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Episode: The Power of Family Stories

Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:56:44

Episode Shownotes

There's a tradition around many Thanksgiving dinner tables that's as consistent as stuffing and pumpkin pie: the family stories that get told year after year. Sometimes these stories are funny; sometimes they make us roll our eyes. No matter how we feel about these tales, we rarely pause to consider

how they shape who we are and how we view the world. This week, we talk to psychologist Robyn Fivush about the profound impact that family stories can have on our lives. If you enjoyed today's conversation, here are more Hidden Brain episodes you might like:Healing 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life The Story of Your LifeRewinding & RewritingThanks for listening!

Summary

In the episode "The Power of Family Stories," host Shankar Vedantam and psychologist Robyn Fivush discuss the critical role family narratives play in shaping identities, fostering connections, and enhancing mental health. Through shared experiences and storytelling, individuals develop a better understanding of themselves and their place within the family. The conversation emphasizes the importance of collaborative storytelling versus repetitive storytelling styles, with research indicating that families who engage in storytelling exhibit healthier outcomes for children. Overall, understanding family stories strengthens emotional regulation and provides tools for coping with life's challenges.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Power of Family Stories) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
Today's episode is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many years ago, when I was a child, my mother told me a family story. It had to do with her brother, my uncle.

00:00:19 Speaker_04
He was an extremely creative man with varied interests in books and music and art. He could also be a little, how shall I put this, disorganized. My uncle was the kind of person who was always ready to reminisce, and he was an amazing storyteller.

00:00:36 Speaker_04
He could spin the tiniest events into funny stories that had you laughing until you cried. Anyway, the story my mother told me had to do with my uncle's wedding day.

00:00:48 Speaker_04
On his way to the wedding venue, my uncle suddenly remembered he had forgotten to invite a dear friend and fellow storyteller, his barber. So he took a detour and went to the barber shop to make sure his friend came to the wedding.

00:01:05 Speaker_04
When he got to the shop, the barber was busy with his customers and asked my uncle to wait while he finished. My uncle happily settled down and he and the barber traded funny stories as the scissors went snip snip.

00:01:20 Speaker_04
All this time, of course, the guests at the wedding and the prospective bride were getting increasingly alarmed. Had something happened to the groom? Had he gotten cold feet? Was the marriage called off?

00:01:33 Speaker_04
When my uncle finally showed up, his barber triumphantly in tow, he had no idea why everyone was upset. I've always loved that story because it perfectly captured my uncle's attitude toward life. Live in the moment, be present.

00:01:52 Speaker_04
Deadlines and appointments can wait.

00:01:58 Speaker_04
This week on Hidden Brain, we explore the world of family stories, how these stories shape who we become, and the fascinating science that demonstrates why telling certain kinds of stories can make us happier, healthier, and better people.

00:02:30 Speaker_04
Cultures around the world have occasions that are designed for people to gather, chat, and reminisce. This can happen on birthdays, on anniversaries, and at funerals. Family members remind each other about the ties that bind them together.

00:02:43 Speaker_04
Disputes break out over half-remembered events from decades ago. At Emory University, psychologist Robin Fyvush studies the psychological effects these stories can have on our lives. Robin Fyvush, welcome to Hidden Brain.

00:02:58 Speaker_02
Thank you. I'm so privileged to be here. I really am looking forward to this interview.

00:03:03 Speaker_04
Robin, when you were very young, your family was struck by two terrible tragedies more or less simultaneously. It changed the course of your life. Can you tell me what happened?

00:03:15 Speaker_02
Well, my father died when I was quite young and my mother was in a very, very bad car accident. She went through the passenger side window of the windshield, was thrown out of the car, and she was actually in a coma for six weeks.

00:03:30 Speaker_02
So she was in a coma when my father died.

00:03:33 Speaker_04
Oh my God.

00:03:34 Speaker_02
And she had a lot of bodily fractures, as you might imagine. She was in a body cast, but she also had a lot of cognitive damage and was essentially in and out of hospitals for a number of years.

