Winner of the 2005 Helpsam.org Research Grant Award

The Therapeutic Road to The Good Life

Jonathan M. Adler & Dan P. McAdams, Ph.D.,

Northwestern University

What do we hope clients will take away from their experiences in therapy?  Different theoretical orientations provide different answers to this question, but all of them are in some way guided towards optimizing the lived experience of the client.  This could mean increasing daily functioning, solving concrete problems, improving happiness, gaining psychological insight, or having a more meaningful sense of one’s life.  What all of these specific outcomes have in common is that they can all be conceptualized as components of helping the client come to live the “good life.”

            The good life, as defined by King, is a construct that has recently emerged as the focus of theoretical and empirical research (King & Napa, 1998; King, Scollon, Ramsey & Williams, 2000; King, 2001; Bauer & McAdams, 2004; Bauer & McAdams, under review).  It has been conceptualized as consisting of two independent dimensions: subjective well-being (SWB) or “happiness,” and ego-development (ED), or psychological “complexity” (King & Napa, 1998).  It has likewise been operationalized with standard measures for assessing both constructs.  Each of these dimensions has a distinct and well-established legacy in the psychological literature, but when King and her colleagues (King & Napa, 1998) obtained lay ratings from student and community samples of what makes a life good, both samples pointed to a combination of high levels of these two independent dimensions.  This was reinforced by lay ratings of experimentally-manipulated profiles of individuals which again produced a conception of the good life as one both high in happiness and high in psychological maturity (King & Napa, 1998).

            Individuals living the good life are therefore special for having achieved a degree of psychological adjustment that is popularly assumed to be desirable.  Since the conception of the construct, narrative techniques have been used to assess the stories of these people living the good life (i.e., King et al., 2000; King, 2001; Bauer & McAdams, under review).  The study of narratives provides researchers with a rich level of detail that is not offered by traditional self-report measures, and allows for the investigation of the intentions and meanings that people use to make sense of the myriad events in their lives (Bruner, 1986; Conway & Plydell-Pearce, 2000; McAdams, 1995; Bauer & McAdams, under review).  With respect to the good life, narrative techniques have been specifically focused on people’s accounts of difficult life events such as: the parental transition on discovering one’s child has Down’s Syndrome (King et al, 2000), adjustment following divorce after long-term marriage (King & Raspin, in press), and after radically switching one’s career path or religious affiliation (Bauer & McAdams, 2004).  It is notable however, that perhaps the most clinically-relevant topic – people’s stories of psychological problems and psychotherapy – has been overlooked in this burgeoning literature.

            Broadly speaking, narrative theory has conceived of the life story as a unique level of personality, distinct from those of dispositional traits and characteristic motives, goals, and values (McAdams, 1995; McAdams, 1996).  This ever-evolving internalized story weaves together personally relevant life experiences from the reconstructed past, the perceived present, and the anticipated future, as individuals link events and thoughts in an effort to provide their lives unity and meaning.  Indeed, the story of one’s life has been formulated as a project that one works on, continuously revising and editing, though not necessarily through conscious effort (McAdams, 1996).  As such, psychotherapy may be conceived of as a unique experience – one in which the individual seeks assistance in the telling (or re-telling) of his or her story such that events or occurrences that do not fit with the on-going personal narrative, or which call into question the established story, may be incorporated (White & Epston, 1990).  Thus, psychotherapy can be understood as an unusual personal project in which the individual seeks help working on his or her story in an effort to help him or her move closer to living the good life.  White and Epston (1990) conclude, "when persons seek therapy, an acceptable outcome would be the identification or generation of alternative stories that enable them to perform new meanings, bringing with them desired possibilities"(p. 15).

What stories to people living the good life tell about their experiences in therapy – and why should it matter?  The proposed study seeks to answer these questions by directly addressing the therapeutic narratives of people living the good life and by contrasting them to those told by other individuals.  In this manner, we hope to illustrate the exemplary story “successful” clients tell of their therapy and thereby devise a narrative measure of psychotherapy outcome.

