The Narrating Self and the Experiencing Self in the Narratives of Women Who Have Experienced Trauma

Abstract

This study examines how the appearance of post-traumatic growth as a result of a traumatic event is affected by the extent to which the experiencing self dominates the narrating self (concepts introduced by Franz Stanzel). The experiencing self describes its feelings, needs, and desires, and reveals its own attitudes toward the situation and its circumstances. The narrating self aims to give a detailed account of the event, circumstances and its own actions, without saying much about its emotional state. Seventy-eight Polish women were asked to recount their traumatic experiences and answer questions about how the experience had affected their thinking about themselves and their world-view. The participants narratives were analyzed in terms of the dominance of either the experiencing self or the narrating self, or their possible balance. The participants also filled out questionnaires to measure post-traumatic growth and sense of purpose in life. The qualitative analysis suggested that greater post-traumatic growth was reported by women for whom the experiencing self either dominated in the narratives over the narrating self, or was balanced with the equally developed story of the narrating self. However, the quantitative analysis distinguished only between the experiencing self and narrating self positions, with the former demonstrating greater post-traumatic growth, whereas narratives that balanced both voices were intermediate in the comparison and were not distinguished from the other more pure positions. Taken as a whole, results support the inference that narration from an emotion-focused internal perspective facilitates personal growth in the face of very difficult life events.

There has been much analysis of works written as first-person narratives in literary studies (Prince, 2003; Romberg, 1962). This narrative style, although apparently not as common as that of the omniscient narrator, is still powerful enough to comprise disparate content: apart from its aim to “verify the objective existence of the world presented in the novel” or to manifest itself as “a symbolic structure in which the consciousness itself is reflected”, it may also be seen as representing “an ultimately inseparable combination of the objective external world and the subjective, internal one” (Heidenreich, 1989, p. 47). In this paper, we analyze accounts of trauma obtained during psychological interviews as first-person, nonfictional, prose narratives.

We undertook this study to describe the various manifestations of the narrator in accounts of trauma, applying the concepts of the experiencing and narrating self, which were introduced in Stanzel’s Typische Formen des Romans [Typical Forms of the Novel] (1964), one of the first classification schemes for narrative situations to recognize first-person narratives as a specific type of narrative. The utility of this classification has been demonstrated in numerous works in the field of literary and film studies, including studies focusing on the process of “a total change” in the personality of the first-person narrator, or, less often, “the continuity of the psychological development of the personality of the first-person narrator” (Stanzel, 1986, p. 213). As Pals (2006, p. 1081) pointed out, the memories of difficult life experiences are amongst those that “challenge the storyline and invite identity questioning and transformation”. For the purposes of this study, we define traumatic events as events that not only cause “painful emotions and physical and psychological symptoms” (Schaefer & Moos, 1998, p. 99) but consequently “represent significant challenges to individuals’ ways of understanding the world and their place in it” (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004, p. 1). Having to cope with trauma can result in post-traumatic growth (PTG) (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 2006, Joseph & Linley, 2008; 2013; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004) which includes positive changes in fundamental beliefs about the self, the world and other people.

Method

Research design overview

Seventy-eight Polish women were asked to recount their experience of trauma and answer questions concerning how it had affected their thinking about themselves and their world-view. The participants also filled out questionnaires. The narratives were analyzed in terms of the presence of the experiencing and the narrating self. A qualitative approach was applied to demonstrate either the dominance of one of the selves in the narratives or their balance. Detailed analysis of selected narratives also demonstrated the issue of their mutual position in a narrative. We then compared the perspectives of the experiencing and narrating selves with scores for meaning in life and PTG, as measured by the Purpose in Life Test (PIL; Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964) and the Changes in Outlook Questionnaire (CiOQ; Joseph et al., 1993).

This study investigated how the process of post-traumatic growth that may occur as a result of trauma is influenced by the dominance of one type of a first-person narrator as well as how the narrative perspective is related to changes in the sense of self, relationships and the philosophy of life following trauma (Baker et al., 2008; Calhoun & Tedeschi, 2013). We sought to determine which kind of a narrative situation — domination of the experiencing self, domination of the narrating self, or a balance between the experiencing and the narrating self — was most common in the accounts of people with the highest levels of PTG in the aftermath of a traumatic event.

We define the roles of the experiencing and the narrating selves more broadly than in Stanzel, as the “I” who describes the emotional state and the “I” who tells a story in a narrative mode. We use the following criteria:

• The experiencing self: its messages serve to express the feelings, attitudes, needs, and desires of the narrator. It is a sender-oriented self, as the narrator says more about their inner world than about the events being recounted. Its statements are often constructed in the subjunctive mood. Illustrative sentences include: “I was happy things turned out so well”, “I regret what I’ve done”, “I wanted so badly to be with him”, “I was so lonely and torn”, “I felt everyone’s eyes on me and that they knew what happened”;

• The narrating self mainly serves a referential function. It aims to give a detailed account of events, circumstances and its own actions, without saying much about its emotional state. Illustrative sentences could include: “It was autumn and the days were becoming shorter”, “I was a young girl. I was twenty. I met a man much older than me”; “Grandma spent all these days at home and we looked after her. My mum was a nurse so she knew how to insert a drip. So, grandma instead of spending time in hospital, she was with us.”