00:03:49 Speaker_02
So my grandparents raised me and my sister for most of my childhood. And during that time, we spent frankly, quite a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms and not spending time doing many of the typical activities of childhood.

00:04:08 Speaker_04
If I could ask you, what happened to your dad? How did he come to pass away at an early age?

00:04:13 Speaker_02
He died of cancer.

00:04:14 Speaker_04
I see. And how old were you at the time, Robin?

00:04:17 Speaker_02
I was three years old.

00:04:19 Speaker_04
Oh, so you were very young. You probably have very few memories of your dad.

00:04:22 Speaker_02
You know, it's interesting. It's one of the things that actually got me interested in studying memory, is I was very young. And most people can't remember things that happened before they were about three or three and a half.

00:04:34 Speaker_02
That's a very strong research finding. When you ask adults to recall their earliest childhood memories, they almost never remember anything that happened before they were three. But I have this unfortunate marker in my childhood.

00:04:47 Speaker_02
I know if I remember my father, it had to be something that happened before I was three. And I actually have two memories of my father. They are very strong images and sense perceptions of being with him.

00:05:10 Speaker_04
Can you tell me what those two memories are?

00:05:13 Speaker_02
One is actually we were visiting caverns, underground caverns in upstate New York. I believe they're called house caverns. My sister is about three years older than me. This is my mother, my father. And I was on my father's shoulders.

00:05:30 Speaker_02
And I remember the feeling of being on his shoulders. And then suddenly things going very dark. Because they turned off all the lights in the cave. And feeling safe. And that's it. That's the whole memory.

00:05:48 Speaker_04
And you felt safe, of course, because you were sitting on your father's shoulders.

00:05:52 Speaker_02
I was sitting on his shoulders. And of course, obviously, that's a super meaningful memory to me because I have so little of my father, so little of that security of having my father there to protect me and support me.

00:06:09 Speaker_02
The other memory is much more mundane. I remember him giving me a bath.

00:06:23 Speaker_04
The twin tragedies of her father's death and her mother's injuries devastated the family. Of course, Robin was too young to fully understand what was happening.

00:06:32 Speaker_02
I'm sure it was devastating. You know, I was three. So my experience was just, my life was yanked out, but I didn't have a full cognitive understanding of the context and what was going on.

00:06:46 Speaker_02
So my memories from that period are very fragmentary and really not very coherent in the way, and frankly, my family, their way of dealing with it was just never to talk about it.

00:07:08 Speaker_04
I mean I can imagine at one level this must have been so painful and even recollecting these events must have been so painful and perhaps they were worried that you were very small and talking to you about something that was painful might have hurt you.

00:07:20 Speaker_04
So I can imagine that those might have been the impulses that caused people to say let's not talk about it.

00:07:27 Speaker_02
I think that is part of it, and I want to come back to that. I think for my family, that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was just, frankly, my grandmother's personality.

00:07:37 Speaker_02
So she went through a lot of hard times, and her way of dealing with all of it was, we just don't revisit that. We just don't go back there. It's not worth revisiting.

00:07:49 Speaker_02
Quite frankly, when I would ask her questions about her past, my past, my family's past, the answer was always, why do you need to know that? It's over. It's past.

00:08:04 Speaker_04
In time, Robin would come to study the role that family stories play in the psychological well-being of both children and their caregivers. But that was much later.

00:08:13 Speaker_04
As a child, Robin wasn't comparing what happened in her family to what happened in other families.

00:08:19 Speaker_02
I didn't really notice it until... I didn't notice it until I met my first husband's family. And I started to spend a lot of time with them. And they were a huge family, a family storytelling family. They told stories

00:08:40 Speaker_02
like many, many families, all the time. But they had all the kinds of family stories. They had the everyday, tell me about your day-to-day, what happened, sharing their home. Remember, this is like when we went to the beach last summer.

