An Interview with Clinical Psychologist Rebecca Shiner
Rebecca Shiner, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Colgate University. She specializes in the intersection of personality, clinical, and developmental psychology.
Sara Wilson: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series. I'm Sara Wilson, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders.
And today I'd like to welcome with us clinical psychologist, Rebecca Shiner. Dr. Shiner is Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Colgate University. Dr. Shiner is recognized for her pioneering research at the intersection of personality, clinical, and developmental psychology. In addition to the books Handbook of Temperament and Handbook of Personality Development, she has written extensively on the assessment causes and consequences of personality disorders in youth. So before we get started today, could you please let us know a little bit more about yourself and what made you interested in studying personality development and its implications?
Rebecca Shiner: Okay. Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me to do this, Sara. I'm really looking forward to it. I got interested in studying personality development when I was in seventh grade. I'm not sure if you want me to go back this far, but anyhow, I will tell you briefly the story. So when I was in seventh grade, I had to write my first term paper, and it felt like a very big deal and very serious. And so I went to the library looking for sources of inspiration, and I came across a book that was a children's book about Freud. And so it covered all of Freud's theories in age-appropriate levels of description. It went and talked about the anal stage, the oral stage, the Oedipus complex, all of that. And when I read it, I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I can't believe that no one ever told me about this."
And I was just completely captivated. There was something about taking seriously the idea that there's continuity across the course of people's lives, but also that people change over time that just grabbed me. And so I wrote my term paper on Freud, and that really has been my passion ever since. And so when I got to grad school and I realized that I could actually study people's development over time, that I could look at longitudinal studies where they follow the same group of people and I could look for traces of continuity and change, I decided that that's what I wanted to do.
Sara Wilson: That's beautiful. I love that.
So in a recent talk you gave about narrative identity in the context of personality disorders in adolescence, you've discussed three levels of personality over the course of our development. Could you introduce each of these to our audience?
Rebecca Shiner: Okay, sure. So personality is more than just people's personality traits. So I think often when people hear the term personality, the first thing they think of is personality traits. And that really is an essential part of our personality. So our traits are the ways that we tend to be at least somewhat consistent across situations and across time, and they summarize general ways that we have of interacting with the world. A good example of a personality trait that everyone knows, I think, is extroversion versus introversion. But another trait that's really relevant to clinical psychology is neuroticism, which ties into Freud. And also really what it reflects is our individual differences in how much we're prone to experiencing negative emotions like anxiety and irritability, vulnerability, and so on. So those are traits, and those emerge early in terms of our temperament. Some of the traits even emerge within infancy, although they change considerably over time.
Okay, so that's the first level, level one. Then the next level is level two. And level two, it has different names. Sometimes it's called characteristic adaptations, but level two has to do with tendencies that we have in terms of what we're trying to accomplish and the goals we're pursuing, the ways that we're motivated in our daily lives. So for example, people vary in terms of the goals that they have for themselves. So for one person, it might be deeply important for them to connect with other people, and then another person might have really strong motives for achievement, or you may have different goals depending on the context you're thinking about. So that's level two, and then that emerges elementary school age when kids start to be more able to control what they're doing and are able to really act as motivated young people.
And then finally, the last part is level three, it's narrative identity. And so that's what we're going to be focusing on today. This does not emerge until adolescence. And narrative identity has to do with individual differences in the way that we make sense of our lives, in terms of the stories that are important to us that we use to tell who we are and what we are about, how our past is connected with who we are in the present and the future. So we vary, very much in terms of the way that we narrate or tell the stories of our lives.
So a good example would actually be the story that I told you about why I decided to study personality development. That was a narrative describing how I came to be excited about this area of research, and we could analyze it in terms of different themes that pop up or how the emotional language in it is positive versus negative and so on. So we all grow in terms of the stories that we tell. As I said, it starts in late or middle to late adolescence, and then it's something that we're really working on over the whole course of our lives.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, so interesting. Yeah, that example's so good too.
Now, where does a personality disorder come into all of this, and why is narrative identity relevant? What is a personality disorder?