We cannot judge this issue by simply following the results of literary studies, although some statements may prove useful. The experiencing self typically dominated first-person narratives during the development of the modern novel in the second half of the eighteenth century, when novels using this kind of narrative were intended to be “an authentic account of the actual experiences of individuals” (Watt, 2001, p. 27). For almost a century, this perception of the first-person narrative led to many interesting novelistic experiments, such as the attempt to create “the novel from which all the novelistic events would be eliminated” (Głowiński & Stone, 1977, p. 111) as in the case of Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s epistolary novel Obermann (1804), of which the author commented: “It will be seen that these letters were penned by a man of feeling, not by a man of action. […] There is in them no dramatic movement, no deliberate working up of events, no climax […]. There are descriptions in them […]. There are passions in them […]. There is love in them […].” (de Senancour, 1910, p. xxxiv) We expected that more frequent presence of the experiencing self would be crucial to post-traumatic growth, as has been shown by Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004, p. 13; cf. the remarks about general long-term health improvement in people writing or talking about upsetting experiences in Pennebaker, 1997): “Active disclosure of thoughts and emotions to empathetic others may be important to the development of post-traumatic growth”.

The domination of the narrating self is less common and more puzzling in the literary world. Głowiński and Stone (1977, p. 111), having noted that even adventure novels may use first-person narration, argued that: “[First person narration] can even successfully appropriate to itself those realms which are supposed to be at variance with its entire direction”, giving the example of The Fall by Albert Camus. In nonfiction, the dominance of the narrating self is mainly used in accounts that may have great historical value for future generations, such as the testimony of Holocaust survivors. The effect of a traumatic event can be so devastating that the narrating self is the only perspective which allows the survivor to communicate about the event: “If I write very little about my impressions. And everything in ordinary language. As if nothing happened. Or if I hardly ever look inside myself, or seemingly from the outside. It is only because it can’t be done any other way” (Białoszewski, 2015, p. 15).

Findings in the field of literary studies suggest that the kind of situation that, for many reasons, can be called the “ideal type of the first-person narrative situation” (Stanzel, 1986, p. 216) involves an equilibrium between the experiencing and narrating self (cf. the terms given by Fludernik: “There is a kind of dynamic at work here: ideally, experience and evaluation should be in equilibrium”; 2009, p. 90). Contemporary literature attempts to demonstrate this: “To say that self-accounts are solely found on singular subjectivity is to ignore the potential for these texts to open a space in which the narrating ‘I’ might connect with the reader” and, as Angelo and Fülöp (2014, p. 5) add with the reference to Forest, “with the others, history, and world”. Psychological studies provide further evidence for our hypothesis. The concept of coherence (Baerger & McAdams, 1999), which comprises details about the temporal, social and personal context of an event as well as employs explicit statements of feelings to create an affective tone or signify an emotional meaning, is the principal narrative feature associated with wellbeing (Adler et al., 2016). Therefore, one might expect that equilibrium would lead to post-traumatic growth. The preliminary findings of Smyth et al. (2001) also suggest that “the mere expression of thoughts and feelings surrounding a traumatic experience may not be sufficient for improvement and that narrative formation is necessary” (p. 170). Another important point in achieving an equilibrium between the experiencing and narrating selves involves the perspective of time, named the “‘I’-now/‘I’-then binary” by Smith and Watson (2010), but described previously by Stanzel as well. Xu Yun (2017) observes that in his typology he analyzed a type of narrator who demonstrates that “he is intellectually and affectively more mature than the character” and is responsible for “the past mistakes” (p. 80). In this perspective, ‘I’-now is fully aware of its feelings, opinions and prejudices in the past and is ready to recall, name and understand its past behavior.

Our research involved working in an interdisciplinary team, whose members used the narrative methodology in both psychological and literary studies. The interview was conducted by a psychologist trained in the McAdams’ (2008) interview procedure. The qualitative analysis was done by a literary scholar with experience in analyses of first-person narratives. The data was analyzed by psychologists experienced in the assessment of post-traumatic growth.

Participant recruitment

The participants were seventy-eight Polish women aged between 20 and 52 years (M = 33.09; SD = 8.48) who had experienced what they classified as a traumatic event over a year ago. The experiences they described were related to events such as the death of a relative; family destruction due to divorce, separation or a partner’s betrayal; life-threatening disease (cancer); car accidents; bullying at school; and sexual assault, including workplace assault.

The participants were students of the Master’s degree in psychology graduate program at the faculty in which the research was conducted. The researchers and the interviewees did not know each other before the interview, as they had no common classes.

There was a call for narrative research participants at the faculty, which provided a contact address. Master-degree psychology students (among whom women dominate), students from an extramural graduate programs as well as those from an individualized study program for Bachelor’s and Master’s degree holders were recruited. The participants, therefore, vary in age.

Data collection

The research was approved by the university ethical commission. Participants had received information about the procedure and the informed consent form before the interview. They could withdraw from the study at any time. The procedure included demographic questions, as well as questions about health status and traumatic experiences in recent years. The interviewer then carried out the interview, which was recorded for future transcription. The participants were asked the following question:

Trauma can be defined as an event that a person witnessed or was confronted with that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of the self or others and responded to with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Have you experienced this type of event in the last 12 months?

During this phase of research, we obtained seventy-eight Polish narratives ranging from 672 to 14,063 words in length (M = 4285.07, SD = 3125.48).

After being interviewed, all participants filled out the following questionnaires:

• The Purpose in Life Test (PIL; Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964) measures the degree to which a person experiences a sense of purpose and meaningfulness in their life. We used the shortened six-item version of Życińska and Januszek (2011). It included items such as “My personal existence is utterly meaningless, without purpose … very purposeful and meaningful” and “Every day is exactly the same … constantly new and different”. Each statement is rated on a 7-point scale.