00:08:54 Speaker_02
And they had the big, iconic stories. Every Thanksgiving, every Thanksgiving, the story about how One of the uncles crashed the car through the trees when he was a teenager, had to get told.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
And it had to get told the same way with the same punchlines every year. And I started to realize how important that was to keep that family cemented as a happy, healthy family.

00:09:29 Speaker_04
Yeah, so it's not the information in that uncle car crash story that was important because everybody knew the facts already.

00:09:39 Speaker_02
Everybody knew every detail of this story. If you told it the wrong way, everybody would correct you.

00:09:46 Speaker_04
And what went through your heart when you saw that? I mean, you must have been happy to be part of this family that that had this rich family lore. But was there a part of you that sort of said that noticed that you didn't have that?

00:09:58 Speaker_04
I mean, is that how you was that made aware to you?

00:10:01 Speaker_02
I think it was obvious. I mean, it was such a contrast that it was so different than the way my family interacted.

00:10:17 Speaker_04
As Robin became a researcher, she was to learn that family stories are not just family stories. They are much more than dinner table conversation or fodder for Thanksgiving table punchlines.

00:10:29 Speaker_04
Family stories turn out to play a crucial role in the mental health of the people who tell the stories and the mental health of the people who listen to the stories. They can serve as anchors for identity and self-esteem.

00:10:41 Speaker_04
Told right, they can change the direction of our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

00:11:08 Speaker_05
This is Hidden Brain.

00:11:10 Speaker_04
I'm Shankar Vedantam. Robin Fiversh is a psychologist at Emory University who studies the way parents and children communicate. Early on in her career, she spent extended amounts of time with families, listening to how parents talked with children.

00:11:25 Speaker_02
I was interested in how families, particularly mothers, talked with their three, four, five-year-old children about the events of the child's life. So we did a lot of work where we would visit families in their homes and hang out with them.

00:11:43 Speaker_02
And then we would explicitly ask mothers to sit down with their child and talk about some things that have happened, some special occurrences. We gave them very few instructions. And we looked at how the past got reconstructed.

00:11:59 Speaker_02
And we discovered that this was really an important part of children learning how to narrate their own past. And also that it actually helped children increase their ability to remember the past.

00:12:15 Speaker_02
We found that different mothers do this in different ways and it has a lot of consequences not only for how children remember things but how they feel about themselves.

00:12:28 Speaker_02
So mothers and children who are more elaborate and detailed in these kinds of early memory conversations have children who have higher self-esteem even very early in development

00:12:43 Speaker_02
They also have higher emotional understanding because so many of the events that we talk about are emotional.

00:12:50 Speaker_02
So I was talking with my colleague, Marshall Duke, talking about the power of these early conversations and how important it was for children to build up their own narrative story, the story of who they are.

00:13:05 Speaker_02
Marshall's a clinical psychologist and he said, yeah, that's totally important. But I bet that what's equally important is how families talk about the family past, the family history.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
Coming from the family I did, I was like, I don't think that matters as much. I really think that that's not as important. So we had this conversation, and we were part of a big funded research program. We had the means to do this.

00:13:35 Speaker_02
We said, let's use our resources to figure this out. So that's when we decided to just tape record families talking over the dinner table to see what they talk about.

00:13:52 Speaker_02
So we tape recorded these families and we simply asked them to just tape record a few dinner time conversations. We were not there, we just, this is old technology, it was literally a physical tape recorder. One of those casserole recorders.

00:14:07 Speaker_02
Families tell stories all the time. Some reference to a past event occurs every five minutes in a typical Tuesday night spaghetti dinner.

00:14:19 Speaker_04
Wow.

00:14:20 Speaker_02
And we know from other research that 40% of all human conversation is referring to past experiences. So that's what human beings do. We talk about what happened to us and we ask other people what happened to them.

00:14:35 Speaker_02
We tell stories, we listen to stories all the time. Most of the stories, and we're talking about, you know, a 35, 40 minute dinner time conversation. Most of the stories are what are called today I stories.

