Narrating the Dark Night of the Soul: The Psychosocial Study of Low Point Stories

Psychologists have long studied people's responses to adverse life events. Certain ways of telling a story of suffering, favored by a person's culture, may be more adaptive than others. The present study explores the culturally sanctioned script for how to tell the story of the lowest point in one's life.

The present study introduces the Psycho-Social Script for Suffering (PSSS), a four-step narrative sequence through which a story of suffering features (1) situational context, (2) emotional expression, (3) closure, and (4) positive meaning. From a sample of 158 Black and white American midlife adults interviewed at three time points over 9 years, the authors coded 426 low point stories for the four narrative themes and analyzed their relationship to self-report measures.

Narrating low point stories with higher levels of PSSS was positively associated with measures of well-being, maturity, and adaptive personality traits. Moreover, with a significant main effect of time, PSSS increased over the 9 years as indicative of a developmental sequence in midlife.

The longitudinal analysis and rigorous mixed-methods approach offer novel insights into the potential benefits of narrating suffering in a way that resonates with culturally accepted discursive norms.