Stocksy

The two kinds of stories we tell about ourselves

ideas.ted.com | 12 January 2017

[excerpts]

...our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent — and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning....

The opposite of a redemptive story is what McAdams calls a “contamination story,”