequences.

  It’s important to note that telling a redemptive story doesn’t necessarily mean that our lives have objectively improved. Erik, for example, could have easily crafted a narrative in which Kate’s accident led to even more negative outcomes. Kate gets exhausted easily in social situations and continues to have problems with depth perception as a result of her brain injury. She also lost much of her memory of life before the accident. Erik could have dwelled on all of the ways that Kate’s life has gotten harder—but he didn’t. He told a story that in part redeemed what happened to her. Emeka was in a similar situation: he could have told a story about how being paralyzed spoiled his dreams, but instead he focused on how the injury changed him for the better.

  The opposite of a redemptive story is what McAdams calls a “contamination story.” In these stories, people interpret their lives or life events as going from good to bad. One woman he studied told the story of the birth of her child, a high point in her life. But then she made a striking narrative choice: she ended the story with the death of the baby’s father, who was murdered three years later. In her telling, the joy that the birth of her child brought to her life was tainted by that tragedy. People who tell contamination stories, McAdams has found, are less “generative,” as psychologists put it, or less driven to contribute to society and younger generations. They also tend to be more anxious and depressed, and to feel that their lives are less coherent compared to those who tell redemptive stories.

  Redemption and contamination stories are just two kinds of tales we can spin about our lives. Some life stories, for example, are defined by inner transformation and personal growth, while others are defined by stagnation or regression; some by communion, love, and belonging and others by loneliness and isolation; some by agency—the belief that an individual is in control of his or her life—and others by helpl
essness; and some by a combination of these themes. McAdams has found that beyond stories of redemption, people who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion, and agency. These stories allow individuals to craft a positive identity for themselves: they are in control of their lives, they are loved, they are progressing through life, and whatever obstacles they have encountered have been redeemed by good outcomes.

  The stories we tell about our lives reveal how we understand ourselves and how we interpret the way our lives have unfolded. They can also reinforce different aspects of who we are. Someone who is depressed or pessimistic, for example, may be more likely to tell a contamination story about his life—and that harmful story could lead him to feel even worse about his circumstances. But there’s a way to break out of this cycle. Just because some stories give rise to more meaning than others doesn’t mean that people who tell negative stories about their lives are stuck in a meaningless rut. We are all the authors of our own stories and can choose to change the way we’re telling them.

  One of the great contributions of psychology and psychotherapy research is the idea that we can edit, revise, and interpret the stories we tell about our lives even as we are constrained by the facts. The psychologist Michele Crossley writes that mental illness is often the result of a person’s inability to tell a good story about his or her life. Either the story is incoherent or inadequate, or it’s a “life story gone awry.” The psychotherapist’s job is to work with patients to rewrite their stories in a more positive way. Through editing and reinterpreting his story with his therapist, the patient comes to realize, among other things, that he is in control of his life and that some meaning can be gleaned from whatever hardship he has endured. As a result, his mental health improves. A review of the scientific literature finds that this form of therapy is as effective as antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy.

  Even making smaller story edits can have a big impact on how we live. So found Adam Grant and Jane Dutton in a study published in 2012. The researchers asked university-call-center fundraisers, a group Grant has studied before, to keep a journal for four consecutive days. In one condition, the beneficiary condition, the researchers asked the fundraisers to write about the last time a colleague did something for them that inspired gratitude. In the second condition, the benefactor condition, the participants wrote about a time they contributed to others at work.

  The researchers wanted to know which type of story would lead the research subjects to be more generous—a story in which you define yourself as a recipient of someone’s good graces or a story in which you define yourself as a giver of good graces. To find out, they monitored the fundraisers’ call records. Since the fundraisers were paid a fixed hourly rate to call alumni and solicit donations for the school, the researchers reasoned, then the number of calls they made during their shift was a good indicator of prosocial, helping behavior. Someone who makes more calls in an hour is being more helpful to the university than someone who makes fewer calls.

  After Grant and Dutton analyzed the stories, they found that fundraisers who told a story of themselves as benefactors—as givers—ultimately made 30 percent more calls to alumni after the experiment than they had before. Those who told stories about being recipients of generosity showed no changes in their behavior. It was an elegant demonstration that the kind of story we tell affects who we are. “When seeing themselves as benefactors,” Dutton said, the fundraisers “now needed to act like givers, which called forth more pro-social behavior.”

  Grant and Dutton’s study shows that the ability of a story to create meaning does not end with the crafting of the tale. The stories the benefactors told about themselves ultimately led to meaningful behaviors—giving their time in the service of a larger cause. Even though the fundraisers knew they were only telling their stories as part of a study, they ultimately “lived by” those stories, as McAdams would put it. By subtly reframing their narrative, they adopted a positive identity that led them, like Emeka, to live more purposefully.