• The Changes in Outlook Questionnaire (CiOQ; Joseph, Williams, & Yule, 1993) consists of 11 items assessing positive changes that refer to post-traumatic growth (e.g. “I value my relationships much more now”; “I feel more experienced about life now”) and 15 items assessing negative changes (e.g. “I don’t look forward to the future anymore”; “I have very little trust in other people now”). Responses to all items are given using a six-point scale ranging from 1 – strongly disagree to 6 – strongly agree.

Data-analysis

Data coding was done by the first author, who had no information about the participants except a general description of the group and did not know the results of the questionnaires. We then drew 30 narratives (38.46%) to check the coding system’s reliability. They were coded by a second judge. Next, we computed intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) in a two-way random model. The ICC coefficient for narrating self was .95, and .91 for experiencing self. These values indicate a very high level of reliability (Syed & Nelson, 2015).

Excerpts from the narratives have been translated into English for the purposes of this article. We made an effort to be “invisible” translators and to use the “domestication” strategy (Venuti, 2004, p. 5), as the main aim of the study was not to analyze representations of Polish life but rather to examine Polish accounts of trauma using universal narrative categories. Although some structural modifications were necessary, we paid particular attention to retaining the grammatical forms of the source language, such as active and passive voice, personal pronouns and the shape of the sentence in the source language; all elements that might affect the recognisability of the type of self. The peculiarities of Polish life and language were taken into account only insofar as this was necessary to make the text comprehensible and fluent in the target language.

The coding system consisted of two indices: the use of the experiencing self’s perspective and narrating self’s perspective. These categories were chosen before the start of the analysis, as they are major notions in the analysis of first-person narratives in both fiction and nonfiction prose. Initially, we identified each sentence (sometimes phrase) as belonging to either the experiencing or narrating self and then gave an overall rating of the whole narrative. Both selves were rated on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 – minimal use to 5 – high use. Each trauma story was given two scores and classified as one of the following four types: dominance of the experiencing self; dominance of the narrating self; balance between the experiencing and narrating selves, both with at least moderate presence (at least 3 points; high-level balance in further text); balance between the experiencing and narrating selves, both with minimal or limited use (low-level balance in further text).

The following narrative of a woman whose sister had attempted suicide is an example of a trauma story with limited use of the experiencing self (2 points) and moderate use of the narrating self (3 points):

I received a phone call. From my sister. She tried to call me several times that day. I wasn’t answering as I was at work and I simply don’t like it when [an expression of feelings related to habits] somebody interrupts me. My sister sometimes forgets that I don’t like talking on my way to work and that we usually talk after my work. I called her back in the afternoon, what I mean is… I don’t remember exactly if [an expression of uncertainty] it was she who called or me. But for sure she was crying. Her voice was trembling and she said that she didn’t want to live anymore and she’s going to take the pills. And, in brief, that’s how the situation came up.

The most notable aspect of this excerpt is that there is no sign of any emotional involvement and it tells us nothing about the emotional relationship between the sisters. Doesn’t the narrator like to talk during work because she likes her job, or, on the contrary, is it because her job is stressful? Why did she call back? Was she afraid for her sister or was she irritated? The only feeling the speaker expresses clearly relates to the disruption of her daily routine rather than to the traumatic event she is recounting. She also does not directly name her sister’s emotional state, and only describes her sister’s behavior. The point at which the woman ends her story could be considered surprising: she does not tell us how she reacted, emotionally, to what her sister told her. This example of coding demonstrates the difference in the first-person narrative of the experiencing and the narrating self: the words “I don’t like […]” are used twice in this story. However, only the first use is coded as the experiencing self. The second time the words appear in a subordinate clause (“she sometimes forgets that”) with the aim to provide information about her sister’s lack of awareness and not about the speaker’s feelings.

An instance of developed use (4 points) of the experiencing self is found in a woman’s account of her husband leaving the family. The use of the narrating self in the following extract was rated as limited (2 points):

It happened, I suppose, about twelve or thirteen years ago. I don’t remember exactly [a subjective sense of time and lack of precise date]. My husband, it came out, it was all so, so surprising for me [an expression of surprise]. It came out that he had somebody on the side. The things went quickly, as soon as I found out, he moved out of the house. And he left me with our two children. In point of fact… Until that time I thought that I might rely on him. Of that, I was one hundred per cent certain [an expression of confidence in her husband]. I wasn’t working. I was a stay-at-home mum. And I suddenly found myself abandoned and destitute. Because my husband, then, he lost his mind, and he paid some ridiculous alimony. Apart from that, it was a psychological burden, it was physically a very tough time [a clear expression of two perspectives coming through this situation]. But quickly, I got myself together quickly. I found a job and somehow things sorted themselves out. I think that the worst thing about this experience was that it happened so suddenly. That I wasn’t even aware, that it was a total shock. Such an abrupt change of situation. What was also difficult about it [an expression of uncertainty about what the most difficult aspect was] was that his attitude towards us completely changed. And my parents-in-law, whom I was sure cared about the children… It turned out that I could not count on them [once again feelings of abandonment and broken trust].

We learn that the narrator was taken by surprise before we are given any information about what happened or before any of the context is described. Many facts are left untold in the rest of the account, for instance the way in which the narrator found out that her husband had betrayed her. The phrase “somehow things sorted themselves out” is a vague description of the process of starting a new life after the end of a committed, intimate relationship. Instead, the narrator describes in detail how she felt, from her initial shock to her disappointment to the financially and emotionally exhausting consequences of realizing that she would have to rely on herself and that everyone she had trusted had deserted her. The contribution of the experiencing self was scored as developed rather than high because some significant emotions are not mentioned: the crucial moment, when the narrator’s husband left her, is only briefly described and she makes no comments about despair, regret or loneliness.

