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Family Dynamics
Why Family Storytelling Is Good for Us
Studies show the importance of family stories, both positive and challenging.
Posted February 23, 2024 Reviewed by Ray Parker
Key points
- Telling family stories of vulnerability and hardship facilitates well-being.
- Research reveals active listening is crucial for sharing harrowing stories.
- Families that share stories of challenging times have adolescents who show lower depression and anxiety.
- Interventions like Narrative Connections can help people tell and share challenging stories.
Next week, my colleague, Jody Koenig Kellas, and I will be at RootsTech, a conference aimed at exploring the role of family stories, family history, and family genealogy in all aspects of family life. We will be speaking at one of the impact forums on family storytelling.
We know from much research, including research from The Family Narratives Lab that I direct, that young people who know more about their family stories and history fare better in the world on virtually any measure examined—self-esteem, a sense of well-being, a sense of meaning and purpose in life. I've discussed how and why family stories matter so much.
But what about when the stories are challenging and express vulnerability and anxiety?
Stories of personal hardship, vulnerability, trauma, and challenges are often called "untellable tales." People are anxious about divulging these stories because they fear humiliation or blame. And people don't want to hear them because they are unsure how to respond.
Yet research, mostly in the health sciences, has repeatedly shown that telling our stories and revealing our fears helps us face our challenges. Individuals who journal about their medical and therapeutic journeys show better outcomes. So, there is something very powerful about being able to narrate even our most fearful experiences.
Sharing these stories with our family members is also beneficial, whether they be stories of life-threatening experiences or simple everyday struggles. Families that share stories of challenging experiences have adolescents who show lower depression, lower anxiety, and higher self-esteem.
However, sharing challenging stories with others requires attentive listeners who actively try to understand and witness the storytellers' experience. This kind of listening is hard because we listen to stories with all kinds of expectations already in place, expectations about what should happen and how people should react and feel in certain situations.
These expectations color how we react to storytellers, responding in ways that may not reflect the storyteller's experience. Really, listening and hearing require work.
Kellas is developing a storytelling intervention that incorporates active listening. Narrative Connections is a series of workshops that help people tell stories of vulnerability to and with others and help people learn how to listen to these kinds of stories in ways that build connections. This kind of active listening, or witnessing, includes listening for how experiences are expressed in language, evoked images, and personal resonance.
In a pilot study, Koenig-Kellas focused on people struggling with the everyday challenges of parenting. Obviously, all parents sometimes struggle with work-family balance issues, with balancing time with children and time with partners or other adults, discipline and boundary settings, and so on. Yet, these struggles often occur against a backdrop of expectations of "perfect" parenting.
Parents feel that they are not "good enough," that they are not living up to what they "should" be doing as parents. How do we help parents understand their personal struggles, reframe and refocus their parenting behaviors, and create reasonable expectations of themselves that will lead to more sensitive and positive parenting?
Throughout three workshops, parents learn how to express stories of parenting challenges and how to listen to others' stories. Follow-up interviews immediately and three weeks later indicate that even this brief intervention had positive effects. Parents felt that they understood themselves and others better as parents, that they had gained self-awareness, and were able to reframe some of their negative parenting experiences in ways they could learn from for the future.
They also experienced renewed curiosity about the parenting experiences of others and how their own parenting experiences might benefit from ongoing communication with other parents.
Narrative Connections is a reasonably simple and effective intervention to help people tell and share their stories. Findings that even such brief interventions can have such positive effects underscore the power of storytelling within and about families. It also highlights that we all have challenges that make us feel vulnerable and that telling these stories is also important.
These kinds of interventions can be expanded to include multiple kinds of family stories, multiple kinds of traumas, and challenges. Certainly, we want to share family stories of triumph and accomplishment, but lives are complicated, and not all experiences are positive. Sharing stories of challenges, vulnerability, and difficulties is also important.
Sharing these stories within our families builds resilience; sharing these stories with other families builds connections. Sharing these kinds of stories connects us to a deep sense of human frailty that, ironically, makes us stronger.
References
Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain. Guilford Publications.
Kellas, J. K., Morgan, T., Taladay, C., Minton, M., Forte, J., & Husmann, E. (2020). Narrative connection: Applying CNSM theory’s translational storytelling heuristic. Journal of Family Communication, 20(4), 360-376.