00:14:50 Speaker_02
So most of these table conversations were four, five people. So you're coming back together at the end of the day and you want to weave yourself back together as a family. So a lot of it is, tell me about your day, what happened?

00:15:06 Speaker_02
And, you know, we got what we expected. How was your math test? Did, you know, did you make up with Jenny after your fight yesterday? But what also surprised us is that the parents also talked about their day with their children.

00:15:21 Speaker_02
They talked about what happened at work or what happened in their social life. So they're starting to open up the world for their teenagers. This is what an adult world looks like. This is the world you're going to be developing into, right?

00:15:38 Speaker_02
It's not just your perspective on the world. I'm telling you stories about my world. So it's really opening the world up for them. So that's a lot of it. But then about a third of the stories are these family stories, where the family

00:15:55 Speaker_02
is talking about something is said, and somebody says, and it's just as frequently the child as the parent. That's like when we went to grandma's last Thanksgiving, and then they start talking about that. Or that's like when we went to see Jaws.

00:16:14 Speaker_02
And embedded in those conversations, you get family history. where parents will start talking about when they were children or their grandparents' lives.

00:16:27 Speaker_02
And then it turns out the families that told more of these everyday stories were in fact doing better. But what really predicted good functioning, both for the family and for the child, were the family stories.

00:16:51 Speaker_04
So in other words, can you talk a little bit about that? When you say that the children were doing better, they had better well-being, how so?

00:16:58 Speaker_02
So families that tell more stories show more trust and community within the family. Then specific to the child, children within families that tell more of these stories

00:17:12 Speaker_02
and particularly tell them in a certain way, and I do want to come back to that, have higher self-esteem. They have higher academic competence. They're doing better in school. They have higher social competence. They are more socially skilled.

00:17:29 Speaker_02
And in later research, because of course we followed up on this first study with lots and lots of research, as they get older and you can start to assess

00:17:41 Speaker_02
more mature aspects of well-being, like a sense of agency, a sense of maturity, a sense of meaning and purpose in life. All of that is higher for children and adolescents and young adults who know more of these family stories.

00:18:09 Speaker_04
So as you were probing the relationship between these family stories and well-being, including long-term well-being, you and a colleague created an instrument called the Do You Know Scale.

00:18:22 Speaker_04
What does this tool do, Robin, and what are some of the kinds of questions you have on it?

00:18:27 Speaker_02
The Do You Know Scale is a 20-item yes-no questionnaire that Marshall Duke and I developed simply to assess, as a very, very rough index, the extent to which families talk about their shared and family history.

00:18:46 Speaker_02
We ask adolescents and young adults, do you know where your parents met? Do you know where your mother went to school? Do you know what sports your father played in high school? Do you know where your grandmother grew up?

00:18:59 Speaker_02
Do you know what school your grandmother went to? Do you know how your grandparents met? So we're not getting stories. We're just getting yes, no.

00:19:07 Speaker_02
But in order to answer yes to a question like that, we're making the assumption you must have been told these stories. And it turns out it's a pretty good assessment of it in two ways. One, This very simple 20 questions, yes, no, is a good index.

00:19:28 Speaker_02
It relates to self-esteem, agency, meaning and purpose in life, emotional competence. So there's something that this is tapping into that's meaningful.

00:19:42 Speaker_04
There was one question on the do you know scale that I found very striking. It's, do you know about a relative whose face froze in a grumpy position because he or she did not smile enough? What was the point of asking that question, Robin?

00:19:58 Speaker_02
That was, Marshall and I are both of Jewish heritage. And this, I think, is something that is culturally Jewish.

00:20:07 Speaker_02
We both grew up with caregivers, parents or grandparents, who would say to us when we would cry or scowl, be careful, your Aunt Linda cried all the time and her face froze in that position. And we both had that story.

00:20:29 Speaker_02
So when we were thinking about family stories, it was kind of an inside joke, to be honest. So we ended up just tagging it on to the end of the questionnaire. But we get asked about that question more than any other question.