The results of our coding, that is the number of stories representing each narrative strategy, are presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Number of each narrative strategy.

Narrative strategy	N
Domination of the narrating self	20
Domination of the experiencing self	10
Balance between the experiencing and the narrating self, both on a high level	29
Balance between the experiencing and the narrating self, both on a low level	19
Total	78

Findings

The findings presented below refer to the classification of the narratives as one of the following types: dominance of the experiencing self; dominance of the narrating self; high-level and low-level balance between the experiencing and narrating selves. We have chosen the most representative examples for each group.

How does the predominance of the experiencing self rather than the narrating self promote post-traumatic growth?

A woman commences her account of her father’s illness:

The story of my dad’s illness is, in fact, a story about me beginning to wake up to the idea that I’m a mortal human and confronting my own fear … more and more. I always was afraid of this kind of illness. […] Because it seems to me insidious. Because speaking generally I was an anxious person… It was really a huge fear, which has now diminished a little. In spite of the fact that it was a tough experience. And it triggered many, many thoughts and emotions. Because I always blamed my father for my own problems because he was an alcoholic. [How does this story begin?] The story begins with the fact that my dad starts to get sick. It begins when my mum calls me and says that dad hasn’t felt well for a long time. And it all appears worrisome. And then he slowly starts to submit to medical examination, but with much resistance, as he’s never visited the doctor before. And it was really an emotional rollercoaster.

In the initial sentence, she indicates two narrative threads: the first can be called superficial because it relates to the traumatic event (her father’s illness), but the second deals with her deepest emotions and gives an account of the symbolic role her father’s illness played in her development. The first should be expounded by the narrating self and the second by the experiencing self. Nevertheless, the first plot is not well developed. The audience is not informed about even the basic facts, such as what type of illness her father suffered. The story of the narrating self, terse and with narrative deficiencies, emerges only after prompting by the interviewer, and continues when the woman responds in the present tense – the tense in which the question [How does this story begin?] was asked, although up to that point she had told the story in the past tense; she also uses a verb (begin) that was introduced by the interviewer twice.

The experiencing self undoubtedly plays the leading role in this narrative and reveals the “true” character of the story (the narrator uses the phrase “in fact”). This part of the story is well developed and much more nuanced. It includes much more detail, e.g. that the narrator’s fear diminished “a little” and that she felt “many emotions” during her father’s illness (the “emotional rollercoaster” to which she refers in the last sentence of the excerpt). Furthermore, there is a deliberate use of paradoxical statements: “When I was telling someone this story before, I said that I had never been closer to life than when I was watching my father die. And I simply hadn’t known until then that I could experience happiness in such tragic moments.”

The positive changes that are clearly expressed in the story relate to being less afraid of a potential, sudden tragedy and to the narrator’s assessment that she is now better able to cope with problems, accept emotions like sadness and pain, remain highly attentive to relationships and appreciate the time spent with relatives. The emotional tone of the story shifts from negative to positive; it begins with the narrator’s fear and reproachfulness toward her father and ends with reminiscence: “I can still recall him as the very strong person and not the person who was giving me the problems. Very, very strong, even though he had a difficult life. He did a lot for me.”

A very interesting feature concerning the dominance of the experiencing self is a kind of redundancy of basic facts (not the lack of them, as in the narrative above), resulting from the repetitions of experiencing self, which every time shows a different perspective on information about the external reality. In a narrative about a family conflict – the attempt of an adult daughter to explain the elements of painful childhood to her parents – the information about the date of the event is given twice: “This was the event during Christmas time. In December 2015. I’m pretty good at dates, so it stuck in my head.”, “The next day, it was the first or second day of Christmas, it’s Feast of the Holy Family. I’m Christian, but I have another life philosophy. But I respect my parents’ attitude and I go with them to the church. I participate in the mass but I don’t experience it the way they do. There was a sermon about the family, respect, and understanding. And I said: Right to the point. That was what I thought.” The first place in which the information is given is related to the memory of the person speaking, and the second is marked by the confession about her attitude to religion and other worshipers and it unveils the symbolic dimension of the conflict. The information about the acts of family violence is also given a few times, it is though always accompanied by the description of the subjective nature of the feeling: “As a child, I got the feeling that it is too much, commonly speaking, too much beating, right? A lot of that. […] For the first time, I had the courage to say my parents what I really think, that it was too much during my childhood and adolescence. […] It is not fair that all my life I had this burden, this feeling that it was too much violence toward me.”

The form of this narrative demonstrates the way the person speaking dealt with the traumatic experience: the constant repetition and explanation, till the point that nothing else could be added, that the experiencing self already said enough and only change in the external relationship could open it to further discussion: “This story remains locked, inside me. It is worked. It is me who worked it through, many, many times, I explained it to myself.” She admits that sometimes she goes back to this difficult conversation, but she does not want to reopen it: “What I thought is that if my parents don’t want to go back to this, I don’t see space to tear this out. And for what? So I closed this theme when I got the information what they thought about it”. The story of the experiencing self is completed, it is totally under control of the person speaking: “I still experience it on my own way, but I closed this path to discussion with them”. The abundant presence of the experiencing self in the story makes it paradoxically rich in facts, but they are all filtered through the feelings, impressions, judgments and evaluations of the person speaking.

How does the predominance of the narrating self over the experiencing self relate to post-traumatic growth?