Rebecca Shiner: Okay, okay. So yeah, we'll start by talking a little bit about what a personality disorder is. Personality disorders are distinguished from other psychological disorders that people might have in a couple of different ways. The key features of them are that people are experiencing persistent difficulties in terms of their sense of self or sense of identity and/or, in most cases, and, they're struggling with different aspects of how they're relating to other people. So it's a fundamental disturbance in both the sense of self and in the sense of relatedness to other people. And so clearly identity is part of that because some of the disturbances in the self have to do with disturbances in the person's sense of identity, in terms of how they understand themselves, say across time, or how they see themselves in terms of their self-esteem and so on. There is a very big burst of interest right now in trying to understand how narrative identity relates to personality disorders because people haven't really been studying that directly until I would say the last five years or so.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, I think that this topic is so interesting, especially narrative identity, just because you have, in some sense, so much agency over the active construction of this self, and then at the same time, it's like a working schema that affects the self directly. So it's like this feedback loop.
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, I agree. I think it's an exciting area to research because I think there's... And it's exciting from a clinical perspective too, because I think there's more of a sense of potential for making significant changes in narrative identity, in part because it's likely to be less heritable and is really evolving over time. So yeah, there's the potential for change there.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. One thing that I was very curious about was how does narrative identity differ from our actual real identity? And I don't even know what that means, I guess.
Rebecca Shiner: No, no, it's a great question because I think that there are different ways of conceptualizing identity. So very often when people think about identity, they think about it in terms of just how we see ourselves in terms of our role, in terms of our sense of vocation. So for example, a person's identity may involve their race or their sex or their sexual orientation. It may involve the kind of occupation that they have or their status as being a married person or a parent and so on. And those aspects of identity are fundamentally important to who we are as individuals, but they're distinct from narrative identity because narrative identity really has more to do with how we tell the stories of our lives. So you could be someone who has exactly the same sense of identity across all of these dimensions as another person, and yet your narrative identity is still going to be distinct to you because it's going to have to do with your own history and how you make sense of how your earlier experiences have impacted who you are now.
Sara Wilson: Now, as you have conveyed in a lot of your work, feeling a lack of agency over your life can really be the root of enduring mental health and personality problems. But then on the flip side, it might also come with this immense pressure to define who we are and take action because our narrative isn't going to write itself. And I was curious how, from your point of view, we should go about reconciling this kind of tension that comes with narrative identity.
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah. So let me say a little bit about what agency is and how that links up because I think that these ideas can be very abstract and hard to understand. When people share a story from their past, those stories that they tell, you can actually look at them across a bunch of different dimensions. And when people are doing research on narratives, what they do is they ask people to tell the story about something significant, for example, a turning point that helped establish their sense of who they are. So you can take those stories and you can code them along dimensions that typically characterize stories that people tell.
And so one of the really fundamental dimensions that you can look at, or you can at least look for in any narrative is a sense of agency. That is considered a motivational theme that gets at how people understand themselves in terms of how they're moving through the world, how they're motivated. Agency has to do with having a sense that you are the director of your own life. So you tell your story in a way where you're in control of the things that are happening to you, and you are active rather than just being a passive victim at the whim of your circumstances. So you're making things happen, you may be growing and changing and so on.
And agency has turned out to be one of the most important aspects of the way that people tell their stories, because across a huge number of studies, looking at a lot of different outcomes, having a stronger sense of agency, being the author and the director in your stories, it's linked up with all kinds of well-being. So a greater sense of satisfaction with life, lower levels of different psychological symptoms like depression and so on. So it seems to be really good and really positive in general.
Yeah, one other important finding that's been found by John Adler, he did a study where he was looking at the narratives that people wrote after they had therapy sessions, so while they were in the course of therapy. And people who produced stories after each therapy session that were characterized by stronger agency tended to be the ones who are getting better over the course of therapy too. So it actually seems to be not just a correlate of doing well, but seems to be an active ingredient that helps people to do better. But your question is about a sense of agency, how we go about creating that. Is that what you're asking? I want to make sure I'm answering the right question.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, and also maybe are there any caveats or trade-offs when it comes to just this pressure to define who we are. As we're shedding more light on it in a clinical context, I was wondering if there's any trade-offs to agency?
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that if it's agency that's being forced by someone else, it's not really agency at all, because that would be... If a person is feeling a kind of pressure to be agentic, in a way that is undermining the very essence of what it means to have a sense of agency because it's action that's initiated on your own and where you see yourself as freely choosing to act and to do things in your life. I don't know of any studies that have found a negative relationship between agency and well-being. There are definitely studies where it's not related to the outcomes that they're looking at.
Sara Wilson: This is very interesting. It's a very promising finding with the therapy sessions and the really tangible effective role of narrative identity and meaning-making and agency being very interconnected with our belief systems.