00:20:49 Speaker_04
So one of the things that you pointed out, and I think is important to underline, is that the key here is not just the knowing of stories in an informational sense, but you discovered there was something powerful about the process of family storytelling.

00:21:04 Speaker_04
Can you talk about this idea, Robin, that what happens, that the important thing here is not the facts, but in some ways the process by which those facts are arrived at?

00:21:14 Speaker_02
Absolutely. The key here is storytelling, not just stories.

00:21:18 Speaker_02
So yes, it's important that we know the stories, but the process of learning those stories, hearing those stories, sharing those stories, constructing those stories together is what really is important in terms of this positive youth outcome.

00:21:33 Speaker_04
So, when telling family stories, you say that adults might be modeling the regulation and modulation of emotion, and in some ways, children are learning from this. How so, Robin?

00:21:46 Speaker_02
I think both when we're constructing stories, helping children understand their own experiences, or when we're talking with children about our experiences, the way that we talk about our emotions and how we reacted in the moment and how we dealt with that emotional reaction helps children understand appropriate emotional regulation.

00:22:11 Speaker_02
That's a very abstract sentence. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that. One of the really important things about reminiscing about the child's own emotional experiences is, you know, the child throws a tantrum in the supermarket.

00:22:29 Speaker_02
And that's the worst time to try and sit down and have, you know, a calm conversation with them. You just want to get out of the situation. But then later, when the child calms down, it's important to sit down and say, let's talk about what happened.

00:22:45 Speaker_02
Why were you so upset? And not to say, that was bad. You were wrong. But what happened? Why were you upset? OK, I understand why that upset you. But maybe being that upset was not the best way to get what they wanted.

00:23:01 Speaker_02
And to help them figure out how to recognize their emotions, and resolve them, and regulate them.

00:23:08 Speaker_04
So in other words, the story is helping you name the emotion, to understand how it came about, to understand what options you might have had in the moment.

00:23:15 Speaker_04
So it's allowing you in some ways to recreate the event in some ways and ask how could you maybe have reacted differently.

00:23:23 Speaker_02
I could not have said that better. When parents tell stories about their own childhood, they're, of course, not talking about their child's emotional reaction. But often those stories are told in moments where the kids are struggling with something.

00:23:37 Speaker_02
So the parent's story becomes, well, OK, let me tell you how I dealt with something like that in my life and the lesson I took from it. Maybe that will help you think about your life. They're worldviews. Stories are little models of the world.

00:24:04 Speaker_04
You found, Robin, that the way in which people tell these family stories is really important. And you've identified two common styles that parents use when telling family stories. What are these two styles?

00:24:18 Speaker_02
So some parents, some families are very elaborative or collaborative. So I'll give you an example. It's a very simple example. This is actually one of my favorite conversations. It was between a mother and her eight-year-old child.

00:24:33 Speaker_02
And they had gone to Callaway Gardens, which is a recreational, beautiful garden near here. They'd been on a long bike trip. And the child, I'll call her Rebecca, was riding on the handlebars of the mother's bike.

00:24:48 Speaker_02
And the mother was a bit of a daredevil, and Rebecca was a little scared because her mother was kind of going a little wild. And her mother is saying, you know, oh, it's so much fun, you know, rushing down those cobblestones. And Rebecca was saying,

00:25:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was, you know, I was a little scared. And the mother, they both laugh, so they're not laughing at Rebecca, they're laughing together. The mother says, yeah, you were a little scared. I was, maybe I shouldn't have done that.

00:25:17 Speaker_02
And then, you know, what else do you remember about it? And Rebecca says, oh, I was getting so tired. And, you know, I wanted to be home. And the mother, like, confirms, like, yes, it was a long day.

00:25:29 Speaker_02
And you know, but we had, but they're laughing and they're having a good time. And at the end, the mother says, we have a good time together, don't we? And Rebecca says, yes, we do. So they had different perspectives on that event.