We obtained many stories during our research that were characterized by the dominance of the narrating self over the experiencing self, which, although varied, take into account the complexity of the structures used. We start our presentation of this type of narrative with a story about an illness that ends in the death of one of the speaker’s relatives. The story is not specifically composed and its shape reflects a train of thought. A woman told the story of her brother’s final stages of the illness, including details about his medical history. At one point she interrupted this part of her narrative to reflect on another aspect of the story:

Somehow we were able to obtain an experimental drug for him. The drug arrived from Warsaw. After he had the second cycle of chemotherapy. However, my brother did not live long enough to take it. After this second cycle, the levels started… Maybe there was a hope. Not of total recovery but maybe for the prolongation of life. Unfortunately, when he came home… the day after that he died. It is, in short, the story of his illness. And all the rest, so the family on one side. The atmosphere which prevailed. A sense of powerlessness and helplessness in all of us. At this moment it was a drama. I did not function badly at this time, as I had to go on. I had to support my parents. I had to support my sister-in-law.

The woman telling this story is conscious of its two aspects, just like the narrator of the previous story about her father’s death. However, the level of awareness varies: the story dominated by the experiencing self begins with a sentence that is sufficiently precise and meaningful to form the title of a story, and that juxtaposes two narrative threads: “The story of my dad’s illness is, in fact, a story about me beginning to […]” and the narrator selects just one thread to pursue and develop. In the above story, however, the narrator realizes as she is speaking that she is omitting an important part of the experience and she resumes: “It is, in short, the story of his illness.” However, she is not effective in developing this other story, the story that belongs to the experiencing self. She prefers to use short sentences, but when she talks about her emotions, her phrases become even briefer. The narrator treats this comment about “all the rest” as an interlude and quickly picks up her previous thread. There is, nevertheless, a slight change in her narrative approach following her remark about emotions: she starts to speak about her own actions rather than events that happened regardless of her actions. She refers to positive changes, such as the development of a more mature relationship with her parents (noticing the strength of her apparently fragile mother and accepting her father’s hardness) and is more emphatic. The changes in behavior pertain to “keeping emotions in check” in every situation and not being subject to emotional ruptures.

The story analyzed above, with its succession of short, simple sentences is closer to a stream of consciousness than to a well-structured story. Nevertheless, our results show that even a predominance of the narrating self within a complex story structure is not necessarily associated with a high level of PTG. One woman began her story by speaking about her stepfather’s characteristics and offering personal memories of a happy, carefree childhood:

My stepfather was always such a loving person; he devoted a lot of time to me. He gave me his attention. He read me fairy tales and played with me. He was simply the perfect father. And he used to tell me, it seems like only today, that there was a way to get out of any and every situation. So as a small child I repeated this sentence to myself every time something failed. When I drew badly, I always tried again.

This scene is a part of her account of the traumatic event of being abandoned by her stepfather and takes as its motif the sentence she learned from her stepfather as a girl. She repeats it sitting on her mother’s lap in the moment when he tells them that he is going to leave the family: “But you always said that there is a way to get out of any and every situation”. The story goes on: “He looked at me and then he said straight to my face: ‘No, Sara, no’. And then my whole world fell apart.” Tension is steadily built up in this story. The rule the narrator learned from her stepfather is broken at an important moment, the most important in the life of the then six-year-old girl. Many years later she still associates her stepfather’s traumatic departure with the phrase that had been his motto: “I had such limitless faith in him, that he loved me, that we were family, and that there is a way to get out of any and every situation. And everything failed utterly. None of the things I believed in came true.”

How might a high-level balance between the experiencing and the narrating selves foster post-traumatic growth?

One of the stories we examined, a woman’s narrative about her mother’s illness, is an example of a narrative structure with various time perspectives, referred to by us as “‘I’-now”-“‘I’-then”.

Table 2 demonstrates that each part of the story’s action is accompanied by a commentary about its emotional significance. It is important to note, however, that in one part of the narrative—describing the death of the narrator’s mother—the voice of the experiencing self is silenced. The narrator breaks off just before the key moment in the story, when she is angry with herself, ashamed and feeling selfish. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the occurrence of positive changes: family relationships are the area in which the narrator emphasizes her effort to improve, but this is also a subject that evokes anxiety in her. The woman is afraid of her relatives and afraid to start her own family. She notes that she has become more mature and then explains what she means by that: “To me, maturity means that when I make decisions, I’m aware of their consequences. In for a penny, in for a pound,” but later she admits that “Now I’m kind of at a stage where I’m not sure what decisions to make in life.” Her world vision is disquieting: “people are very fragile and the world is very unpredictable”; “the world is unreliable and it is not certain that someone who is next to me in the morning will be there in the evening.”

Table 2. An example of a narrative with a balance between the experiencing and narrating self, achieved by adopting an “I”-now and an “I”-then narrative.

The “then” perspective (a report on events)	The “now” perspective (reflections on the events and the emotions triggered)
Also, I only knew that mum was very seriously ill and that she’d have an operation. In fact, the surgery happened quite fast.	When I think about that time now, I was sixteen and had lots of silly things on my mind. […] Which is shocking to me now. For example, it shocks me how I could even think about going out to a party.
No one was particularly interested in my needs. And, of course, I rebelled against it a lot.	Also, now I think about the fact that it was really sad that I would argue because I had to stay home with my sick mum.
My first serious boyfriend. And he was going to the gym, passing by. And my mum was limping so much, and she was wearing a scarf on her head. And I remember when I saw him I thought I didn’t want him to see her. That I was ashamed of it.	Now that I recall it all, I’m so angry at myself that I could think that way.
And I went to get my hair dyed red. And I came to the hospital just like that. With a new hairstyle.	It’s just that, well I just I can’t, I was so egoistic. How could I do it? It was tragic.