Rebecca Shiner: Right. And I think it's important to note too that it's not like people are consciously... Normally, people aren't consciously necessarily deciding that this is how they're going to tell their story. I think they could. They could. But in most of these studies, it just seems to be a process people aren't even necessarily aware of. And so the people who tell those stories with a sense of agency do turn out to be doing better.
Sara Wilson: On that note, what is the role or importance of meaning-making and why is there this focus on the client's relationship to their beliefs, narrative therapy, and in other therapeutic techniques more broadly?
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a whole separate line of research that's about meaning-making in life and purpose in life that in general finds that it's really an essential component of wellbeing. It's not the same as being happy, for example, but it's another really important sense of thriving in the world. So meaning, being able to make meaning out of your experiences, I think especially negative or traumatic experiences I think is fundamentally important. People can make meaning in different ways. They can make meaning by pursuing something that they feel called to do. They can create meaning by doing something in service of other people, for example. But narratives also give us a way of making meaning, because it's our way of trying to understand how the things that have happened to us have affected us, and how our own choices and ways of navigating the world also are impacting the way that we're doing right now.
I think narrative is another important contributor to a person's sense of meaning. So for example, if someone has had something very painful, very traumatic happen to them, one way of trying to make sense of that is to try to understand the impact of it and to really find a way to weave that into the story of your life rather than having it be just this standalone, horrible thing that has happened. So there's something very powerful about the process of trying to understand the impact and how perhaps you can carry that with you moving forward. That is really helpful, and I think that that is part of what can happen in the process of therapy.
Sara Wilson: I think that this is so fascinating, especially because it's not really the content necessarily of the narrative or your belief and/or your story that's changing, it's the meaning around it and the organization of it, and I guess the degree of how attentive you are to certain things, how integral they are to you, which relies a lot on your relationship to this content.
Rebecca Shiner: That's right. I think that's right, because it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to change the content of what you believe, but through the stories that you tell yourself about what you've experienced, it may affect the way that you can imagine yourself moving forward into the future.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. One study of yours that I was very curious about your paper, “The Relations between Narrative Identity and Personality Pathology among Clinical Adolescents: Findings from a Multi-Ethnic Asian Sample”, this was the first study to assess the links between themes of narrative identity and personality disorder domains in a clinical adolescent sample. Could you explain the study a little more to our audience, why you chose the participants you did, and just your findings more broadly?
Rebecca Shiner: So this is a paper... The first author of this paper is Amy See, who at the time that she did this study was a PhD student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands working with Theo Klimstra, who is a colleague of mine whose studies actually identity development in adolescence. Amy See herself was from Singapore, and so she was very interested in trying to look at whether the narratives of adolescents are linked with their emerging personalities and particularly personality difficulties that they might be having. As I mentioned, adolescents, teenagers are really in the very earliest stages of starting to develop their narrative style and are really starting to have a richer sense of what are the most important episodes from their lives.
What Amy did was she recruited a clinical sample. These were teenagers who were being seen at the largest mental health clinic for adolescents in the country. And so she asked them to write about a turning point that they had experienced. And a turning point is a specific kind of narrative where you ask the person to share something, to share an experience that they've had that really informed the way that they understand themselves, that really changed the way that they perceive themselves. So she asked them to write about that, and then she also asked them to fill out a questionnaire about difficulties they were having in terms of their personalities. So these were not young people who were diagnosed with personality disorders, they were having clinical struggles, and they were just reporting on personality difficulties they were having.
So the most striking finding from it was that there was a particular dimension of those narratives that was related to personality difficulties that the young people were having. And that dimension is one I haven't mentioned yet, which is communion. Communion is a motivational theme similar to agency that describes how much the person tends to talk about positive, loving, close relationships with other people, with friends or romantic partners. If you're looking at a sample of adults, it may also be caregiving relationships or any sort of feeling of connection with other people.
And so what we found in this paper is that the teenagers who were having more personality difficulties tended to express lower levels of this kind of positive communion with other people in the turning point stories that they told. We're not sure which came first. We don't know if it may be that they were having problems in their relationships, and so then that's reflected in their narratives. It could be that the way they tell stories was affecting their mental health, for example, by making them more depressed. I thought, if it's okay, I could share a couple really short narratives from that study because I think it will make the findings a little more concrete. Is that okay?
Sara Wilson: Yes, we would love that!
Rebecca Shiner: Okay, so here's a first turning point narrative from one of the teenagers. "I was diagnosed with depression one year ago. I was not myself and caused a lot of problems for my family. After a number of sessions with the psychologist, I started understanding myself better and why I behaved the way I did. This made me change my mindset, and I told myself to enjoy life more. I am now feeling happier and approach life in a more positive manner." So this person is talking about learning and growing through the process of therapy, but they're also suggesting that they had been having a lot of problems with their family. But they're talking about this positive connection with the psychologist and this more positive mindset that came out of it. So they're expressing a sense of communion.
