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Humans are storytellers.
I am a Narrative Inquiry researcher, meaning I collect people’s narratives and search for recurring themes in an effort to help people better understand their stories and the stories of others.
Narratives serve as our meaning-making framework, helping us to make sense of our experiences and tell others who we are. Each day we revise our characters, plot, and setting as we grow into who we aspire to be. This storytelling process engages us in what Bruner (1987) refers to as “life-making,” in which selective recall shapes our autobiography. In this cobbling of remembrances, we privilege some memories over others while constructing our timeline. Targeted moments are then assigned a value, based on who we believe ourselves to be.
For example, a weekend getaway punctuated by bungee jumping may feed Sarah’s conceptualization of herself as courageous and hence become an important tag on her timeline, while Zinnia, Sarah’s friend who also attended the weekend’s festivities, may remember the late-night fireside chat, representative of the value she places on forging connections with others.
If you listen carefully, the way people frame their stories is indicative of the values they believe themselves to embody, such as honor, kindness, truth, creativity, and spirituality. For example, your co-worker’s story of how she came up with the winning campaign slogan for the marketing team while mountain biking alongside the river’s treacherous trail, offers value labeled subplots of courage, confidence, innovation, and reflection.
But what happens when somebody steals your script, rewrites your plotlines, and then broadcasts out this new identity without your consent? That is exactly what happens in workplace bullying and other instances of trauma.
According to the research, a typical bullying attack cycle follows the following trajectory. First, the bully targets a top performer who is well-liked, creative, and an expert in her field. In an effort to regain the spotlight, the bully uses tactics of gossip, manipulation, gaslighting, and sabotage to tarnish the target’s reputation and ultimately push her out. The bully then withholds essential resources, excludes her from important meetings, and insists on her complete ostracisation (Duffy & Sperry, 2012; Namie, 2011). For victims, the experience is deeply traumatizing, often resulting in financial hardships, physical deterioration, and long-term emotional suffering such as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
These attacks are like paint splattered across the target’s autobiography. Suddenly, her well-worn plotlines of compassion, creativity, and success are covered up with splotches of falsehoods. The identity theft often causes what Janoff-Bulman (1992) refers to as “shattered assumptions,” charging the target to rethink her belief in a benevolent world, the kindness of people, and the rules of fair play.
Re-authoring offers victims of workplace bullying and other survivors of trauma an avenue to reclaim their autobiography. Re-authoring, according to Michael White (2011), one of the founders of narrative practice, recognizes “ongoing psychological pain in response to trauma in people’s lives might be considered a testimony to the significance of what it was that those individuals held precious that was violated through the experience of trauma. This can include people’s understandings about:
- Cherished purposes for one’s life
- Prized values and beliefs around acceptance, justice, and fairness
- Treasured aspirations, hopes, and dreams
- Moral visions about how things might be in the world
- Significant pledges, vows, and commitments about ways of being in life.” (p. 125)
To begin the re-authoring process, some victims of trauma find it useful to progress through the following invitations:
Invitation # 1: Identify and record the two to three values you hold most sacred and explain how they manifest. For example, you may write, “I value compassion, courage, and innovation. In my daily life, I want to show compassion to others, even when it is not reciprocated; act with courage, even when it would be easier to join the crowd; and pose innovative solutions to entrenched problems, even when I get push back for challenging the status quo” (Brown, 2018).
Invitation #2: Write out your testimony of the traumatic event from the perspective of an unbiased observer. This is an opportunity to externalize and depersonalize the trauma, separating yourself from the experience of bullying, harassment, assault, or other wounding events. Within this step, you view the trauma as something outside of yourself instead of the circumstance that defines who you are. In narrative practice, “the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem” (Denborough, 2014, p. 211).
Invitation #3: Reread your narrative and locate where you lived into your values despite the trauma. For example, in what moments did you maintain compassion for others despite their toxic or criminal behavior? How did your courage empower you to fight for the greater good despite the high cost to yourself? In what ways did your innovative ideas help to expose entrenched problems, even if you were ultimately fired for being a whistleblower? Asking these value questions invites people to “attach significance to some of these previously neglected events … (and) contradict the negative identity conclusions that are associated with what have been the more dominant stories …”(White, 2011, p.5).
Invitation # 4: Rewrite your story from Invitation #2, privileging the parts of your narrative where you lived into your values and maintained your authentic plotlines despite the abuse. This step is not about finding the silver lining, forgiving the perpetrators, nor forgetting the magnitude of what happened to you. In contrast, it is about refusing to allow another person to tell and own your story (Epston, 2016).
Now, with a warrior’s heart, reclaim your power, plotlines, and purpose as you walk back into yourself.
References
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead: Brave work, tough conversations, whole hearts. New York: Random House.
Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32.
Denborough, D. (2014). Retelling the stories of our lives: Everyday narrative therapy to draw inspiration and transform experience. New York: W. W. Norton.
Duffy, M., & Sperry, L. (2012). Mobbing: Causes, consequences, and solutions. New York: Oxford University Press.
Epston, D. (2016). Re-imagining narrative therapy: A history for the future. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 35(1), 79-87.
Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992). Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma. New York, NY, US: Free Pre
Namie, G., & Namie, R. (2011). The bully-free workplace: Stop jerks, weasels, and snakes from killing your organization. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
White, M. (2011). Narrative practice: Continuing the conversation (D. Denborough, Ed.). New York: Norton.
