Latest / 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project / Your Evolution May Feel Like a Revolution | Jonathan Adler on Who Else Is Holding Your Story

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Your Evolution May Feel Like a Revolution | Jonathan Adler on Who Else Is Holding Your Story · 100 Stories: The Narrative Intelligence Project

• Paige Williams: Welcome to 100 Stories, the Narrative Intelligence Project. I'm Paige Williams. I'm talking to 100 thinkers, creators, researchers, leaders, and people shaped by profound change as I explore the emerging field of narrative intelligence. At the center of this is one question. How malleable are the stories we live by? And what does it take to change one? What I learn will help shape the field in the foundational book that I'm writing about it. This is one hundred stories. Today I am speaking with Dr. Jonathan Adler, who's a professor of psychology at Olin College of Engineering. His research focuses on narrative identity, and the relationship between the stories people tell about their lives Jonathan is also a theater director and playwright produced off Broadway, and he works with Health Story, which is an nonprofit who works to support medical patients using the science of narrative. Jonathan, thank you so much for being here today. I'm so excited to learn from you. Jonathan Adler: Delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Paige Williams: wanna start off by saying what in the whole field of psychology, why narrative for you? Jonathan Adler: for me, narrative is the form that our identity takes. So where with all the other psychological phenomena that folks are interested in, I think a lot of it gets filtered through the story that we tell about our lives. and so it seems like many thing many psychological phenomena trace back to narrative. So that's why narrative for me. Paige Williams: And is there a personal story of transformation where you realized you were living one story and something happened and you shifted direction and you and you had a big aha moment? Jonathan Adler: No, not exactly. I've always been drawn to stories. so you know, I'm a lifelong theater kid, always been interested in stories. When I went to college, I thought I was gonna major in English or history, cause I was really interested in stories. And I took a course my first year called Representations of Mental Illness in Literature and Film. And it was sort of I took it 'cause it was a literature and film course, but it turned out I was really interested in the people. And then when I discovered that there was a field of narrative identity research, I thought like, my gosh, this is the thing? This is the thing. so that was how I find my way there. But it it was less a personal transformation of stories and just a lifelong investment in the power of stories. Paige Williams: what happens when someone tells a story or is on stage and is acting as another person, as a storyteller, and becoming that person in the narrative Jonathan Adler: Yeah. Paige Williams: identity associated with that, both for the actor Jonathan Adler: Yeah. Paige Williams: and for the transition that happens as a result of us, you're a playwright telling a story? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, I think theater is a a magical site of this kind of storytelling because there are three stories h operating simultaneously, right? The ensemble each is comprised of people with their own stories. There's the stories that are in the world of the play. And then there's also the stories in the lives of the audience members who have come to invite this new story into their own lives. And I love the complexity of those three layers going on there. So I've worked with actors with all Different approaches to the craft of acting, right? There's not just one way to be an actor, and some people it it is really about finding those connections between their character and their own lives. Some people it's really not about that. but all actors feel get impacted by the characters that they play. So it seems to me that the theater is an incredibly special place where everyone in the room has agreed that coming together over storytelling. Is a profoundly important thing to do. Paige Williams: what have you learned that has most shaped your own understanding of how identity works? Jonathan Adler: I think people are very invested in their stories, So one of the seminal books in my field, back from the eighties, is called The Stories We Live By, These are really important stories. They matter tremendously to us. And yet they are stories. We know from foundational research on memory that we are not particularly reliable reporters about the things that happened to us. and so we are always reconstructing our experiences, interpreting our present moment and weaving them into stories. And I think again, you can see the resonance with the theater side of me. There's something about identity as this story that matters a lot to people. that's what has always fascinated me about it. We imbue The stories of our lives with tremendous power, even though they are stories. and that means that us as individuals and as collectives can we are not only the main character in that story, right? We're also a narrator, and we're a narrator doing so in a community of co-narrators. So our identity stories matter tremendously to us, and we can intervene in them, we can change them, we can revise them. Paige Williams: When you were doing your PhD in this and looking at narrative identity, what surprised you the most from the research? Jonathan Adler: Yeah. in in grad school I got obsessed with the question about the relationship between our psychological well being and our narrative identity. And I've never been someone who's interested in the sort of highly controlled confines of running experiments where you're randomly assigning people to do things. I'm much more interested in the messiness of the real world. So for my dissertation