00:25:43 Speaker_02
Rebecca may not have had as much fun as her mother, but they kind of come to an agreement that they enjoy being together and that they accept each other for who they are.

00:25:56 Speaker_04
Yeah, and they're constructing the story together even though in fact they don't exactly have the same story.

00:26:01 Speaker_02
They don't have the same memory.

00:26:03 Speaker_04
Yeah, but they're putting the two memories together and in some ways coming up with something that is a collaborative shared memory.

00:26:10 Speaker_02
Absolutely. And we see that even in the larger families when it's a whole family together. And this is also really particularly important. I mean obviously it's important to talk about the fun times, the positive events, laughing, creating those bonds.

00:26:26 Speaker_02
But it's also important to talk about the challenging experiences. Like I mentioned, having a temper tantrum, if you never talk about it, the child never learns what to do with that emotion the next time it happens.

00:26:40 Speaker_02
We asked families to talk about challenging experiences. Many of them talked about an illness or death, death of a grandparent or a beloved family pet.

00:26:50 Speaker_02
And the families that were more collaborative, who really shared the emotional experience, you know, I know that you were really sad about that. I was sad too. I remember, you know, that you, you were crying when Susie came over to hug you.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
And that kind of shared emotional resonance really helps us deal with grief and mourning and difficult experiences.

00:27:26 Speaker_04
There's also a second style of storytelling that you studied Robin and you call this a repetitive style of storytelling. What is this style? What does it look like?

00:27:35 Speaker_02
So rather than asking open-ended questions, you ask close-ended questions. Did you have fun, rather than how did you feel? And that there's no opportunity for the child to do more than say yes or no.

00:27:49 Speaker_02
Or even saying something like, you remember your grandmother's cookies, don't you? You know, maybe that's not always important to the child. Maybe she wants to talk about the ornaments that were on the Christmas tree.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
So it's not really giving the child an opportunity to recall their perspective on the event or what they remember. And when the child doesn't remember, the parent will simply repeat the question. You know, who drove down to Florida with us?

00:28:22 Speaker_02
Who was in the front seat? Don't you remember? Who was in the front seat with us? The child just doesn't remember. So it's almost as if the elaborative collaborative style is their goals are different.

00:28:39 Speaker_02
Their goals are to create a shared story in the moment that creates a resonance and a shared history and helps us to bond and understand each other. The more non-elaborative or repetitive parents, it's about getting the facts right.

00:29:00 Speaker_02
I remember there was a mother with her four-year-old son who was a dinosaur fanatic. And they were talking about going to a natural history museum. And she was asking about seeing the T. rex. And he was like, no. There was no T-Rex."

00:29:20 Speaker_02
And she's like, yes, there was. There was a T-Rex there. Don't you remember? And she goes on and says, you know, and then we saw, you know, the exhibit on this dinosaur and that dinosaur. And he's like, yeah, there was a Brontosaurus and da-da-da-da.

00:29:34 Speaker_02
And he lists them. He says, but there was no T-Rex. And she's saying, I know there was a T-Rex. And then he says, no. And he names another museum. And she says, oh. That's right. But it was almost as if there was a T-Rex there.

00:29:50 Speaker_02
So she, you know, it's not a collaboration of kind of, oh, maybe there wasn't, you know, maybe my memory could not be accurate or maybe the way you're remembering it is different or, you know, there's kind of an assumption that I remember it correctly and you don't.

00:30:11 Speaker_02
And it's my job to make sure you remember it correctly.

00:30:19 Speaker_04
I asked Robin why she thought families with collaborative styles of storytelling function better than families that told stories in order to get the facts right, or families that didn't tell stories at all.

00:30:32 Speaker_02
We create our sense of self through our sense of our experiences. I am the person I am because I've had these experiences. This has made me the person I am today. This has set up my beliefs, my goals, my values.

00:30:46 Speaker_02
Particularly in adolescence and young adulthood, When we really, all of us, go through a period of identity questioning, right? As children, we don't question our family's values, their religious values, their community values, their moral values.