The proposed study seeks to expand upon the previous narrative investigations of the good life detailed above by focusing on individuals’ experiences in psychotherapy.  As explained above, from a narrative perspective, psychotherapy is distinctive in the life, for it may be the only time when one seeks assistance in writing or re-writing one’s story.  In the relatively new narrative therapies, this “re-storying” is the explicit goal of the process.  Yet, as Angus & McLeod (2004) explain, even established, mainstream psychotherapeutic ordinations such as cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic therapies can be understood in these narrative terms.  Indeed, as research on psychotherapy proliferates and increasingly diversifies, “narrative [can serve as] a non-trivial point of convergence for the therapy field” (Angus & McLeod, 2004, p. 373).  Thus, the unique psychotherapeutic process is ripe for narrative investigation and, as in the previous study of difficult life events and life transitions, the stories told by people living the good life can prove especially instructive.

In the proposed study we will collect narratives of psychotherapy from a diverse group of adults, including those living the good life.  We will then undertake an exploratory content analysis to determine what narrative themes characterize the stories of people living the good life.  If the good life is a valued way of living in contemporary American society, then the psychotherapeutic narratives of those living the good life represent a privileged way of reconstructing the psychotherapy experience.  By comparing these stories to those told by the rest of the sample, we hope to produce a narrative measure of psychotherapy outcome that reflects the way we hope clients will make sense of their experiences in therapy.

            Seventy-five adult from the greater Chicago community who have been in psychotherapy within the past five years, but who are not currently in psychotherapy, have been recruited for participation.  These participants have completed a range of self-report questionnaire measures of SWB, a measure of ED, and written a narrative of their experience in psychotherapy, as well as answering several informational questions about their therapy.

A group of five coders will conduct an exploratory content analysis on these narratives in an attempt to uncover unique narrative patterns that differentiate those individuals living the good life (high in SWB and ED) from the rest of the sample.  Identifying the particular narrative styles which discriminate people in this most desirable group from their peers will be the first step in developing an empirically-informed narrative measure of psychotherapy outcome.  Such a measure will allow for a consideration of psychotherapy outcome that accommodates a distinct level of personality – that of narrative identity.  Furthermore, because this measure is focused on individual’s lay conceptions of their psychological problems and experiences in treatment, it will have high external validity in its ability to inform strategies aimed at modifying maladaptive ways of thinking about these issues as they naturally occur.  As such, the proposed study promises to let the participants’ experiences guide the emerging theory.  Unlike a traditional quantitative hypothesis-testing study, this proposed study operates more in the sphere of theory building, and thus the anticipated findings will be based on the experiences of the participants in the sample.

References

Angus, L. E. & McLeod, J. (2004). Toward an integrative framework for understanding the role of narrative in the psychotherapy process. In L. E. Angus, J. McLeod (Eds.), The Handbook of Narrative and Psychotherapy: Practice, Theory, and Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Bauer, J. J. McAdams, D. P. (2004). Personal growth in adults' stories of life transitions. Journal of Personality, 72(3), 573-602.

Bauer, J. J. & McAdams, D. P. (under review). Interpreting the Good Life: How mature, happy people frame their autobiographical memories. 1-38.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Conway, M. A. & Plydell-Pierce, C.W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261-288.

King, L. A. (2001). The hard road to the Good Life: The Happy, Mature Person. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 41(1), 51-72.

King, L. A. & Raspin, C. (in press). Lost and found possible selves: subjective well-being and ego development in divorced women. 1-21.

King, L. A., Scollon, C. K., Ramsey, C., & Williams, T. (2000). Stories of life transition: subjective well-being and ego development in parents of children with Down Syndrome. Journal of Research in Personality, 34, 509-536.

King, L. A. & Napa, C. K. (1998). What Makes A Life Good? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 156-165.

McAdams, D. P. (1995). What do we know when we know a person? Journal of Personality, 63, 365-396.

McAdams, D. P. (1996). Personality, modernity, and the storied self: a contemporary framework for studying persons. Psychological Inquiry, 7(4), 295-321.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990).  Narrative means to therapeutic ends.  New York: Norton.