 5. Narrative Identity and the Life Story 131
Narrating Suffering, Recovery, and Growth
Emotionally positive and emotionally nega -
tive events in life offer very different narra -
tive challenges (Berntsen, Rubin, & Siegler, 
2011). People may enjoy savoring positive 
events in life and accentuating the differenc -
es among them, as if to imply that happiness 
in life may come in many different flavors 
(Tomkins, 1979). But emotionally negative 
events demand more work. Experiences of 
failure, loss, sadness, fear, shame, and guilt 
beg for an explanation (Pals, 2006). They 
challenge the storyteller to explain why the 
event happened and what it says about the 
protagonist of the story and the protagonist’s 
world. How people narrate negative events 
tells as much as anything else about narra -
tive identity, revealing recurrent themes and 
conflicts and expressing characteristic styles 
of autobiographical reasoning.
There are many ways to narrate nega -
tive events (McAdams & Jones, 2017; Park, 
2010). Perhaps the most common response is 
to discount the event in some way. The most 
extreme examples of discounting fall under 
the rubrics of repression, denial, and dis -
sociation. Some stores are so bad that they 
simply cannot be told—  cannot be told to 
others and, in some cases, cannot really be 
told to the self. Freeman (2011) argues that 
some traumatic and especially shameful ex -
periences in life cannot be incorporated into 
narrative identity, because the narrator (and 
perhaps the narrator’s audience as well) lacks 
the world assumptions, cognitive constructs, 
or experiential categories to make the story 
make sense. Bonanno (2004) has shown 
that many people experience surprisingly 
little angst and turmoil when stricken with 
harsh misfortunes in life. People often show 
resilience  in the face of adversity, Bonanno 
maintains. Rather than ruminate over the 
bad things that happen in their lives, they 
put it all behind them and move forward.
In many cases, however, people cannot or 
choose not to discount negative life events. 
Instead, they try to make meaning out of 
the suffering they are currently experienc -
ing, or experienced once upon a time. What 
is the best way to make narrative meaning 
out of suffering? Research suggests that peo -
ple who emerge strengthened or sustained 
from negative life experiences often engage in a two-step process of meaning making 
(King & Hicks, 2007; Lilgendahl & McAd -
ams, 2011; Pals, 2006). In the first step, the 
person explores the negative experience in 
depth, thinking long and hard about what 
the experience feels or felt like, how it came 
to be, what it may lead to, and what role the 
negative event might play in his or her over -
all understanding of the self. In the second 
step, the person articulates and commits the 
self to a positive resolution of the event.
A number of studies of life stories show 
that exploring negative events in detail is 
associated with psychological maturity. For 
example, King and her colleagues conducted 
a series of intriguing studies wherein they 
ask people who have faced daunting life 
challenges (e.g., mothers of disabled chil -
dren, women whose long-term marriages 
have ended in divorce, lesbians and gays who 
have come to terms with their sexuality) to 
tell stories about “what might have been” 
had their lives followed a more expected or 
conventional path (King & Hicks, 2007). 
Those narrators who are able to articulate 
detailed and thoughtful accounts of loss and 
struggle in their lives tend to score higher 
on independent indices of psychological 
maturity, such as Loevinger’s (1976) metric 
of ego development. In addition, higher lev -
els of exploratory processing and narrative 
meaning making are associated with gains 
in maturity in the near term. For example, 
King and Smith (2004) found that the ex -
tent to which gay and lesbian individuals ex -
plored what might have been had their lives 
followed a more conventional (heterosexual) 
course predicted higher levels of ego devel -
opment at the time of their life-  narrative 
accounts and increases in ego development 
2 years later. Bauer and McAdams (2010) 
found that self-  exploration in narrative ac -
counts of life goals predicted increases in 
ego development over 3 years in a sample of 
college students.
If the first step in making narrative sense 
of negative events is exploring and elaborat -
ing on their nature and impact, the second 
involves constructing a positive resolution. 
When people are able to derive positive or 
redemptive meanings from negative life 
events, they may feel that they have fully 
worked through the event and attained a 
sense of narrative closure. Accordingly, nu -