The handling of time in other stories is more complex than a simple distinction between “then” and “now”. For example, a woman who was bullied at school described her emotional state after one such incident: “I’m tired. I have had enough of all of that.” The bullying led her to attempt suicide:

And this is how everyone, behind me, follows me to my apartment on the third floor. I open the door. […] On the one hand, it’s tragic; on the other hand, it’s comic. […] One guy, Rysiu, gets in my way and says… He stood up in the door like that and said to me: ‘Well, we’ll see how you kill yourself’. And, you know what, really. I know this must have looked hilarious. But for me, it was awful.

The last sentences of the quotation use both the past tense (“But for me, this was [at the time] awful”) and the present tense (“I know [now] this must have looked hilarious”). However, a careful analysis demonstrates that the present tense prevails in this narrative, which puts the audience at the center of events, in the eye of an emotional storm. Both the experiencing and narrating self depict the course of events as they would be performed on stage, and make the narrative complex, rich and vivid. Nevertheless, in some parts of stories, narrators also describe events from the perspective of a witness, rather than the main protagonist, which affects the assessment of positive and negative changes. The woman does not identify with her own successes; rather than being happy about her achievements, she is worried that she will in some sense be unmasked as a fraud. She pays particular attention to self-development because she never feels she is good enough at what she does.

The third example of a story in which there is a balance between the experiencing and narrating selves, both of which are highly developed, is a formally coherent story: both narrative perspectives have a common point of departure. They reach the climax at once and the tragic dilemma is resolved (Table 3). The theme of the story is a woman’s struggle with cancer.

When the woman describes her reaction to her initial diagnosis, she says: “But I’ve never felt any kind of protest. I don’t remember anything like that. Instead, I moved toward acceptance. To sorting myself out. And making sense of everything. Of everything I could change, to trying to understand what I really wanted.” Her narrative reflects this attitude: it is well-structured and complete. The two columns can be read independently or as interwoven threads. In both cases, the story has a coherent construction and meaning, none of the elements are discarded or detached from the others. These are the aspects of this narrative that differ from the two previous examples of narrative, with a balance between the experiencing and narrating selves: unlike in the narrative of the woman whose mother died, both narrative perspectives are maintained until the climax, and neither of the narrative perspectives is chaotic, with a range of tenses and emotions.

The image of the disease that emerges from the narrative means that we consider it a missing piece of the narrator’s life story that, once found, changes her life story into a story about growth toward being a fully-fledged human being. During the narrative, in parallel with the effects of the disease and treatment, the focus shifts from external, physical manifestations of femininity to how the narrator’s cancer changed her view of femininity: “it’s not that attractiveness drops, it only changes. My femininity was changing. That’s how I explained it to myself.” She starts referring to herself as a “person” and stops characterizing herself in terms of gender: “I started thinking about myself as a person simply integrated with my own skin”.

How does a low-level balance between the experiencing and the narrating selves relate to post-traumatic growth?

In the group of low-level balance narratives, we encountered brief stories of low-complexity, which were often commented on by the person speaking: “That’s how the situation looked in short”. These kinds of statements mostly relate to the use of the narrating self. Some of the stories are composed mainly of a beginning, and contain no development of the story at all: “It all started … maybe even eight years ago. My brother was five years old then. He got cancer. Well, it lasted two long years … I don’t know what else I could say”. We may say that the experiencing self is silenced in these narratives, as physically there are no words which describe its perspective, the sentences are unfinished or incomplete, e.g. “But then it was, it was, really …”. The lack of experiencing self is represented through omissions, hesitation, and admission that the experience is difficult to tell. In some examples, we may observe a kind of looping narrative structure in which the tenses and the emotions cannot be easily related to each other. To illustrate, in the story about a grandmother’s death, the facts and emotions described represent different parts of reality each time: “My grandma died eight years ago.” – “I was very close to her. Grandma was always at home with me.” – “It happened so quickly.” – “I saw her becoming weaker and weaker each day”. – “Mum went into our room and said the grandma passed away.” – “In general, I don’t remember what was happening with me after that.” – “Well, somehow, so far, I cannot accept it completely. Because as I said, it came so suddenly. I didn’t understand it at that time either. Grandma was always a person full of energy”. The end of the story reaches a point which is far earlier than the point at which the narrative starts and corresponds with the second sentence. All these narrative features: summarizing the details of the traumatic event by the narrating self, creating only some parts of its story, and/or not using the experiencing self/replacing its role with sentences which demonstrate a refusal to talk about the emotions or the lack of ability to do this, serve to create a set of sentences for both selves that are unrelated to each other, and make these narratives difficult to assess from a narrative perspective.

How are the results of narrative and quantitative analyses of PTG related?

We compared users experiencing and narrating self traumatic life events with respect to their scores for meaning in life and post-traumatic growth, as measured by the PIL questionnaire and CiOQ. A Kruskal-Wallis H test showed that there was a statistically significant difference in posttraumatic growth between the four groups, H(3) = 9.67, p = 0.022, with a mean rank of 26.58 for the narrating self, mean rank of 52.22 for the experiencing self, mean rank of 37.94 for the low-level balance group and a mean rank of 34.50 for the high-level balance group. The results of the Bonferroni post hoc test show a significant difference only between the narrating self and the experiencing self, p = 0.014 (asymptotic significance adjusted by the Bonferroni correction for multiple tests). However, a Kruskal-Wallis H test showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the sense of meaning in life between the four groups.

We also conducted an analysis of the correlations between the levels of PTG and sense of meaning in life, measured with questionnaires, and use of the experiencing self and narrating self perspectives (Table 4). The results suggest a positive relationship between the use of the experiencing self and PTG. The results also suggest, contrary to our expectations, that the use of the narrating self is negatively related to PTG.

