Shankar Vedantam

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Jonathan Adler has found that the way we tell stories changes the way we feel about our lives.

He says that when we start stories from a place of success and well-being and end the tale with disaster and tragedy, we are telling what he calls a contamination story.

Things started out great and then turned bad.

On the other hand, when we tell stories that start out with difficulty and challenge but end in a positive place, these redemption stories are often associated with better well-being.

Jonathan, we heard from a listener who said that the pressure to tell redemption stories can sometimes feel unfair.

Here's Kristen.

So Jonathan, you were talking a moment ago about how in some ways we have this master narrative that we're supposed to come up with a redemption story.

And I feel I can very much hear that in the way Kristen is telling the story of the many challenges she has encountered in her life.

Yeah, wow.

Kristen, I am so sorry to hear about this.

I don't know how listeners are feeling, but my body feels different just hearing what Kristen has been through.

So I'm really grateful for sharing this hard story.

I think it's really important to remember that negative experiences are a part of everyone's life.

And if we just ignore them, we miss out on an invitation to grow from them.

But...

We've already talked about master narratives and looked at redemption as one example of an American master narrative.

And I think there's a real rush to redemption in our culture where we want to get through the negative as quickly as possible, put a nice redemptive bow on it and move on.

But negative experiences can also force us out of the story that we've sort of gotten used to living.