Week 1 Blog Post
Narrative identity as described by McAdams (2011), is the internal sense of self that makes sense of your life, justifies who you are and where you might be going. It is shaped by the encounters and events throughout your life and can change over time dependent on those. Changes in narrative identity occur naturally through developmental phases as we age or through specific events. Early drafts of personal identity are more mythical or can be grandiose but get grounded in reality as people reach adulthood. During later life narrative identity takes on a softer glow as life stories become more general with less emphasis on specific events (McAdams, 2011) Negative experiences can sometimes lead to a redemptive change of narrative where people go through a process of altering their own narrative identity after a period of atonement or recovery. While narrative identity is an internal discourse it can also be affected by social elements leading to a performance of narrative identity in dif...