When comparing the stories of women with the highest and the lowest PTG levels, we observed analogous results to the general tendencies described above. We chose 16 contrasting stories: eight with the highest PTG level, and eight with the lowest PTG level (approximately 10% from the contrasting sides). The highest PTG level was reached in the narratives with either a balance between the experiencing and narrating selves or the dominance of the experiencing self. Of the eight stories told by people with the highest PTG levels, five represent the same type of narrative that is analyzed in Table 3 (in the subsection How does a balance between the experiencing and the narrating selves relate to post-traumatic growth?) that is to say, a narrative in which both perspectives are developed in a parallel and comprehensive way and stories of both selves reach a conclusion. One narrative uses the ‘I’-now/‘I’-then perspective reported in Table 2. Two of the stories told by people with the highest PTG level can be simply described as having a strongly dominant use of the experiencing self in a manner we described above in the subsection How does the predominance of the experiencing self rather than the narrating self relate to post-traumatic growth? as the second example. At the opposite pole, we observed that amongst the narratives of people with the lowest PTG level, the use for the experiencing self did not exceed three.

Table 3. An example of equilibrium between the experiencing and narrating self achieved by developing two threads in parallel.

	Narrating self	Experiencing self
Exposition	I have been under the care of doctors for some time; There are no genetic risks there for me, because she [mum] doesn’t seem to have that one gene that kind of determines the disease; I have also undergone such tests	…so I was calm
Rising action	after some time, this topic kind of came back again …and I decided that I would go and get tested, go and have it checked.	Again, those emotions kind of came back to me
Climax	These very first meetings with my doctor and these tests were taking place at the time when my husband had just left.	…well, at this point there was the high emotional
Searching for help	...as if regardless of the practical measures taken to verify my condition, I was giving myself over to these different prayers	As far as this accumulation of emotions is concerned, I think that those moments of prayer absorbed much, plus the knowledge that I’d been trying to gather myself
Falling action: the negative message turns into a positive one, the same ambivalence is perceptible at the emotional level	The doctors had x-rays from previous tests and they also had the results of the biopsies. It turned out that basically no one knows why, but in the breast in which I was saying that there were metastases, these changes were not there (emphasis of the person speaking)	I can say that I kind of went through such a mega stressful situation in a negative and positive way.

Table 4. Descriptive statistics and correlations for study variables.

Variable	M	SD	1	2	3	4
1. Narrating self	3.17	1.25	–
2. Experiencing self	2.82	1.16	.03	–
3. Posttraumatic growth	4.72	0.81	−.30**	.33**	–
4. Purpose of meaning	5.57	1.08	.02	.24*	.56***	–

* p < .05.

** p < .01.

*** p < .001.

Common features in the narratives of people with the lowest PTG level include the lack of detailed story of the experiencing self, its vagueness (for instance, “it was difficult” repeated a few times in various parts of the narrative without relation to a specific event as the only sign of participation of the experiencing self), and the unfinished plot of the experiencing self as in the example already described in Table 2.

Discussion

The traumatic event in the analyzed narratives was related to the acts the person speaking did and also things that happened to them (e.g. accidents, disease). However, the act of telling a story about the event is completely dependent on the speaker, everything happens in it the way we want it to. Our results suggest that the experiencing self may be the most vital part of the process of composing your own story of the event.

The experiencing self, describing not only emotions but also attitudes, mental reactions, evaluations, impressions, attitudes, judgments, and details that were remembered could help to freely regulate emotional distance, to stay “neither too close nor too detached from feelings” (Androutsopoulou et al., 2004, p. 387), which leads to “become more self-reflective and thoughtful” (p. 392). The experiencing self creates distance from the external world as it constructs its own world of emotions, memories and observations. This inner world and all its changes are described in a similar manner as the plot of the event itself. The core feature of the experiencing self’s perspective, apart from the level of detail it brings to a narrative, is comprehensiveness. The experiencing self should participate in every part of a story built using “emotional topoi” in the terminology of a literary scholar Lubas-Bartoszyńska (1993, p. 186) or “emotional schemas” in the terminology of a psychologist Leahy (2002, p. 178–179). This perspective should contain a clear ending, demonstrating, for instance, a journey from an imperturbable state to the depths of despair and thence to rebirth; in other words, it should be analogous to a narrative plot, use narrative schemas, and have a beginning, a middle and an end. The qualitative analysis enabled us to show that the high-level balance between the experiencing and narrating selves may prompt PTG when they are both developed and situated in a proper way. The crucial factor is the position of both selves in relation to each other within a story; the relationship between them. The emotions expressed should be embedded in the context of events and actions of the person speaking (Gergen & Gergen, 1986; Trzebiński, 2002) and accompany the description of events, as we show in the story from Table 3. The deficiencies in the description of external events, although often remarked upon by the narrator, should concern matters of lesser importance, and should not influence the assessment of positive and negative changes. In one sense, our study is in line with the works that emphasize the value of coherence rather than those that underline the disorderly, chaotic, variable and flux-like role of personal experience (Crossley, 2000) in the making of meaning and shaping of identity. Our research demonstrates the significance of “affect”, according to Life Story Coherence Coding Criteria (Baerger & McAdams, 1999) since even a clear and refined narrative structure is not a guarantee of positive results, as is demonstrated by the second story in the section about the dominance of the narrating self. We noted that even the use of a complex narrative structure by the narrating self is not associated with the level of PTG. The role of the experiencing self in the assessment of coherence of the story can be commented on using Androutsopoulou’s words: “The criterion of being in touch with emotions seems of particular gravity and its role needs further exploration” (p. 402).

