Stories and Resiliency Part 2

Family Stories

My last ‘Story about Stories’ reported on research on resiliency in children, teens, and young adults.  In a nutshell, as Robin Fivush states it, “families build resilience through building stories.” (Fivush is minutes 28:00-33:00; quote at 33:00.)

Prof Fivush and her associates at the Family Narratives Lab have a very specific focus, some concrete theories, and are systematically conducting research to validate them.

My theories are more general, less concretely stated, but are supported by her research. 

I’ve had a lifelong preoccupation with stories. This started with an interest in the social side of stories around age 10. I started exploring the ‘psychodynamic’ side of stories at age 16 by reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections while undergoing a fairly, well, interesting adolescence.

I’ve come to believe that both individuals and cultures are built by their stories and that the two are deeply intertwined.

Here are a few more studies.

Stories by Firelight.

"What I found was a big difference between day and night conversation, the kinds of information transmitted and the use of imaginary thought," Wiessner says. 

Deep History

My theory: As we became smarter our instincts became more generalized allowing more and more room for learning. Within our instinct to learn language is an instinct to shape language into stories...and one key role of language and story is to knit together self and tribe. This process has been slow cooked into us for tens of thousands of years.

Stories around the Dinner Table

Next let’s jump to a ‘modern’ urban context: family dinner conversation.

 

 

For the last decade, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) and others have been conducting studies that correlate a variety of positive outcomes with the frequency of family dinners. Family dinners 5 times a week have a ‘robust’ correlation with higher grades and lower rates of addiction, to mention a few examples.

 

Much like Fivush and Duke’s work on family story-sharing and resiliency, these folks are only beginning to unpack the causality behind the correlation. 

 

Not being held to academic standards, I’m happy to speculate! I see a direct line from the hunter-gather campfire through village hearths to the family dinner table. I do not believe that if everyone ate in glum silence there would be a positive impact. Table talk is key! My guess is that part of the positive result of story-sharing is the feeling connections that are maintained but that, also, an important part are those stories that knit things back together into a coherent personal and family/tribal narrative. Both sharing and having of the story that makes the difference.

 

Healing Stories