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  In addition to story-editing, one of the best ways for people to make meaning through storytelling is to reflect on the pivotal moments of their lives—the central scene or scenes from their personal narratives—and consider how those moments shaped who they are and how their lives have unfolded. As Emeka told me his story, for example, there were a lot of “what ifs” peppered throughout his narrative. What if I could walk? What if I hadn’t got involved in youth ministry? What if I could still play football? Of course, Emeka will never know the answers to these questions. But when he thinks about those critical moments in his life and the alternative paths his life could have taken had things turned out differently, Emeka is not just engaging in wishful thinking—he’s making sense of his experiences and, in doing so, building meaning.

  The exercise of imagining how life would have turned out if some event had or had not occurred is what academics call counterfactual thinking. In research published in 2010, psychologist Laura Kray of the University of California at Berkeley and her colleagues asked participants to come into their lab and reflect on significant experiences from their lives, and then consider how their lives could have developed differently had the experiences not occurred.

  The researchers asked students at Northwestern, for example, to reflect on their decision to attend that school: “Think about how you decided where to go to college. How did you end up coming to Northwestern?” the students were asked. “Looking back, list the broad sequence of things that led to your decision.” After responding to the essay prompt, half of the participants were asked to respond to one more statement: “Describe all the ways that things could have turned out differently.”

  This simple exercise, researchers found, made the participants rate an important life experience as more meaningful. They were more likely to endorse statements like “Coming to Northwestern has added meaning to my life” and “My decision to come to Northwestern was one of the most significant choices of my life,” and to say that the event defined who they were. The researchers found similar results when they asked participants to reflect on a close friendship. Mentally subtracting meeting the friend, like mentally subtracting the decision to attend Northwestern, led participants to conclude that the friendship was more meaningful.

  Why is counterfactual thinking so powerful? The answer, Kray suggests, is that this kind of exercise engages the sense-making process more rigorously than does simply thinking about the meaning of an event. First, it helps us appreciate the benefits of the path we ultimately took. As the study participants thought about what their lives would be like without the pivotal event, they mostly imagined alternative lives that were worse, not better. Without that event, they concluded, their lives would lack many relationships and experiences that were important to them. If I hadn’t attended Northwestern, one perhaps realized, I would never have gotten that job at the company of my dreams. If I hadn’t met Julie at the party, another may have reasoned, I would never have been introduced to the man I eventually married.

  Second, counterfactual thinking leads us to tell more coherent stories about our lives. In another study, the researchers found that those who mentally subtracted a turning point from their lives, like meeting a future spouse, were more likely to believe that the event was “meant to be.” Their life, they concluded, was not shaped by random chance; rather, it had followed a logical pattern that inevitably led them to meet their partner. Life doesn’t just happen, they seemed to believe; it has an order and a design.

  Of course, many of the subjects in Kray’s studies were reflecting on positive moments in their lives—going to college and meeting a close friend. But some of the most important turning points in our lives are difficult or painful. When we subtract those experiences from our stories, we are forced to consider that life might have been better had they not occurred.

  For Carlos Eire, that moment was the Cuban Revolution. He was eight years o
ld when Fidel Castro marched into Havana in January 1959 and seized power from dictator Fulgencio Batista. Before the revolution, Carlos lived a privileged and idyllic life in Havana. His father was a respected judge and art collector who believed he had been Louis XVI in a former life and behaved accordingly. His mother was a beautiful woman and devout Catholic who adored her two sons. Carlos spent most of his time playing outside and trying not to get into trouble at his strict all-boys Catholic school.

  Just days before Castro came to power, Carlos and his family spent Christmas Eve with his grandparents. It was a classic childhood scene. Roast pork for dinner, nougat for dessert; Carlos cracking nuts with his grandfather on a balcony; the women sharing stories together in the kitchen. “We didn’t know it then,” Carlos has written, “but it would be the last time my entire family would spend Nochebuena together at my grandparents’ house.” That night, Carlos’s father drove the long way home so that they could see the Christmas lights and decorations adorning the city’s houses and storefronts. It would soon “all be over,” Carlos wrote—Castro’s “guerrilla war and our future as a family.”

  Not long after that night, Castro’s government began showing its teeth—torturing and executing political rivals, confiscating private property, and indoctrinating children at school. When Carlos’s mother heard rumors that Castro planned to separate children from their parents, she panicked and decided to send Carlos and his brother Tony to the United States, where they would be safe. The boys were among the fourteen thousand Cuban children airlifted to Florida between 1960 and 1962 as part of Operation Peter Pan. Carlos’s mother and thousands of other parents remained behind in Cuba awaiting their exit permits and the day that they would be reunited with their children.