The Hero’s Story: To Triumph Over Suffering

Co-authored with Ian Kidd, Ph.D.

The stories people tell about their lives offer insights into their personalities. Psychologists studying narrative identity have long been interested in the life stories that people construct from their memories and experiences.

The life story is an evolving story that individuals tell and re-tell to weave together significant experiences and interactions into a narrative that gives structure, coherence, and purpose to their lives.

Re-storying the narrative, especially after difficult phases in life, is one way people come to terms with what has happened and process its impact. An individual managing chronic illness, for example, could tell a story depicting it as painful condition to endure, or one that will strengthen their resolve and resilience.

Although the stories we tell are deeply personal — informed by our personalities and experiences — the type of story and our reason for sharing it is often influenced by "master narratives," as much as by our own needs. Master narratives are shared stories embedded in a culture that communicate the beliefs, values, and ways of behaving that are valued and expected from members of that culture.

A popular master narrative that many of us will recognise is the hero’s journey. This is an archetypal narrative, present across time and cultures — a kind of story that has long been communicated through religious texts and in popular culture through movies, books, and song lyrics.

The narrative has seven story elements in a set order — a protagonist experiences a change in their circumstances that requires them to set out on a personal quest. During this quest, they make friends who support them along the way and face obstacles that threaten to undermine their goal. Eventually, however, the hero triumphs and is both personally transformed by their journey and is celebrated for their legacy in their community. If this story made you think about Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, then you get the idea!

The hero’s journey is a familiar and celebrated story. An article published earlier this year outlined a series of scientific studies that found a relationship between this narrative and well-being. Individuals who storied their own life narrative using the structure of the hero’s journey reported higher meaning in life and well-being.

The hero's journey narrative was also found to be an effective intervention. Individuals who were instructed on how to use the hero’s narrative to re-story their own lives reported increases in meaning in life and well-being when compared to individuals in a control condition that merely described aspects of their lives.

The idea that storying our lives as a hero who triumphs over personal challenges is beneficial for well-being is generally well supported by psychological research. Individuals who storied their experiences with serious illnesses with greater agency, connection to others, and as an experience that eventually had a positive ending reported improvements in their mental health.

There is, however, far less research into the potential harms of seeing our painful experiences on the bright side.

"Bright-siding" is a term offered by the late American writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who uses it to describe tendencies to ignore, dismiss, gloss over, or otherwise distort the negative aspects of different kinds of human experience, like breast cancer or poverty.

Bright-siding takes many forms, from blunter forms like omitting or downplaying the "dark sides" of one’s experiences, to subtler forms like acknowledging losses and pain only on the condition that they become part of some triumphal narrative. One loses friends — but makes better ones. One goes through horrible pain — but one becomes a stronger person.

Trauma Essential Reads

The Debate Over Trauma in the New DSM Revision

How We Help Each Other Heal

Ehrenreich thinks bright-siding is endemic, sustained by many psychological and cultural forces. We like happy endings. We crave hopeful assurance in times of struggle.

Many people are discomfited by gritty realities, so are resistant to stories with a darker tone. All this is understandable, but bright-siding has serious perils. Central among these, we think, is that it blocks an important kind of truthfulness about our experiences.

To be truthful often means reporting uncomfortable realities — grisly, graphic, dismaying accounts of uncompensated loss, suffering without self-transformation, or periods of loneliness and grief that incur costs but offer no benefits.

If we only report the sunny sides of our life, we are not telling the whole story. This prevents certain kinds of meaningful connection with other people. To really connect with someone, a certain amount of truthful disclosure of the complexities of experience is necessary.

Authenticity is difficult, perhaps impossible, as long as we remain entrapped within superficial sunniness.

We do not deny there is a time and place for bright-siding. It can be a very helpful and adaptive way to process negative and painful experiences. However, bright-siding cultures that demand only the cheerful, upbeat, optimistic stories can deprive us of what we most need in times of suffering — rich kinds of meaningful, interpersonal connection.