In contrast, here's one from a participant who expressed a low level of communion. "So I was sexually abused by a family member a few months ago. It made me feel hurt, horrible, and disgusting. I now flinch when someone touches me, and I hate this feeling. This has made me less trusting of others, including my family." So you can see this is a turning point for this young person when asked to think about an experience they had that really changed their sense of self. They describe something that's really painful, and they talk about that painful experience of abuse leading to them not trusting people anymore. So you can see this clear distinction in terms of that theme of communion there.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. And whether the turning point itself is articulated in positive or negative terms.
Rebecca Shiner: Right. Yeah, in this case, there's a clear difference in the overall tone of those two narratives that you can see there. But I think it's interesting too, this is an Asian sample, and so in general, Asian cultures tend to be more collectivistic and to have a stronger focus on interdependence across people and stronger need to think about the group rather than just the individual. Whereas a US sample, for example, is more individualistic. So it would be really interesting to know whether the pattern would replicate in a Western sample where maybe communion is not so clearly linked with problematic personality traits.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, Because I noticed in your results that communion was perceived as more a significant dimension in that sample in particular, as opposed to agency.
Rebecca Shiner: Right, which is an unusual finding actually. Agency is more consistently associated with wellbeing in general than communion is. There are a lot of studies where communion is just not related to whatever positive outcome measures you have. And so it raises questions about whether maybe this is a cross-cultural difference that I think would be worth studying more.
Sara Wilson: Right, yeah. It also definitely raises the question of how narrative identity is highly convoluted by nurture and just your social situation and upbringing. So it's subject to change I guess.
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, absolutely. I think narratives are a place where culture plays a big role because different cultures have different preferred ways of telling stories. US samples have a very strong preference for redemption narratives where things start out bad, but then by the end of the story, they turn out to be positive. We love a good redemption story in the United States. And that's not always necessarily a positive thing, but it's a clear cultural preference that we have.
Sara Wilson: Yeah, it's so interesting because it's not real in some sense, it's very socially and culturally dependent and context relevant, but then at the same time, it manifests itself in very real situations. It very much changes your belief systems.
Rebecca Shiner: Right. That's right, but the outcomes may vary again, depending on the culture. So I think it's important in thinking about narratives to not assume that narratives that are positive in one culture are necessarily going to have positive outcomes in another.
Sara Wilson: One more study I wanted to talk about. Can you discuss a little about your study exploring narrative identity and PTSD symptoms in veterans? I was especially curious about the finding that even if patients experienced a loss of control during traumatic military experiences, it may be possible to help them find ways of narrating their life in more agentic terms in the present through the process of therapy.
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, let me describe that study. This was a study that was actually inspired by one of my honors students at Colgate, and this is before I really had done much narrative research. So I had a student who wanted to study veterans for his honors project, and he wanted to look at PTSD. And so we hit it on the idea of asking veterans to tell us about their most stressful experiences that they had had in the military. And we wanted to look at whether their way of narrating those really stressful experiences was predictive of whether they had PTSD symptoms or not. It's really interesting because in a lot of the literature on PTSD, there's the assumption that the memories themselves are highly relevant to developing PTSD or not, but they're not looked at in terms of narrative identity, they're more looked at in terms of whether the memories are fractured or fragmented or not.
But we thought that it seemed likely that the narrative style, the way that people tell the stories of those really stressful experiences would be highly relevant to whether people have PTSD symptoms or not. So we collected stories about the most highly stressful military experience in a sample of veterans. We found that, in fact, there was a link between narrative identity and PTSD, so specifically the veterans who told these stories in a more agentic way and also with a stronger sense of growth tended to have lower levels of PTSD symptoms. So I think this is really, really important because it suggests that, again, those memories are important because they become part of a person's narrative identity. There may be ways of working with those memories to help people to begin to narrate them in a way that is going to bring some relief to them.
It's really interesting to me that the treatment method that has the most evidence for its effectiveness for treating PTSD is something that's called prolonged exposure, which is where the person with PTSD is asked to tell, in as much detail as they can, the traumatic experience that they have had that has left them with PTSD. So they have to recount in great detail everything that they can remember about that experience. Which is obviously extremely difficult and painful to do, particularly the first time. And then they're asked to retell this story and actually to listen to recordings of them having told the story themselves. The contention is that the reason this is working is because it's exposing them to the story or the memory of something that they have been trying very hard to avoid having direct contact with.