project, which I ended up staying in grad school an extra year so that I could do a project of this magnitude, it was a longitudinal study. And it was looking at people over the course of Psychotherapy. I figured I was a clinical psychology student, so I was interested in psychotherapy. I was being trained as a therapist, but I also was interested in psychotherapy as a moment when people are quite explicitly working on their stories. So in that study, we enrolled people before they started therapy. So they said they reached out to a clinic and said, I'd like to see a therapist. We got their stories. We measured their well-being using standard questionnaires. And then in between every session, we got their stories and we measured their well-being used as standing questionnaires. And what that allowed us to do was we didn't randomly assign people to tell certain kinds of stories. We tracked naturalistically what was happening for people. All all adults, all in individual therapy, but in treatment for a huge variety of things from you know depression, anxiety, eating disorders, but also relationship challenges, work challenges, the whole spectrum. And with a huge variety of therapists doing cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic therapy and Narrative therapy, right, a huge range of things. And what that design allowed us to do was to look at the trajectory of people's stories alongside the trajectory of their well-being. And I was really curious about which would change first. but what we found was that first people's mental health improved over the course of therapy, that we have decades of research showing that therapy works, okay. Good. we found that people's stories did change over the course of therapy. And what we found was that actually their stories changed before their well-being improved. So I titled the the research paper Living Into the Story because it was as though people were sort of putting a new version of their story out there and then a week or two later they would live their way into it. Their mental health would catch up with it. so for me that was always that was a really delightful surprise. And one that that sticks with me. Paige Williams: That's awesome. I was just thinking about how how that's a little bit different than our our relationship to our story changes. Jonathan Adler: I don't think people were thinking self consciously in that story about their relationship to their story. Most people were in therapy to work on other things, right? They were thinking about their challenges with their boss or their, crumbling marriage or whatever it was that brought them to therapy. but the stories there running in the background and consolidating those changes along the way. Paige Williams: How much does the family that we're born into and culture affect narrative identity? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, fantastic question. So, in my field, my colleague Kate McLean has written really beautifully about what she calls the narrative ecology. We think about our stories as living in a world of stories, and some of those are broad cultural stories that existed long before us and will exist long after us. And some of those are stories in our families told about even about us as individuals before we're born. And so we don't come into the world with a blank slate, you can tell whatever story you need to tell. We come into a richly thriving narrative ecology. And in that narrative ecology, some stories are more powerful, right? Some soak up the proverbial oxygen, or occupy the root structure, or cast shadows on other stories, right? And so you have to find your way through the narrative ecology when you're telling your own story, and you do that partially as you emerge from the story. That you've inherited, right? So, as you know, we're born without words, let alone stories. So, being able to tell stories is something we learn to do. It's heavily scaffolded by our parents. I can talk a little bit more about that if you're interested. and it is in adolescence and early adulthood when we become the primary narrator of our own lives, and at that point, we've already learned a lot about how stories are supposed to unfold in our culture. and so of course, that's how we've learned to tell our. own stories. Doesn't mean people can't change them over time, but we have become narrators over the course of development. Paige Williams: love to take you up on your offer to talk about the narrative scaffolding Jonathan Adler: Sure. Paige Williams: we learn from our parents. Jonathan Adler: So this happens in a at a huge variety of levels, right? So at the broadest level, right, different cultures around the world have different ideas about what's supposed to show up in your story. Like how do you parse the flow of daily life into stories? And that's a largely cultural phenomenon. likewise there are expectations in different cultural contexts about what some researchers call the cultural concept of biography, meaning there are sort of milestone events that are supposed to show up in a life story and they show up in a certain order, right? usually we get married before we have children, for example. But that's not true for everyone. People's lives deviate from these default templates. But when they do, you have a narrative challenge. You have to tell that story. So we absorb that broadly from our culture. Within families, there's really excellent research by my colleague Robyn Fivush at Emory. university about the gendered ways in which we learn to become self-narrators. So Robyn's research program has shown over a variety of studies that parents, both mothers and fathers, when they're telling their little kids stories about their days, they tend to tell their little boys stories about what happened. So it's like, we went to the zoo, we saw the tigers. And they tell their little girls stories about how they felt about what happened. So remember you were scared of the tigers at the zoo. And so