Tell me a story! Part 2 - Love stories
28/07/08 15:01 Filed in: Psychology of Love | Healing stories
Moving away from grand theory and back to psychology, I have been interested in the power of stories for a long time.
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
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