Why You're Stuck: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Welcome back to PsberSpace. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about why some people can go through something genuinely hard and come out the other side seemingly fine while other people get stuck in it, sometimes for years. If you've ever asked yourself that question, you've potentially made some assumptions about the answer. You might think the person who bounced back is just tougher or more resilient.
Leslie Poston:People like to say they're just built differently or assume the thing they went through wasn't actually that bad. Those explanations can feel intuitive, but they're mostly wrong. Three decades of psychological research shows us bouncing back often comes down to the story you're able to construct about what happened to you. And remember, hard is relative. One person's hard experience is the death of a parent, but for another, it's a coworker who made every single day miserable for two years, a car accident when you still have bills overdue, or maybe a breakup that the person saw coming but still couldn't prepare for.
Leslie Poston:The scale of the event matters far less than what happens afterward in how you narrate it to yourself and to other people. Let's get into it. There's a body of research in psychology called narrative identity that's been building for over thirty years now. The idea is that human beings don't just experience their lives, they narrate them. We each carry an internalized evolving story of who we are that stitches together the past we remember and the future we imagine.
Leslie Poston:That story is how we answer the question who am I in a way that feels coherent from one day to the next. One of the key tools used to study this asks people to describe their lives as if they were a book. Chapters, key scenes, characters, turning points, and where their story might be headed. And when you code thousands of these interviews for patterns, two keep showing up that matter for what we're talking about today. The first is called a redemption sequence.
Leslie Poston:That's when someone narrates a scene that starts negative and transitions to something positive. Such as, I lost the job, and it was devastating. But it forced me to rethink what I actually wanted, and so I ended up somewhere better. The second is called a contamination sequence, which is the reverse. A scene starts positively and gets overtaken by something bad, such as Things were going well, but then everything fell apart and it's never really recovered.
Leslie Poston:Across multiple studies, started by Dan McAdams and across multiple decades of research, we found that people whose life stories contain more redemption sequences report higher well-being and better psychosocial adaptation overall. People whose stories lean toward contamination sequences report higher depression and lower well-being in general. This kind of story that you tell about your life is measurably connected to how you're doing. And this applies across the full range of what hard means. You don't need to have had capital T Trauma for this to be relevant.
Leslie Poston:A difficult divorce, a friendship that ended badly, a period where you couldn't find workany of those things can contribute. The story you construct about what happened becomes part of the infrastructure that you carry forward. The obvious question is whether people who are already doing well are just more likely to tell redemption stories. Is the story a symptom of well-being, or is it doing something on its own? Three separate lines of research suggest the story itself is an active ingredient in this process.
Leslie Poston:The first looked at recovering alcoholics. Researchers compared people who had been sober for over four years with people who had been sober for six months or less and asked both groups to narrate the story of their last drink. The long term sober group was significantly more likely to tell a redemption story about that night, something like that was the worst night of my life, but it became the moment that everything changed. When the newly sober group was followed over time, the ones who had told a redemption story about their last drink were more likely to stay sober. The narrative came first, and the sustained behavioral change followed.
Leslie Poston:The story was just a precursor, not a retrospective rationalization. The second study tracked therapy clients across 12 assessment points, looking at something called narrative agency, which is the degree to which someone's personal story reflects a sense of being the author of their own life rather than a character that things just happen to. Increases in narrative agency preceded improvements in mental health. The story shifted before the symptoms did. The third body of research is a paradigm called expressive writing, replicated in over 100 studies at this point.
Leslie Poston:The setup asks people to write about a difficult experience for about fifteen minutes a day over several sessions. The results consistently show improvements in both physical and mental health, but the benefit showed up specifically when people moved toward narrative structure and coherence, when they organized the experience into a story with some shape to it. People who wrote about the pain without structuring it into anything didn't see the same positive effects. The early work behind this actually started with the observation that people who experienced trauma and kept it secret were more likely to be hospitalized for physical illnesses. Disclosure mattered, but what mattered more was the shape the disclosure took: structured, story like narrative, not just emotional release.
Leslie Poston:Across different populations and different methods, the same pattern continues to show up. The story that you build around your hard experience is doing something very real to help you. It's organizing the experience in a way that either lets you move through it or keeps you trapped, circling mentally inside of it. If redemption stories are associated with better outcomes, the next question is why some people seem able to construct them naturally while others get stuck in contamination loops. Part of the answer starts earlier than you might guess.
Leslie Poston:Decades of developmental psychology research has looked at how children learn to narrate their own experiences, focusing on something called elaborative reminiscing the way parents talk to kids about things that have already happened. Some parents do this in detailed, emotionally rich ways. They ask open ended questions. They help the child co construct a story about the experience, including how it felt. Other parents don't do this much at all because of their own temperament, their own history, or the conditions that they're living under.