00:31:06 Speaker_02
But then we get to an age where we have more resources. We're moving out into the world. We have a greater set of friends and contacts. We can think about things more abstractly. We start to go through what Eric Erickson called the identity crisis.

00:31:25 Speaker_02
Who am I? Who do I want to be? You know, just because my parents go to church? Do I want to go to church? Just because my parents vote for this political party, is that my political party?

00:31:38 Speaker_02
Many, many adolescents and young adults end up in the same place as their parents. But we all go through that process of exploration and questioning. And that's when we really start to put together what's called a life story or a life narrative.

00:31:54 Speaker_02
How did I become the person I am? And who do I want to be? In doing that, we need material. We certainly have our own experiences.

00:32:06 Speaker_02
But what we've discovered is that adolescents and young adults really draw from their parents' stories, the stories their parents tell them about their childhoods and their family history, to figure out what their own personal experiences mean and how to make sense of it.

00:32:25 Speaker_02
It's how they draw their life lessons and moral stances.

00:32:32 Speaker_04
An interesting finding from your research, Robin, is that knowing family stories appears to help people be more resilient in the face of adversity.

00:32:42 Speaker_04
And you say this might be because hearing other people's struggles provides us with something that you call vicarious memory. What is vicarious memory?

00:32:52 Speaker_02
Vicarious memory is a memory that you have of something that happened to somebody else. So I can tell you, for example, I can tell you a story that happened to my husband when he was a child. I wasn't there. I didn't know him when he was a child.

00:33:07 Speaker_02
But he's told me that story. I know that story. And so I have a vicarious memory of it. That's what these intergenerational narratives are. Most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
And these vicarious memories essentially provide models or views of how the world works. So when we have these stories of our parents and our family, they become ways of understanding both how the world works and how we fit into that world.

00:33:58 Speaker_04
One of your studies looked at how children coped following the 9-11 attacks, with specific attention to the role of the family stories being told. Tell me about that study and what you found.

00:34:10 Speaker_02
What we discovered is that the families who had been able to talk more openly and in more collaborative ways about difficult and challenging experiences pre-9-11, had kids post 9-11 who were showing better aspects of well-being.

00:34:29 Speaker_02
They were showing fewer behavior problems, fewer indexes of depression, less anxiety. fewer symptoms like anger problems, substance abuse.

00:34:42 Speaker_02
So there was something about being in a collaborative storytelling family that buffered them against some of the anxiety that we all experienced after 9-11.

00:34:58 Speaker_04
There was another study conducted by the psychologist Adam Brown of the New School that looked at how familiarity with family stories affects military veterans. What did he find, Robin?

00:35:10 Speaker_02
So as you might imagine, military veterans who have seen combat come home, and it's very, very difficult for them to talk about their experiences for multiple reasons. One, they themselves are traumatized.

00:35:24 Speaker_02
They don't want to traumatize their listeners. And frankly, their listeners don't always encourage Wanting to hear about the awful things that had to happen. We saw this with World War II vets, Holocaust survivors.

00:35:40 Speaker_02
It's a general pattern of people who have experienced trauma. We see it with refugee families. But the veterans who came home.

00:35:50 Speaker_02
having experienced traumatic combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ones who knew more of their family history showed higher levels of adjustment and well-being than those who did not.

00:36:06 Speaker_02
And again, it's some suggestion that having that as a buffer is helpful. And I think it's because that tells you we're a family that perseveres. We've been through hard times. We've gotten through them. We stay together. We get through it.

00:36:40 Speaker_04
In one of the stories that you elicited from one of your research participants, a 14-year-old named Mary, she told you about a story involving her grandfather and her father. Tell me that story, Robin.

00:36:54 Speaker_02
This was an African-American family, and it shows how family stories can situate us not only in a family history, but in world history. So this is a story about the Civil Rights Movement and about this family's role in the Civil Rights Movement.

