132 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
merous studies have shown that deriving 
positive meanings from negative events is 
associated with life satisfaction and indica -
tors of emotional well-being (Adler et al., 
2015; Weston, Cox, Condon, & Jackson, 
2016). For example, King and Hicks (2007) 
demonstrated that attaining a sense of clo -
sure regarding negative experiences from 
the past and/or lost possible selves predicts 
self- reported well-being. Dumas, Lawford, 
Tieu, and Pratt (2009) showed that young 
adults who narrated low-point events in re -
demptive terms, providing coherent positive 
resolutions to life problems, reported more 
positive parenting experiences at age 17 and 
showed higher levels of identity achievement 
and emotional adjustment at age 26. In a 
study of recovering alcoholics, Dunlop and 
Tracy (2013) found that the ability to create 
a redemptive narrative about alcohol addic -
tion was associated with maintaining sobri -
ety. Examining narrative accounts of 9/11 
written 2 months after the terrorist attacks, 
Adler and Poulin (2009) found that Ameri -
cans who derived redemptive meaning from 
the attacks, and who indicated greater levels 
of psychological closure in their accounts, 
showed higher levels of psychological well-
being.
Adler (2012; Adler et al., 2008) has ar -
gued that psychotherapy provides a prime 
challenge for life storytelling. Therapists 
work with clients to restory their lives, often 
aiming to find more positive and growth- 
affirming ways to narrate and understand 
emotionally negative events. In one set of 
studies, Adler has asked former psycho -
therapy patients to tell the story of their 
therapy experiences. Those former patients 
who currently reported higher levels of psy -
chological well-being and ego development 
tended to narrate heroic stories of therapy 
wherein they bravely battled their symptoms 
and problems, and emerged victorious in the 
end. In these stories, personal agency tended 
to trump the well-  meaning efforts of the 
therapist. Moreover, agency emerged as the 
key narrative theme in a prospective study of 
psychotherapy patients, who provided brief 
narrative accounts of how therapy was de -
veloping before each session transpired, over 
the course of at least 12 therapy sessions 
(Adler, 2012). As coded in the succession 
of narrative accounts, increases in personal agency preceded and predicted improve -
ment in therapy. As psychotherapy patients 
told stories that increasingly emphasized 
their ability to control their world and make 
self- determined decisions, they showed cor -
responding decreases in independently as -
sessed symptoms and increases in mental 
health.
Finding positive meaning in negative 
events is the central theme that runs through 
McAdams’s (2013) conception of the re -
demptive self . In a series of well-  replicated 
nomothetic and idiographic studies conduct -
ed over the past 20 years, McAdams and col -
leagues have shown that midlife American 
adults who score especially high on measures 
of mental health and generativity —suggest -
ing a strong commitment to promoting the 
well-being of future generations and improv -
ing the world in which they live—tend to 
see their own lives as narratives of redemp -
tion (Jones & McAdams, 2013; McAdams, 
2013; McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & 
Mansfield, 1997; McAdams & Guo, 2015; 
also see Walker & Frimer, 2007).
Compared to their less generative Ameri -
can counterparts, highly generative adults 
tend to construct life stories that feature 
redemption sequences, in which the pro -
tagonist is delivered from suffering to an 
enhanced status or state. In addition, highly 
generative American adults are more likely 
than their less generative peers to construct 
life stories in which the protagonist (1) en -
joys a special advantage or blessing early in 
life, (2) expresses sensitivity to the suffering 
of others or societal injustice as a child, (3) 
establishes a clear and strong value system in 
adolescence that remains a source of unwav -
ering conviction throughout the adult years, 
and (4) looks to achieve goals to benefit 
society in the future. Taken together, these 
five themes—  early advantage, sensitivity to 
suffering of others, moral steadfastness, re -
demption sequences, and prosocial goals— 
comprise a general script or narrative proto -
type that many highly generative American 
adults employ to make sense of their own 
lives (McAdams & Guo, 2015). The same 
narrative prototype has shown positive as -
sociations with the dispositional traits of 
conscientiousness, agreeableness, and ex -
traversion, and negative associations with 
neuroticism (Guo, Klevan, & McAdams, 