What do we mean by narrative?

By narrative we simply mean the ideas we form in our mind about something.

Narrative does not have to flow like a conversation to be considered narrative. It’s simple one way of seeing something, a point of view.

Narratives are subjective by default. They are ways of seeing things that form by making selections about what to consider, what’s important, and how to evaluate things. We sometimes use the metaphor of branches that connect an array of points on a grid. The points can be connected any ways. Each method of connecting them in one narrative out of an infinite set of options.

For example, how do I think about myself? Do I focus on my successes and positive qualities, or my failures? How do I judge my failures? Do I see them as a natural part of life or a character defect? Likewise, how do I judge my successes? Do I see them as insignificant and behind my peers, or ahead of them? Which peers do I use to compare myself? The sum of thoughts that are generated is narrative, specifically, a “key narrative” that concerns the all familiar topic of me.

Narratives are mental formations, not sensations. They are thoughts. Our experience of the world via our senses are different from our thoughts. For example, our experience of a sound is a sensation. It’s our thinking that adds to that sensation. In this case, it could add a label, e.g., “that’s a siren.” It could add a feeling/judgement, e.g., “it’s too loud, I don’t like it.” It could also add a story a prediction about what happened, an idea about the state of the world, a fear that the emergency is related to one’s own life, etc. All of these are considered layers of narrative in NT.

Classifying Narratives

Dimension 1: Unconscious or Conscious

Some narrative content is unconscious or “under-the-surface.” Labels, automatic feelings and judgments are often under-the-surface. Oftentimes, our view of ourselves operates under-the-surface. We don’t realize that it’s been negative until we have an event that transforms it quickly, like positive news or hormonal shifts (which in turn has an effect on our perceptions/narratives). Other narrative content is directly in focus, i.e., conscious, and often unfolds as a stream of words in our head. This is our personal stream-of-consciousness narrative.

Unconscious narratives can be made conscious through introspection, dialogue, and reflection.

Dimension 2: Flavor/Style

Flavor refers to the style of the narrative. In traditional psychology, we might think of style as the emotional qualities of the narrative. For example, we might say that a person is feeling angry or sad or afraid. In NT we don’t distinguish between the thinking style and the feeling. The feeling is actually a combination of a thinking style and a body state, and it is only that. This is an important point to carefully consider and you can simply ask yourself to reflect on your own emotional states and ask whether they are truly composed of anything other than a style of thinking and seeing the world plus a state the body is in. There is no separate thing called a feeling.

In NT we describe one’s thinking states in flavors (sweet, salty, bitter, spicy) because using emotion terms like angry, sad creates confusion. In addition, the emotion-language doesn’t really capture the full range of human thinking styles. How for example, do we accurately describe a person who’s thinking is theoretical, intellectual, and abstract? What about someone who constantly finds fault and error in things people say or do? Or someone who looks to dominate others in conversation? There’s no easy way to fit it in. Each person has their own signature thinking style, and that thinking style changes over time, often passing through different flavors throughout the day.

Flavors give us the overall qualities of the narrative style, but we have to further drill down to describe a person’s narrative style in more detail.

Flavors also give us the added ability to describe thinking states as combinations of flavors like a pot of soup, rather than being forced to choose one clumsy label and force-fit all of one’s thinking style into that label.

For the technical, we have components of narrative which you can read about here (link coming).

You can read about narrative mapping here (link coming).

Our narratives get interwoven with our experience of the world, which we almost always fail to appreciate. We call this the Saran Wrap. (section 3)