Further research could consider the details of using the experiencing self, not only its dominance or its scarcity but also its location and content. In our research, we learned that the experiencing self may be present in much weaker manifestations, e.g., as one general sentence (“it was difficult”) that was repeated a few times at different points of the narrative without any relation to a specific detail or as another general sentence (“These eight years devastated me totally”) illustrating the whole traumatic event and summarizing the detailed story of the narrating self. In this case, the experiencing self does not form a story, there is no beginning, development or ending of its plot. It may also be present in rich manifestations that are, however, interrupted at some point, so its story does not have the proper closure. A pertinent question here is what matters most in this case: the kind of emotions unveiled in the part of the story that is told, or the point at which it ends. Does, for instance, the story of the experiencing self: “I don’t have a good relationship with my mum”-“I was scared I didn’t know who I should call”-“maybe I should do something different”-“I behaved badly” have different consequences than if the negative emotions were balanced out by the positive ones? The location and comprehensiveness of the experiencing self should also be discussed. Some stories are distinguished by a strong presence of the experiencing self at the beginning of the narrative when it invades a significant part of the narrative before the most general information about the participants, type and circumstance of the traumatic event are told. Does this expression strengthen the narrative potential of the whole story or weaken it?

The qualitative method we have used comes from literary theory. It can be characterized as universal and has been used to analyze novels in several languages. However, a distinctively Polish way of using the experiencing and narrating selves could be observed in our data. For instance, the majority of interviewees reached more easily for the narrating self. Dwelling on personal experiences of tragedy is not culturally appropriate in Poland, because for a long time the most widespread theme was that of collective, national trauma as a result of war, emigration and repressive, totalitarian state power. Wierzbicka identified “sincerity” as a typical Polish script of emotional expression but pointed out that “Polish culture does not have a tradition of elaborate verbalization of emotions or of highly developed analysis of one’s own emotions […]. Polish culture encourages spontaneity, not introspection” (Wierzbicka, 1999, p. 258). We can set this statement alongside the prediction of Szarota et al. (2015, p. 184): “We predicted that with close friends Poles not only are more expressive than with acquaintances or strangers, but this endorsement strategy is equally valid for all studied emotions no matter how negative or socially disruptive they are.”

The relationship between the strong presence of the experiencing self in a narrative and post-traumatic growth may indicate a person’s readiness to tell a stranger about their feelings and emotions related to the event as well as about the personal significance of the event. This correlation may speak of a certain cognitive and emotional “overworking” in this story – which means that talking about your own experiences is no longer difficult and threatening to self-esteem. This seems even more important in Polish culture, in which, as mentioned earlier, narratives are poorer in words related to emotionality. Living in a culture in which emotions and feelings are not revealed and emotional speech is somewhat different from the cultural norm may enhance the effect described above. Having an unprocessed story (which raises very strong or negative emotions) will be related to avoiding to talk about emotions so as not to reveal them to others (“because they think I have a problem”/“I’m abnormal/“I’m afraid I’ll lose control”/“I’m afraid of feeling it again” which are associated with emotions of anxiety and shame). If the event is overworked, people may not be ashamed or afraid of it, because they know that they dealt with it, and may even feel pride and want to share it. This hypothesis seems to be supported by the research of Amir et al. (1998), showing that in the description of every traumatic event, the frequency of emotional words is much lower than in stories related to other unpleasant events. Emotional avoidance is also a common reaction to trauma. In fact, emotional avoidance is part of the avoidance cluster of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, serving as a way for people with PTSD to escape painful or difficult emotions (Naifeh et al., 2012). This effect can be strengthened by embedding stories in a more emotionally-distant Polish culture and referring to the frequency of emotional words used in stories (which forces to reeexperience the story told, and also reveals the narrator’s internal world).

Limitations of the study

Our study has some limitations. The cross-sectional design limits conclusions about the cause-and-effect relationships between the use of the experiencing self and narrating self perspectives and post-traumatic growth. According to Tedeschi et al. (2018, p. 55) “Changed narratives can initiate and foster the post-traumatic growth processes but also be fostered by the realization of post-traumatic growth experiences”. Longitudinal research is required to explore the relationships between post-traumatic growth and the balance between the perspectives of the experiencing and narrating selves.

Since we have only examined the narratives of women there is still a question of gender differences in emotional expression. Women are said to internalize negative emotions (Allen & Haccoun, 1976), which may contribute to their frequent use of the narrating self in personal narratives of trauma, and to the observed correlation between the experiencing self and the presence of positive changes. However, we should remember that the concepts of the experiencing and narrating selves were developed at a time when most of the literary works that were being analyzed were written by men, and thus the difference between men’s and women’s accounts will probably not be significant.

We believe that by using different tools we could provide a further analysis of the low-level balance narratives. The concept of “small stories” (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008) would allow us to refer to their quality in a more proper way that this based on the comprehensiveness, completeness and coherence of the stories of both selves of the first-person narrator. Small stories are in fact short enough to be told “in passing, in our everyday encounters with each other” (Bamberg, 2004, p. 367) or to be shared on social media. Their specificity also comprises the presence of “deferrals of tellings and refusals to tell” (Georgakopoulou 2007, p. 151). A fragmentary and chaotic narrative with less complicated action would, therefore, be further explained.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Robert A. Neimeyer who provided careful guidance along the way of preparing final version of our article for his valuable comments and gracious support.

Additional information

Funding

The second author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research: this study was supported by the grant 2013/10/E/HS6/00502 from the National Science Center, Poland.