Stress, Story and the Unspoken Connection

Stress, Story & The Unspoken Connection

Source: Ben White/Unsplash

What is really happening when we use our narratives to attempt to alleviate the stress of traumatic life experiences?

At the time when I had completed writing the story of my own healing from a life-threatening case of lupus, I met a man named Peter. Perhaps we were destined to connect – to follow a similar trajectory on the road to meaning-making in our own lives and in those of others.

When we first connected, Peter was only a few years into a diagnosis of Parkinson’s. He was 45 at the time of discovery – a discovery he much rather ignore than integrate into his life.

For an entire year, he remained sworn to secrecy with himself about the seemingly insurmountable reality that had crippled his world view. The narrative of what had just happened remained locked away, shared not even with his closest family members.

Meanwhile, his internal narrative played on, as he remained convinced that his diagnosis was the end of everything. He declared his career to be in a rapid decline and his hope of finding love to be eternally tarnished.

Three years later, he was beginning to share his story more broadly...still attempting to make sense of this vicious shift in his life’s plan.

University of Connecticut Psychologist, Crystal L. Park, has dedicated herself to creating a meaning-making methodology applicable to reducing stress in the face of traumatic circumstances. In her 2010 work, Making Sense of Meaning Literature: An Integrated View of Meaning Making and Its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life Events, she powerfully summarizes the “essential tenets” (drawn from the work of influential theorists*) for what occurs in the adaptation to life’s stressors and the calling to create meaning:

1. We all possess an orienting system (referred to as “global meaning”) that provide us with the cognitive framework to interpret our experiences.
2. When encountering situations that have the potential to stress or challenge the global meaning, we appraise situations and assign meaning to them.
3. The extent to which the appraised meaning is discrepant from the global meaning, determines the extent to which we experience distress.
4. The distress caused by the discrepancy initiates a meaning-making process.
5. Through meaning-making efforts, we attempt to reduce the discrepancy between appraised and global meaning to restore a sense of the world as meaningful and of their lives as worthwhile.

In other words, when things are not as we believe there should be, or do not occur as we believe they should, we experience distress...and through the creation of meaning, we can alleviate that distress.

What’s fascinating is that the stressor is both the catalyst to the discrepancy and the catalyst to the need to alleviate it. The cumulative effect, should we be willing to step forth and create meaning, is that we are destined to grow – to move forward in life, no matter how vastly different our life path looks.

The progression of his disease did eventually cost Peter his steady voice, and therefore his vocation as a motivational speaker. Though, as the drive to create meaning and continue contributing pushed him forth, he discovered an alternative way to share his voice: he became a serial author.

In addition to sharing his own story of the “gift” (meaning) behind his hit of Parkinson’s, Peter rallied a community of author together to share their stories in a newly founded book series.

Having been the one “gifted” the opportunity to help these authors shape their story, I witnessed the trajectory of global meaning—appraised meaning—discrepancy—meaning-making play out, again and again.

This is not a new theory. The main concept behind Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy is “that lack of meaning is the chief source of stress as well as anxiety, and logotherapy aids the patients to reach the meaning of life.” By the nature of our circumstances, we are called to create meaning.

An antidote to stress is the creation of meaning.

The question then becomes just how can we initiate the meaning-making process? One answer: our personal narratives, our stories, give us a readily available tool to replacing stress with meaning.

However, the journey to shaping the kind of narrative that spurs growth isn’t always an easy one. When the events and experiences of our lives do not initially make sense, it can be difficult to construct any kind of narrative through our logical mind.

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In my experience, I’ve found that both sides of the brain are required to form an effective meaning-making-narrative.

By definition, “Meaning connects things” (Park, 2010) and it is the right side of our brain that initiates the creative element and greater consciousness required to see connection. It is this side of our brain that connects to the greater whole and meaning in our lives. Neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor speaks about this brilliantly in her TED talk, “My Stroke of Insight”, when she says we are “connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemisphere.”

When we face severely traumatic or stressful events, our logical mind isn’t always able to connect things. There isn’t always a logical progression. Our right brain takes us where we need to go to narrow the discrepancy between appraised and global meaning.

Sometimes the process of meaning-making requires us to look at our experiences more abstractly – to step back from ourselves and take a greater world-view. We may write our narrative in third-person before translating into first, or we create of ourselves a character in a fiction to enable us to unfold the interconnectedness of the details of our story.

There is no singular way to meaning. We do with our story what feels right in the process of our own growth and progression. What matters most is that we begin to share our story in order to help ourselves shape the meaning that can be created through it.

Swearing to secrecy with ourselves will not rapidly induce meaning. Only letting the world in will.

The world around us will serve as a powerful reflector. And when we allow ourselves the opportunity to be still and lean into see what others are mirroring back to us about what is playing out within us, what we are intended to learn, and how we can grow, we will clearly see meaning, waiting for us to behold it.