Leslie Poston:If you want a fairly recent example of this that may have come across your social media feeds, on Instagram or TikTok, you may have seen videos over the last few years of toddlers learning to snowboard. One of the more interesting ones for this purpose, there's a toddler in a little bunny snowsuit where you can't see their face, and the parent has mic'd them up. And they're narrating their trip down the mountain, and the parent is encouraging them. So anytime they get stuck, the kid is giving themselves a pep talk, and the parent is also in their ear telling them about a positive outcome from this experience. That's a great example of what that can look like in a very low risk situation.
Leslie Poston:The consistent finding of the studies we've been discussing is that children of more elaborative parents develop stronger narrative skills. Earlier theory of mind, which is the ability to understand that other people have their own internal experience, a more coherent sense of self, and better emotional regulation. These kids are learning how to turn their raw experience into a structured narrative, and they're learning it through conversation with someone who cares about them. There's also a finding that family stories about the intergenerational past stories about the parents growing up, their own hard moments and their own mistakes, and how they overcame them are uniquely connected to positive adolescent development. So it's not just let's talk about what happened to you today.
Leslie Poston:It's let me tell you about the time something like that happened to me and what I did with it. That modeling is how narrative capacity gets transmitted across generations. The connection to adult adversity is direct. If you grew up in a home where hard things were never discussed or where emotions were dismissed or just not addressed, you may have less practiced narrative infrastructure for making sense of difficulty when it arrives later in life. And that's not a character flaw on your part.
Leslie Poston:It's a developmental gap shaped by circumstances that were completely outside your control at a time in your life when that mattered the most. There's another reason people get stuck, and it operates at a slightly different level. There's a concept called event centrality that measures how much a single event has become the organizing center of someone's identity. When a difficult or traumatic experience becomes the reference point someone uses to interpret everything else that happens, the turning point of the entire life story, or maybe the core of how they understand themselves, their psychological outcomes get worse. PTSD and CPTSD symptoms increase.
Leslie Poston:The event has swallowed their narrative instead of being contained within it. This captures something people experience but sometimes don't have language for, and that's the difference between this terrible thing happened to me and I am the person this terrible thing happened to. The first positions the event as a chapter. The second turns it into the title of the book, so to speak. When the event becomes the title of your story, every new experience you have gets filtered through it.
Leslie Poston:So a new relationship becomes an opportunity to be heard again. A new job becomes one more thing that can be taken away. The event stops being in the past and becomes your lens for the present. And because it's functioning as the lens, it's constantly getting reinforced. Every time something goes wrong for you, even if it's something minor, it's confirming the centrality of this original event.
Leslie Poston:The story tightens around it instead of helping to expand past it. And this same dynamic operates at a collective level When a society or a group of people organizes its identity around a single traumatic event, that event becomes the filter for interpreting everything new. It stays raw because the culture keeps reactivating it rather than integrating it into a larger ongoing story. Think about post nine eleven America. A generation of foreign policy, surveillance infrastructure, cultural anxiety, and political rhetoric has been filtered through one morning in September 2001.
Leslie Poston:The wound doesn't close for the country because closing it has been made to feel like a forgetting or a betrayal. Picking at the scab of it has become a form of identity maintenance. And meanwhile, the inability to integrate that event into a broader, more positive national story one where it's a chapter and not the entire book, is keeping the whole system stuck in a defensive posture that distorts the response to everything that comes after it and prevents building a better future. Individual or collective, this dynamic is the same. The traumatic event becomes so fused with identity that narrating past it feels impossible.
Leslie Poston:And people who benefit from keeping it central politically or financially or socially, have every incentive to make sure that integration never happens. And that's as true in individual abusive relationship dynamics as it is in the way political figures invoke national traumas to justify present day political agendas. There's one more layer to all of this, and you won't be surprised when I tell you that it connects to themes that you've heard about on my show before. Cultures provide a limited menu of acceptable stories. As psychologists, we call these master narratives, the culturally shared stories that tell you what a normal or good life is supposed to look like.
Leslie Poston:They can include things like the expected life course, school, career, marriage, kids, the preferred story structures and assumptions about who gets to be the protagonist. In The United States, the dominant master narrative for adversity is the redemption arc. You suffer. You overcome it through your own individual effort and come out stronger. If your experience fits that template, building a redemption story feels natural to you because the culture is handing you the scaffolding.
Leslie Poston:You fill in your specifics, and the framework is already there. And this is so deeply embedded that many Americans don't even notice it as their cultural pattern. It just feels like the way stories are supposed to go. You hear it in commencement speeches, recovery testimonials, campaign trail biographies, and job interview answers about what's your greatest weakness. But what about when your experience doesn't fit or when you need the power of a community and not individualism to get past the hard thing?