those two children, as they become narrators of their own lives, have gotten different input about what kinds of things are supposed to show up in their stories, and that repetition prepares them to be different kinds of narrators when when they ultimately become the narrators of their own lives. Paige Williams: Tell me about the work at the nonprofit in using narrative science for patients. Jonathan Adler: So the nonprofit is called Health Story Collaborative. It's it's based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. and my colleague Dr. Annie Brewster, who's a physician, founded it. And Annie founded the organization very much based in her own story. So Annie is a physician, she you know, ambitious, high achieving, and when she was on residency, she was diagnosed quite abruptly with multiple sclerosis. as she says, she had a two-year-old, she was going through a divorce, she was a medical resident, and she just it w it felt like an identity threat to all of a sudden be a chronic illness patient. She was an athlete. So she had always sort of been able to power through. And consequently, she didn't go back to get any treatment for her MS for five years. And during that time, she really experienced an identity shift. And that was what allowed her to go back and feel like she could sort of integrate her illness into her identity without it engulfing her. And because of the experience that she had as a patient, she realized that the The American medical system is just not set up to adequately attend to patient stories. And so Health Story Collaborative was founded to be a place where we could really work with patients to help them tell their story of illness and healing. Illness itself is often a biographical disruption, right? We don't practice stories about getting sick. And the American medical system can be so fragmenting. This doctor about this and that doctor about this, but nothing gets integrated and woven together. And Story, one of Story's fundamental mechanisms is to be tools of integration. And so we use at Health Story Collaborative, we use the science of narrative identity to support medical patients telling their stories of illness and healing. And in the last, I don't know, five years or so, we've actually had a lot of medical providers say, Actually, could I have some of that too? Right? That like being a medical provider. Can be just as fragmenting and demoralizing as being a patient. So we have increasingly also been working with medical providers to help them tell their stories of their career. And we teach a course every year about our work at Harvard Medical School, and that we the medical students get assigned a patient and they work through our model and collect patient stories, and we do a live patient storytelling event as sort of the capstone project for the course. Paige Williams: What happens for the patients as a result of this work? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, many of them talk about how profoundly integrating it is that they feel like they, when you go to the doctor, you tell your story over and over and over, but it's a very particular segment of your story. People want to know when did symptoms start? When were they the worst? But it's not about you, the person. And so the patient participants in our programs often talk about how seen they feel, how they were able to put the pieces together for themselves in a way that they hadn't. And All of our programs culminate with some kind of public sharing of the story because we really believe stories exist in communities, not just in our own minds. And it's really beneficial for both storyteller and story receiver to hear these stories. our signature program is called the Healing Story Sessions, where we work with people on their narrative, but then we we host events where they share these stories, and we've done those in places. as diverse as private living rooms for ten people to big public events at hospitals or at our local public radio station here in Boston for the you know very big audiences and we've done them on Zoom too. and again we hear that for the storytellers it's a really meaningful experience, but it's also a really meaningful experience for the audience. Paige Williams: When does an experience become a part of our narrative identity? Jonathan Adler: Whoa. So there's the sort of foundational theory in the field of narrative identity suggests that we don't actually tell stories about everything. right, the sort of grandfather of this field, Jerome Bruner is his name, he said that the things that we tell story about are deviations from the canonical, that was his phrase. So the canon, the canonical, those are the things that happen all the time. And it's not that we forget those things, but they sort of recede into the background. So like if I went to, you know, pour myself a glass of juice, I don't need to tell a story about where the cup was or where the juice was. Like those, I know those all the time. Time. But if I got poisoned by my juice, I'm gonna tell you that story, right? That's a deviation from the canonical. Or if I had like a really meaningful conversation with someone while drinking my juice, that's also gonna be a deviation. I'm gonna tell that story. So in the first part, the the things that stand out as sort of candidates for our narrative identity are these deviations from the canonical. And again, they can be objective deviations, like I got poisoned by my juice, or they can be subjective. Deviations like wow, that was a really meaningful conversation we had over juice. so then from those the stories that become part of our narrative identity are not static and stable over time. We are always using our repository of past memories to serve some psychological function in the present moment. And so the stories that become part of our narrative identity keep getting updated. I was part of a longitudinal study where people were asked to tell their full life. life story using a series of prompts