And I believe that that's true. I believe that it's exposure that helps them put aside the avoidance that is playing a really important role in why that model works for helping people get over traumatic memories. But I also expect that there's something about the retelling of that story that helps people to actually gain a sense of mastery over it. And I think it would be really interesting to actually do a study where you looked at whether those stories change in terms of whether the person feels a greater sense of agency in the retelling of the story over time.
Sara Wilson: This is such amazing research, really, and such important implications, and it's just starting to be tapped into its full potential. Yeah, I totally definitely agree with you. I think it's very good work that you're doing.
Rebecca Shiner: Thank you. I feel very lucky to have had people who are willing to let me collaborate on this kind of work with them.
Sara Wilson: When you discuss this epistemic gap in clinical theory regarding personality disorders, I think it's interesting that you cite one of the reasons for this deficit in knowledge to be the desire to protect youth from stigmatizing diagnoses. How might a diagnosis in any domain, I guess, actually contribute further to poor narrative identity? How can we go about this maybe more carefully or be more sensitive to this in therapeutic practice?
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah, it's a great question. Historically, there's been a lot of hesitancy to use labels of personality disorders for teenagers. And in fact, the diagnostic manual, the DSM has encouraged clinicians to be cautious about using personality disorder diagnoses for people below the age of 18, even though it's recognized that these personality patterns start earlier in life, so they don't just emerge out of nothing when a person gets 18. And this has been because in the past, people saw personality disorders as being chronic and very hard to treat, like once you have a personality disorder, you are destined to have that personality disorder forever. And that seems too stigmatizing to apply that to a young person.
However, it turns out that there are a bunch of mistakes that have been made in those assumptions. It turns out personality disorders are amenable to treatment. It turns out that they do naturally change over time even without treatment. And it turns out that personality disorder problems actually may be at their worst during adolescence. And so that suggests that there may be value in at least thinking about personality disordered patterns in young people like paying attention as a clinician to whether the young person you're working with has problems with their sense of self and identity, or chronic problems and how they're relating to other people.
That being said, I have a lot of sympathy for this concern about using personality disorder diagnoses on young people. And that is because as we've talked about, teenagers are in the process of developing their sense of narrative identity. They're only just beginning to figure out what are the important stories from their lives, how do their past experiences affect who they are now? And so there is a great risk, I think, actually in giving them a label that would lead them to formulate a sense of identity that is going to be really pathological, that is going to discourage them from feeling hopeful about change.
And I'm especially concerned about this now because on social media, there has been this profusion of teenagers and/or young adults self-professing that they have personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder. And there's a strong tendency for people almost sometimes to almost relish having this diagnosis that makes them feel special or celebrates their sense of being a victim in a way. This has become rampant on TikTok with mental health in general, young people posting TikToks about their diagnoses and so on.
And so this is something that I have actually been gradually rethinking for myself, because in the past, I have encouraged clinicians to think about personality disorder diagnoses for young people and to very carefully present that information to young people. But I think that as those diagnoses have been promulgated in social media, I am beginning to see more and more the potential risks that are associated with that, especially because of young people's emerging sense of identity and the way that that diagnosis may play a part in how they're crafting the narratives of their lives.
Here's where I'm at on this at this moment. I may change my mind again, I still think it's vitally important to be paying attention to those core personality disorder features for people who are working with teenagers to really pay attention. Is this a person who's struggling with intimacy, is struggling with how they see other people? Do they tend to view other people in a black and white way, for example, that might characterize borderline tendencies? Is this a young person whose sense of identity is so profoundly unstable that they're having trouble beginning to navigate decisions about what they want to do after high school and so on?
So I think those are things that clinicians should be paying attention to and should develop some competence in learning how to treat, because those problems are significant for a large number of teenagers with clinical problems. On the other hand, I think that there's a really important role for being cautious about giving a personality disorder diagnosis. And I think it's important to be careful in how that is articulated to the young person. And I think explaining it in the kind of language that I've been using, it's likely to be more helpful, that these are ways of seeing the self and seeing other people interacting with them that are profoundly important, but also open to change so that the young person can start to develop narratives about who they are that are both realistic and more healthy.