Leslie Poston:When the hard thing isn't over, when it's ongoing or when it's systemic or structural, when there's no neat resolution available, when your version of hard doesn't even register as legitimate within the cultural story about what counts as real adversity, if you're dealing with chronic illness, poverty that has no single turning point, caregiving that has no end date, or systemic discrimination that renews itself every day, then the redemption arc doesn't fit because the story isn't finished and may never resolve the way that template demands. One twenty twenty four cross cultural study looked at how adults in The United States, Japan, Denmark, and other countries narrated difficult life events. The cultural differences were significant. American participants defaulted to redemption arcs where negative experiences transitioned to positive outcomes, consistent with cultural narratives of personal growth and self reliance. Japanese narratives featured acceptance and attribution of meaning without requiring a positive emotional turnaround but still experiencing the benefit of the story.
Leslie Poston:Danish narratives emphasized balanced affect and communal growth, framing difficulty as something managed collectively rather than conquered individually. The redemption narrative isn't a natural human universal. It's a culturally specific template. And The United States version carries a bit of a shadow: the implicit assumption that any problem is solvable through sheer individual will and the implication that people who don't overcome their personal hardship just didn't try hard enough. For people whose difficulties are ongoing and systemic, the dominant cultural story can make them feel like they're failing at adversity on top of having the adversity itself.
Leslie Poston:And the people most likely to have experiences that don't fit this redemption template are often the people with the least access to the resources that would help them build their alternative stories. Whether that's therapy or supportive relationships or just communities that validate their experiences. And the gap continues to compound. So what does all of this actually mean for you? Let's bring it back to something practical.
Leslie Poston:Because this whole body of work is useful, and I don't want it to feel too abstract. None of this research says tell yourself a better story and all of your problems go away. What it tells us is that narrative is a real psychological process with measurable effects and that your ability to use it is shaped by forces that have nothing to do with how tough or how weak you are. Your family of origin and your culture shaped whether you learned to narrate difficult experiences early. In fact, your culture shapes which story structures feel available to you, and your relationships shape whether the stories you try to tell get received and supported or simply shut down.
Leslie Poston:And the nature of the hard thing itself shapes whether it can be contained as a chapter or whether it threatens to take over your whole book. So knowing all of that, some things I want to highlight. Therapy works in part because it's a structured space for re narrating your experience. Narrative agency, that sense of being the author of your own life, tends to increase during therapy and precede symptom improvement. A therapist is, among other things, someone who helps you construct a more workable version of your own story.
Leslie Poston:And keep in mind, every style of therapy is different. You may need somatic, EMDR, internal family systems, or something more traditional like DBT. Don't be afraid to experiment and find the type of therapy that's right for you. Writing about hard experiences with some structure helps you even without a therapist. Fifteen minutes a few days in a row, writing about something difficult with attention to what happened and how you make sense of it.
Leslie Poston:You don't even need to be a good writer. And you don't need to show it to anyone. The cognitive work of putting that experience into a sequence, giving it a beginning, a middle, giving it some kind of meaning This is what produces the effect. How other people in your life respond when you talk about hard things matters enormously. The parent child reminiscing research is about early development, but the principle that it finds extends.
Leslie Poston:When someone tells you about something they're going through and you help them think through it, you ask the right questions, or you just stay present in the moment while they work out what the experience means to them, you're doing something with real psychological utility. When the response is dismissal or silence, well, that has consequences too. And recognizing that your difficulty is a chapter rather than the title of the book is an active cognitive process that can be practiced. If you find yourself stuck in a story about something hard that happened to you in the past, the question that you should be asking isn't why can't I just get over this? It's what would I need in terms of support or tools or just someone willing to listen well to tell a fuller version of this story that helps me move past it?
Leslie Poston:Those are different questions and they lead to very different places. The difference between people who move through hard experiences and people who get stuck in them isn't about toughness or even the size of the problem. It's often just about whether they have the narrative tools, relational support, and cultural space to build a story that lets the experience be part of their life without taking over. Some people have those tools because they got them early, and some people build them later through therapy or relationships that make room for those stories. Some people are still building them, and that's okay too.
Leslie Poston:And some people are trying to construct a story that their culture doesn't make easy to tell. None of those groups are failing, and that last group is doing a little bit harder work than most of us realize. Thanks so much for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Leslie Poston:If you're still with me, I wanted to do a little post credit PsyberSpace housekeeping. You may have noticed that PsyberSpace does not have ads. I do this show completely for free, produced entirely from my own time and out of my own pocket. That is intentional. I do not want the show to be influenced by brands or sponsors.
Leslie Poston:That said, I have decided to start offering courses and teaching some of the things I talk about on the show. Those I will charge for. I'm going to put a link in the show notes of this episode where you can sign up to be notified when the first course drops. That's all for now. Thanks for listening.
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