at years one, five, and nine. And we found that a very small percentage of people actually told the same story as their high point, their low point, their turning point at all three years, even if it's not because they had a new high point, low point, or turning point, it's because that's what they were thinking of that day. So the content of our life stories is somewhat unstable. But we're calling on our memories to help us navigate the present. And so those are the things that show up in our narrative identity at the moment. Now, many people have these milestone events that are just gonna always be there, right? And that aren't gonna move. And that's also perfectly normal. but when we think about identity development, we're always thinking about the dance between stability and sort of like a rigid crystallization, right? Like we wanna be open to growing, even while we want some continuity to our sense of self. Paige Williams: Mm, I love that. Is telling a more agentic story about your life the same thing as actually having more agency? And how difference? Jonathan Adler: so agency is one of those themes that comes up a lot in the research. It's certainly come up a lot in my own research. We're really interested in it. And we we think about agency as the way you portray the main character in the story, you, right? And it's sort of on a continuum from you know, I'm I'm in the driver's seat of my life, I'm I'm proactively responding when things happen, all the way to the other end, like I I'm being batted around at the whims of external forces, right? And neither of Those is true, right? No one is completely in control of their life, no one is completely not in control of their life. So the agency in a story really is how you tell the story of the character of you. So We tend not to ask questions about capital T truth when it comes to stories. Stories are not a good way of accessing what objectively, historically happened. our memory systems in our brain are just not wired for accuracy. That's not what they're there for. and so I don't know how you would measure whether someone actually is high in agency or not. but I do know how you measure whether people tell a the story of themselves as high in agency or not. And what we know is that that story that you tell has a powerful impact on your well-being. so I'm much more interested in the subjective worlds that people live in as opposed to the objective world. Paige Williams: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. That's so interesting. Can we begin behaving differently before the story about ourselves changes? Or does lasting change usually require some change in the narrative first? Jonathan Adler: it's this dynamic and reciprocal relationship between us doing our lives and us narrating our lives. I I always say most of the time, most of the day, we're the main character. We're just doing our lives. But we have the ability to step out of being the main character and also be the narrator reflecting on our lives. And absolutely both both can be a source of change. Paige Williams: Happens when someone can step out of their own story and look at it from a higher view and narrate their story. Jonathan Adler: Yeah, it gives you some distance some productive distance, I think, usually, from the the goings on of every day. it gives you a moment to see yourself playing out your life and to ask the question, is this the way I wanna be doing this? so I I think that's often a useful pivot. it's not a sophisticated one, we can all do this. but it is often something that we get help from other people to do. We might ask, you know, trusted, close people in our lives to help us, like, does this make sense? This is who I think I'm becoming. and certainly I think the work of psychotherapy, whatever the the therapeutic approach is, is very much like let's step out of the flow of your life and look at it and analyze. it and and let you be intentional about the way you're living. Paige Williams: And then what do you think it requires for someone to enact a different structure or different story? Jonathan Adler: it requires a lot. change can be really hard. Paige Williams: Mm-hmm. Jonathan Adler: I think it requires first some intrinsic motivation, right? Like you have to want to do things differently. you have to have the capacity to do things differently, right? So you could be you could want to do things differently, but find yourself embedded in structures that don't allow you to do things differently. and there's really wonderful work by a feminist philosopher named Hilde Lindemann. She wrote, she has a book called Holding and Letting Go. And the idea is that for us to be able to maintain our identity over time, other people have to hold us in our stories. Right? I have to say to you, I'm a professor and I know something about narrative identity, and you have to say, you, you're a professor who knows about narrative identity, right? You're holding me in this story that I tell about myself. And that's the force for continuity over time. But What Lindemann says so beautifully is that we also have to be able to let go. We have to let people out of stories that are holding them. And I think people can relate to that, that they feel like they have grown up in families that tell stories about them as sort of that kind of kid. And at some point you might not be that kind of kid anymore. But if your family continues to tell the story of you as that kind of kid, it's really hard for you to not be that kind of kid, at least when you're with them. So stories exist not just in our heads, but in the interpersonal space. I've been writing recently about what I'm calling the ensemble of our lives, very much drawing on that term from theater. That the story is collectively produced by the ensemble, and we all have to sort of be telling the same story for it to coalesce. I think that our identity works like that too. Yes, we have an internalized story that we're telling ourselves, but if If no one