Sara Wilson: Yes. Yeah, I think that expressing a critical sensitivity to narrative identity and the reality of it in therapy especially, will inevitably strengthen the therapist-patient relationship just because a lot of traditional therapeutic practices stigmatize the client's point of view as something that's disordered or subjectively inaccurate. But instead of discrediting the content of the narrative itself, the narrative therapist helps to consciously separate the story from the client and sees narrative identity as a construction over which we have agency that's separate from our core.
Rebecca Shiner: I agree. Although I think that there's a place too for reality testing in the sense that I think that the best narratives are in contact with reality, but are also healthy. A narrative identity that is entirely positive, but disconnected from a person's actual reality is going to be a problem perhaps in a different way than a narrative that's unduly negative, if that makes sense, yeah. So I think that it's important for the person's sense of identity to be both flexible and reality based, and ideally positive because there's the potential for change there.
Sara Wilson: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really think that this is such an important concept right now, especially as so much research on the self is emerging and in our relationship to selfhood, what is the self? And there's obviously so many levels to it with so many pressing implications and very real importance for who we are and for wellbeing. So I think that this is very, very important research and a very cool concept. Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience today, Dr. Shiner?
Rebecca Shiner: I had one last thought that I wanted to mention. There's a brand new study, it actually hasn't been published yet, but it's been accepted for publication, that was looking at this construct of the hero's journey. This is a popular motif that a number of people have recognized that the most loved stories across many different cultures seem to take this form of the hero's journey, where the person begins in the dark, but then they feel this calling to leave their safer childhood home, and they venture out and they find a mentor and they have to battle the foes that may thwart them and so on. So there's a particular form that this hero's journey story takes.
Anyhow, this study has found that there's actually value in telling your own story as a hero's journey and being able to see your life in terms of that pathway from a maybe sheltered existence, but moving forward into facing your foes and your challenges and being defeated, but then continuing to move forward. This was a series of studies that showed that actually adopting that kind of sense of your own story as a hero's journey, it's good for us, and maybe it gives us courage to face the things that are inevitably going to be painful and difficult.
Sara Wilson: I wonder, do you think that we inherently value that as an intrinsically good narrative organization, or do you think it's maybe very convoluted by cultural norms, what we've been accustomed to?
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah. Right, that's a great question. I think that part of the impetus for studying this is that this is a very common narrative format across historic time and across place. There's something about this kind of story that deeply appeals to all of us and suggests that there may be something universally, humanly relevant about it.
Sara Wilson: How would you suggest that someone goes about trying to develop their narrative identity?
Rebecca Shiner: Yeah. I have a few ideas. One is I think reading good books is a good way of doing it. Actually, over Thanksgiving break, I have gone back to... I pulled out one of my childhood books that I love very much called A Little Princess. It's like a classic, classic girl's book. Anyhow, and just reading it actually makes me really... It actually follows the hero's journey pathway. And I realized how much I internalized that narrative form as a kid when I was reading it.
So anyhow, I do think there's a place for watching good movies and reading good books and so on to have a sense of the narratives of other people's lives. I also think that there's really good value in well done therapy. I definitely think some therapies are better than others for developing a sense of narrative. I think all therapies do it, but I think for people who are trying to gain more of a sense of understanding of themselves, I think some of the more traditional therapies like psychodynamic can be especially useful. I think journaling. I really think anything that has to do with self-reflection and deep thinking about yourself.
Sara Wilson: So interesting.
Rebecca Shiner: Very useful, yeah.
Sara Wilson: How many layers there are, and how many different ways there are to get in touch with yourself and make real change. Yeah, I've been very interested in the concept of self throughout my psychology and philosophy major at Colgate. And the more I study it, the more I'm just blown, mind blown. It really is such an incredible concept. It's just unbelievable how much there is to it. And the more I study it, the more I'm just dubious of what it even is, what it even means. The research is just so interesting. And I think it's so relevant nowadays, especially right now with so much more research going on with regards to what mind is and major developments in neuroscience. And I think that this very much deserves to be paid attention to, especially in neuroscience and the mechanisms behind this. It really is just unbelievable.
Rebecca Shiner: It's fantastic that you've been able to study it. Yeah, my hope is that people will be inspired to learn more about it. I highly recommend anything that has been written by the person who developed this concept, who I should have acknowledged at the very beginning of this interview, who is Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern, who really I think pioneered the... Who was drawing from a lot of existing traditions within psychology, but really helped to pioneer the empirical study of narrative identity. So I commend anyone looking up Dan McAdam's work.
Sara Wilson: Thank you so much for joining us today. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. This was Dr. Shiner.
Rebecca Shiner: Great questions, yeah.
Sara Wilson: Of course. It was so amazing.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.