Story-Making is How We Define our Values for Ourselves and With Others
Story-Making is How We Define our Values for Ourselves and With Others
Part two of exploring Relational-ACT, a model of human psychology.
This is the second of a three-part series looking into the essential characteristics of what I call Relational-ACT, comprised of Values, Narrative, and Behavior. This forms the cornerstone of a broader psychological and therapeutic model that I’ve developed over the course of the last twenty years, which I will get into in the future. Here, we’ll start with the foundation, and all such posts will be found in their own sub-section of the substack.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), created by Steven Hayes, has six central components, as often taught, with the nature of the self used to bring attention to what we center our attention on. ACT breaks down this self-perspective as either being primarily concerning Process or Context, where Process perpetuates the notion of a singular self, or “I,” that careens off of and interacts with a separate environment, and Context, where the self is more like a kaleidoscope, constrained by what is present, but still capable of taking multiple forms depending on context. This “self in context” is where we derive our verbiage concerning wearing different “hats” when behaving differently at work or with family, or separating work from personal life, and centrally acknowledges the reality of a self that is firmly embedded in an intersectional existence rather than being separate from it.
ACT takes its cues from Behaviorism, though the greater emphasis is placed on Relational Frame Theory (RFT). Generally, RFT is a form of applied behavioral analysis focused on language and dialogue, that brings attention to how we create relationships through language between perceived stimuli and responses. These “relational frames” are constantly being re-evaluated through the analysis of responses patterns from others and from our own internal dialogue, all of whom are also embedded in broader socio-cultural influences.
While there is certainly a level at which this can get extraordinarily complicated, the core idea is simply that the perspective-taking ability we all have is primarily funneled through language, which is itself relationally constrained by the social connections we’re embedded within. Consider that how you talk and even the words you use will shift depending on if you enter a hospital, bank, or school, and the accompanying sense of self with varying levels of confidence will also shift. Further, if one or another of those social situations tends to trigger an emotional response like anxiety, we don’t even need to actually be physically present there, we can internally create a response pattern by describing the environment and creating stories associated with them. For example, we all know that we can get angry at people without them actually even being near us. The unfortunate core of social media is almost entirely based on this.
What We See Is All There Is
These relational frames are the threads tying data points together that give us what we call experience. Perspective-taking is the active process of creating stories (e.g. experiences) or Narratives that provide us a sense of continuity for our lives. Relational-ACT, beginning with Values, sees perspective-taking as a relationship model for cognition, providing the structure for our emotions to be triggered and therefore start the cascade of assessment that we then formalize as beliefs, intentions, and justifications for Behavior. It is in the identification of Values and the subsequent critical appraisal and criticism of our Narratives that leads to changes in our Behavior.
Narrative is, particularly these days, too often used as a means of sneaking in a belief of relativism as it concerns truth. The focus here is simply on how we all, as human beings, construct our experiences and navigate the contours of our beliefs in all their variation. At the risk of adding yet another word, Relational-ACT operates, as does ACT itself, on the notion of Functional Contextualism where it concerns truth claims. When a belief is stated, the question is not whether it belongs in some metaphysical realm of absolute claims, but what is the purpose of it and within what varied context is the claim of the belief being made? Without going too deep into the philosophical weeds (which will be done in another post), this is not relativism, and truth very much still matters, though admittedly it is not in the form of religious absolutist claims.
Consider Narratives then as the process through which we organize reality into individual experience, embedded as we are in the nearly infinite variables of life as we walk through it. They organize our potential responses, justify the behavior we do express, and direct the attention of others to the self-image we've constructed. This latter is particularly important when it comes to social Identities, where Values are carefully selected, defined, and conflated with specific behavior to show solidarity.
Narratives are the Social Structures of Consciousness
Reality contains too much information in even the most simple of experiences for us to ever be consciously aware of it all. While the analogy can only be taken so far, consider life experience like a computer, with programs running in the background, but you're only using one at a time. Perhaps, like me, you're switching between multiple programs all the time (and don’t get me started on how many tabs I have open on a browser), but the reality is there's only one at a time you're consciously using. Also, depending on what is being worked on, not all the programs running in the background will be accessed equally.
That background processing is similar to the experience of our everyday lives. We are inundated by information in the form of social, familial, personal, emotional and ideological programs (or memes). We must be selective in the building of our conscious experience.
A major consequence of this narrowed vision that we experience as conscious life is a false sense of our comprehension. Simply because we are not currently aware of those programs running and all the information they contain doesn't mean they've stopped or that they aren't making connections with one another. Our mind/brain's are, in part, associational devices, connecting disparate pieces of information with others. It's why we can remember new things when recalling older experiences. It's why multiple people can experience the same traumatic event and have different memories of what happened and different reactions. It's why our emotions can connect us with so many experiences.
Precisely because our brains work this way, creating Narratives out of disparate pieces of information, is why flexibility is key to mental and relational health. Narratives provides the structure for determining what it is we will pay attention to, in order to direct our actions to serve those things that matter. We serve those things, those Values, with behavior that signals to others that we share a similar way of viewing the world. Functionally speaking, our individual Narratives provide the structure and impetus to connect with broader ones, like chapters in a novel, that we are then writing together in groups.
We have an innate desire to belong, but equally so we want to maintain a sense of self. Thus our identities serve the two-fold purpose of identifying for others that we are a part of something larger than ourselves even as we do so from a centralized notion of "This is me."
One way of looking at this is seeing our relationship with identity as that of an old-style drawing compass. The circle we draw is the social group our identity connects us with, even as the center point determines the size of that circle. Anything within the circle we will feel connected to, whereas everything outside it becomes "other." This is why ostracization is so often metaphorically described as being ‘cast out.’ The person is not only being told they don’t belong in the group, but that the way they view the world and their place in it is no longer valid. One caveat on the compass, as it overly simplify what is going on, in the sense of leading people to think we only have a single identity at a time, but this is not true. No single identity can ever encompass the whole of any one of us.
Relational-ACT and Our Narratives
Our personal stories grow out of what is important to us, guiding our responses to life and providing a grounding for our interactions. We never cease being in relationship, even as the details of those many and varied connections ebb and flow in importance based on the context our self-images are constantly shaping.
Relational-ACT recognizes the power of Narrative as it leaps forward from our Values to provide the structure for our identities and guides us in developing behavior to interact with ourselves and others. By exploring our stories, we can peer back through the windows of our perspective, see what we missed, and find the space to grow.
Part one:
