“Tell me about it” – the motive for writing this book is in my curiosity to better understand how sharing experiences with others helps to deal with them, emotionally, intellectually, and practically. Emotions provide a fine system of signals to others and oneself. They call for turning our attention to something that we need to deal with. Often it is not quite clear why a situation makes us feel uneasy or arouses a specific emotion. Often we notice them only later and wonder what they are about. Strong emotional experiences as well as unclear emotional experiences motivate us to share them with others – to share experiences we narrate.
Narrating is a frequent everyday activity. A specialized professional context has emerged in the late nineteenth century which specialized in this activity, psychotherapy. My clinical background is in psychoanalysis. I wished to understand some of the mechanisms by which psychoanalytic and related psychotherapies work. Psychoanalysis has little theorizing and little research to offer that actually studies the moment-to-moment mechanisms of change. Studying the uses of narratives is one possible access to the therapeutic processes.
In psychology, emotions are conceptualized predominantly from evolutionary, biological, and cognitive perspectives. In this book, I argue that emotions are communications, to others and to ourselves. When reacting emotionally, we automatically evaluate something that happens. The evaluation is fast and often informed by more than what we consciously know about ourselves. Therefore, understanding emotions is often not an easy task. Understanding emotions requires a narrative format. It allows for communicating and making sense of them. Most psychological emotion theories ignore this central means for understanding emotions. They also tend to ignore that one of the most frequent elicitors of emotions are not snakes and bears, but other people and the stories they tell. Emotions are a social, communicative phenomenon, and they are processed in a social process.
We have the power to transform emotions by narrating them. We transform emotions by gaining a fuller access to our past selves as well as by integrating others’ reactions and co-narrations into our stories. Therefore, integrating diverse narrative perspectives of self and others, present, past, and hypothetical is central for coping with experiences. Coping research is only beginning to study this black box called social support.
Vygotsky's assumption of the social genesis of higher mental functions is also valid for narrative competence. In the final part of this book, I intend to push the borders of the research of Robyn Fivush, Elaine Reese, and Catherine Haden further by exploring specifically how parents help children, and how therapists help patients to learn how to cope better with emotions by narrating them in a more complete and consistent way.
The book reflects the ideas on which I have been working for the past fifteen years. Some chapters use material and elaborate ideas, which I have used in earlier publications. More specifically, Chapters 4 and 6 elaborate ideas first developed in Habermas (Reference Habermas2006); Chapter 5 elaborates findings from Habermas and Diel (Reference Habermas and Diel2010); Chapter 8 develops a taxonomy I first presented in Habermas (Reference Habermas, Köber, McLean and Syed2015); Chapter 10 uses some ideas from Habermas and Berger (Reference Habermas and Berger2011); Chapter 11 contains material also used in Graneist and Habermas (Reference Graneist and Habermas2017); and Chapter 12 elaborates ideas first sketched in Habermas (Reference Habermas2013) and Habermas and Döll-Hentschker (Reference Habermas and Döll-Hentschker2017).