in the ensemble of your life is willing to uphold that story, it makes it very hard to live that story out. So that ability to change requires something internal but also something external. Paige Williams: Right. Makes so much sense. You mentioned this a little bit. You've been exploring what happens when we lose authorial control over our story. And who gets Jonathan Adler: Yeah. Paige Williams: to define who we are when our own story conflicts with the stories told by our families, by our bodies, institutions, Jonathan Adler: Yeah, yeah. Paige Williams: and culture? Jonathan Adler: Exactly. Right. Right. Stories are not facts, right? So there's no arbiter of the facts. right. I'll I'll talk a little bit about that that work that I've been doing now. So yeah, I have a book that's coming out in May of 27, so next spring, from Penguin Random House. It's called Who We Might Become, Reimagining Our Life Stories and Our Understanding of Identity. And in that book, I have structured it around quite dramatic cases. Of what I'm calling identity theft, where someone really quite spectacularly loses authority over the story of their lives. Authority, right? Author. so for example, the book opens with a man whose family was put into the witness protection program. and there the federal marshals literally tell their family, here's your new story. If you tell your old story, your family could die. Right? That's that's why I start the book there. That's as extreme as it could possibly get. But I have folks who've been edited into reality TV villains and they can't go about in the world without people thinking they're awful, even though they know that it was just a a trick of the editing. I've talked with people whose bodies get transformed in an instant by illness or by accident, and they find themselves living in a body that doesn't align with their sense of self and they have to work that out. and then I have much more mundane stories of people who immigrate to a new Culture and find themselves uncertain of what new narrative ecology they've entered. People making life transitions, becoming parents, retiring, right? Like these normative life transitions that can also ask big identity questions. And I think it is the reason that I've structured the book around these cases is that I think the extreme helps shed light on things that are actually universal but can be hard to see in our daily lives. So these extreme examples let us see how we never had full authority over our life stories. They were always these shared products. And it's only in these extreme cases that we can really see what happens when your narrative authority completely is taken by someone else. But that helps us understand something about the role that we play with respect to our own stories and also the role that we play with respect to each other's stories. Paige Williams: Yeah, what happens to a person when their ensemble lets them off the hook? Jonathan Adler: Say more, what you mean laugh the hook? Paige Williams: if you're living your life and then say you get a divorce and now you and the people Jonathan Adler: yeah, exactly. Paige Williams: around the the supporting cast maybe doesn't like it, but someone does, how Jonathan Adler: Exactly. That can be Paige Williams: how does that change a person? Jonathan Adler: it dramatically, right? I like I said, it's really hard to live out your story if the people in your ensemble don't support it. so that can be that can be really challenging. and sometimes change experiences that internally feel like an evolution for the people in our lives can feel like a revolution. All right. And so they need some time to catch up with the the evolving story. And you know, I I like to assume people have best intentions and will catch up. but there can be those moments of narrative slippage where you feel like, I'm I'm living a new story and no one's caught up with me yet. that can be that can be really hard for people. Paige Williams: I just have to pause right here and say that might be the most important thing I've heard is my story may feel like an evolution when I'm going through a change, but to the people around me it may feel like a revolution. Jonathan Adler: Exactly. And so we need to give them time and space and scaffolding to go through the internal process that we had gone through. Again, when we think about ourselves as overly inflated main characters, we forget that the other people in our lives have stories that they want to tell about us too and that they do tell about us, and that partly maintaining their continuity is their story in relation to our story, right? So children of divorce, right? Each parent might have an internal story, but the kids need a story too that helps them make sense of this. And if they didn't see it coming, that's gonna feel like a revolution to them and they need a moment to to have their own stories catch up. Paige Williams: Well, thank you for writing this book. It's going to really important for us. I really appreciate it. I can't wait to read it. Jonathan Adler: Sure. Thank you. thanks. Paige Williams: so as you know, I'm exploring narrative intelligence as a capacity to recognize the stories that shape us, discern what's true, hold other possibilities, choose our relationship to the story, and then live from that choice. What do you think out of these capacities already have a home in narrative identity research and where If anywhere do you see something distinct? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, so the thing that's that stood out to me as distinct is the discern what's true. Right, stories are not good at discerning what's true. So you may mean true in a lowercase t authenticity. It feels like me. Like, yeah, I believe that that's my values, that's my morals, that's who I want to be. But it's not capital T true, right? It's not gravity. identity doesn't have mass and volume. so that's the piece that feels quite different. though stories can be very helpful at clarifying our values and our and the things that we really care about. And that those have their own sense of again, lowercase T truth. There's a classic book from the nineteen eighty two, I think it is, by Donald Spence called Historical Truth and Narrative Truth. Right? so there's a distinction there, right? Things that feel true in the story aren't necessarily historically true. so Paige Williams: Yeah. Jonathan Adler: that was the one that feels different to me, but many of the other pieces around figuring out what our story is and and what kind of character we wanna be and how we wanna live our lives in relation to that story, though those seem like like the the work on narrative identity does speak to it. Paige Williams: Yeah. And maybe what I was thinking around that is imagine you were raised Southern Baptists in Mississippi like I was. And then you realize, maybe the rest of the world isn't wrong. Jonathan Adler: Yeah, that there's a s there's a there was a story you were raised with around Paige Williams: Is discernment in the story, yeah. Jonathan Adler: right and wrong and you're gonna expand that definition of right and wrong or maybe in certain cases revise it. in this research on the narrative ecology There's a thread of work again by my colleague Kate McLean and her colleague Moin Syed that focuses on a phenomena they call master narratives. So these are in the narrative ecology, these are the really dominant storylines. And so many religious traditions have extremely strong master narratives. That that's one of the reasons people are drawn to religion. They offer you a narrative structure for living your life. And there are wonderful pieces of that. And they can be connected. They can be narrow. By definition, they are going to tell a certain kind of story. and so when we tell our own personal stories, we kinda only have two choices. We can either reproduce the master narratives that we have been inculcated into, or we can repudiate them. reproducing is easy, right? You don't even people are often not even aware that they're reproducing a a master narrative. And we have master narratives about gender, about race, about physical ability, right? Like there's all kinds of master narratives. but repudiating them takes courage. And we often in my field talk about the only way that master narratives change is when individual people are willing to tell their own personal stories in ways that repudiate the master narrative and say actually there are other ways of living, right? That that the narrative ecology needs seeds of alternative narratives before those master narratives themselves. can change. Paige Williams: my god, I love that so much. when you write a play? do you include this shift? Jonathan Adler: I think whenever you're interested in stories, you're engaging in the relationship between individual people stories and master narratives. and so, yes, absolutely, this has come up in my in my theater work. So for example, the the play that I had that was off Broadway a few years ago, I co-wrote it with my friend and colleague Jim Petosa, and it was a play, act one was about gay men navigating sex and relationships during the height of the AIDS crisis in the late 80s and early 90s. Paige Williams: Yeah. Jonathan Adler: And the second act was about gay men navigating sex and relationships in the height of the COVID pandemic. And there Paige Williams: interesting. Jonathan Adler: were so this is two dominant cultural storylines that have many resonances actually. The original impetus behind the project, which we were working on before COVID and then scrapped and started over once COVID started, was about reviving forgotten lessons from the AIDS pandemic. Paige Williams: Yeah. Jonathan Adler: so yeah, the characters in that play are navigating their own individual. lives against the backdrop of what it means to be a gay man during this moment in history and how the broader culture is talking about infectious disease. And again, we have some of the same, like Anthony Fauci shows up in both places. And there's some really interesting parallels between the two. And there's a lot of sadly lost insights from the 80s and 90s that could have served us really well in 2020 that we were hoping to resurface with Paige Williams: Hear, here. Yeah, Jonathan Adler: with the play. Paige Williams: that was in some huge master narratives. god. Jonathan Adler: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely right. The the notion again of what it meant to be a gay man in the eighties versus in twenty twenty, rev complete overhauling of that master narrative, at least Paige Williams: Right. Jonathan Adler: at the national level. Paige Williams: Right. Awesome. If we wanted to study narrative intelligence scientifically, what would we measure first, if anything? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, that's a good question. it seems to me that there's no question the first thing you have to do is what's called operationalize narrative intelligence, right? You have to make that a measurable variable. and there's all kinds of processes by which we operationalize and then Test new variables. And to me, the most important way of doing that, this is getting like really arcane, but there's a core concept in the history of psychology called the nomological net. Meaning, like all concepts exist in a web of other things that have been established and studied well. And the way you determine that a new thing is a thing is you show both convergent validity. So it it sounds an awful lot like X, Y, and Z, so I'm gonna show that measures of X, Y, and Z correlate with measures of the new thing, and also discriminant validity. It's very different from A, B, and C. So I'm going to show that measures of A, B, and C play out very differently than this measure of my new construct. So that's my thought: is that to introduce this new idea of narrative intelligence, you need to really carefully define what it is and what it's not, and figure out what that network of concepts that converge with it. it and concepts that are quite different from it to establish its place in the sort of again ecosystem of other related variables. Okay. Paige Williams: Okay, great, let's start right now. What is the definition of narrative identity? And then how would you define narrative intelligence? Jonathan Adler: Yeah, okay. So narrative identity we tend to define as the internalized evolving story of the self that weaves together the reconstructed past, the perceived present, and the imagined future. Okay. So internalized, first we tell it to ourselves before we tell it out, evolving, it's not a static thing, it's gonna change over time. It weaves together, it's it's an integrative tool, right? That's what it's there for. And it weaves together the reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Those modifiers are there to acknowledge the slipperiness of memory and the reconstructive nature of memory. Okay, so narrative intelligence to me has some overlap, but You have two terms. You've got narrative and intelligence. And both of those have long research lineages. So you'd want to think about how does the narrative one might be even more straightforward. Like what is a narrative? What counts? What does it mean to be interested in a narrative phenomenon as opposed to some other kind of phenomenon? And again, Bruner, sort of the grandfather of the field, distinguished narrative from what he very cumbersomely called the paradigmatic. which is like the domain of rational argument. Like that's the domain of science, of the law, like we're interested in capital T truth there. so he said like not everything's narrative, narrative is separate, there are these other things. Intelligence, it seems to me, is this is now well beyond my area of expertise, except to say that there's a, century plus long lineage of trying to define and operationalize and study what intelligence means. So that's not a simple question. and then you get the two put together, and and then the question: so I don't know yet, does narrative intelligence mean like I really understand how stories work, or I understand how my story works might be narrative identity intelligence. I understand how stories work in relationships. Right? So I can imagine if I if intelligence is a competence, I can imagine that that there are different narrative competencies that you might be interested in. Paige Williams: Same, more questions than any answers. Jonathan Adler: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Paige Williams: thank you so much for this. this has been awesome. Is there anything I haven't asked you that I should have asked you? Or that you're thinking, we should fill in this this little gap here. Jonathan Adler: No, I love that that's a great question to end on. No, I usually I'm like, I I have this theater side too, we could talk about that, but you already went you went right for it. So so no, there's nothing nothing that comes to my mind that we didn't get to talk about. Paige Williams: I love how all of your work integrates and it seems like its Jonathan Adler: Thank you. Paige Williams: mission is to be of service to people, whether it's on the stage or Jonathan Adler: Yes, thank you. That that is a fairly recent phenomenon. I've had these various threads of my work which I think of as a research thread, a teaching thread, a like clinical thread and a artistic thread. And I feel I do feel in the last few years that they have all sort of finally integrated and my hope is that this book is the repository for that integration. That like that was the force that that led me to the integration. so that's been incredible. Incredibly fulfilling and clarifying and feeling like, I know what all my whole career is about now. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that. My pleasure. Paige Williams: Yeah, it's really beautiful. Congratulations. Thanks for being here. I learned a lot in this conversation. Jonathan has spent his career studying narrative identity, and one thing he made very clear is that our stories matter enormously to us, even though they are stories. We reconstruct the past, we interpret the present, we imagine the future, and we weave those pieces together into a sense of who we are. But we don't do that alone. We inherit stories from our families and culture. We live inside what Jonathan called a narrative ecology. And the people around us become part of the ensemble that helps us hold our identity in place. One thing Jonathan said really landed for me. A change that feels like an evolution to you may feel like a revolution to the people who know you. And that helps explain why changing a story can be so difficult. We may be ready to become someone new before the people around us are ready to see us that way. And then Jonathan challenged this project in exactly the way that I hoped he would. If narrative intelligence is going to be a meaningful field of study, we have to be precise about what it is, what it isn't, what it overlaps with, and what it uniquely explains. He also challenged my language around discernment and truth. Stories can help us understand our values, our identity, and what feels deeply true to us. But a story is not necessarily a reliable record of what objectively happened. And that distinction matters. So I'm leaving this conversation with more clarity and more questions. Maybe narrative intelligence begins partly with understanding that we are living inside stories, that those stories are always being shaped in relationship with other people. And that we can participate consciously in what happens to them next. And the question I'm leaving with today is. What story about who you are are you ready to change? And who in your life may need some time to learn the new version of you? This is 100 Stories, the Narrative Intelligence Project. If this conversation gave you something to think about, subscribe and share it with someone who might want to be a part of this inquiry.