00:37:13 Speaker_02
So Mary told us this story that her father, when he was in a stroller, was taken to a civil rights rally where MLK spoke in Atlanta by his, I think it was by his grandparents.

00:37:29 Speaker_02
And he still remembers it, even though he was so young, he was in a stroller. And according to the story, it really changed his perception of the world he felt validated, and it was the awakening of his political consciousness. Now, is that possible?

00:37:51 Speaker_02
Probably not if he was in a stroller, but it's still a great story. And Mary herself used that story to talk about her own interest and work in political activism.

00:38:12 Speaker_04
So when Mary tells that story of her father in a stroller listening to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., what she's saying is, that is my story as well.

00:38:23 Speaker_02
That is my story, not just of me and my family, but of my people.

00:38:38 Speaker_04
You found that when young people tell family stories from the perspective of a parent or an ancestor, this can have very powerful effects.

00:38:48 Speaker_04
You once heard a story from a 14-year-old named Dave who told you a story about his mother when she was in high school. What was the story?

00:38:56 Speaker_02
Dave was 14, and he talked about this story where his mother was also in junior high or middle school, and she was at the school bus stop, and she overheard one kid bullying this other little boy.

00:39:13 Speaker_02
And she went up to him, and this is the story that Dave tells. She went up to him and she said, stop bullying that kid, even though she was really scared herself and was afraid of what the bully would do to her. And the bully said, what's it to you?

00:39:27 Speaker_02
And she said, it's not right. And so the bully hauled off and hit her. And then he comes back. He said, but my mother, you know, she didn't even realize her nose was broken, but she went to the hospital and indeed her nose got broken.

00:39:40 Speaker_02
And that was just such a courageous thing for my mom to do, to stand up to a bully like that. And the coda of the story, and this is really critical too, is, and it really taught me how important it is to stand up to bullies.

00:39:57 Speaker_02
So Dave is putting himself in his mother's shoes, in her head. What is she thinking? What is she saying? How is she feeling? And that even though she was scared, she did it anyway. So it really is this lovely

00:40:14 Speaker_02
model of what it means to be morally courageous, that he's internalizing.

00:40:25 Speaker_04
I mean, he's essentially saying, my mother could be courageous when she was 14. I can too.

00:40:32 Speaker_02
The developmental age matching, I think, is important because every child that age thinks their parent doesn't understand them and never went through anything like this. But this is, she's like me. And of course, parents are identity figures.

00:40:47 Speaker_02
I'm like her.

00:41:01 Speaker_04
Stories are not just stories. They are sophisticated tools that humans use to pass on values, norms, and the complex contours of relationships. In family settings, stories can be engines of meaning, identity, and purpose.

00:41:15 Speaker_04
When we come back, how we can start to tell better stories. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University who studies family stories.

00:41:44 Speaker_04
She's found that intergenerational storytelling has a wide range of psychological benefits that range from increased resilience to higher self-esteem.

00:41:54 Speaker_04
Robin, you and your colleague Marshall Duke have theorized that there are three types of family stories and that one of these three is the most predictive of positive outcomes. What are these three types of stories, Robin?

00:42:08 Speaker_02
Ascending, descending, and oscillating. These are not about particular stories, it's about the shape of the whole family saga, so to speak. So this is really the family history. So ascending, in some sense, it's the American dream.

00:42:22 Speaker_02
You know, we came with nothing, we worked hard, and we succeeded. Ta-da! Descending is, things are bad, they only got worse, things are never gonna get better. And oscillating is life happens. There's good in life, there's bad in life.

00:42:45 Speaker_02
We will talk about the bad things that happened, but we'll also put them in the context of all of the good things that happened. So, for example, we came, we worked hard, Unfortunately, we didn't have as much success as we might have liked.

00:43:05 Speaker_02
There were some back steps that we had to take, but we overcame. And now, we are here and we're still together. That's a characterization, because all family sagas are a little bit of all of those.

00:43:21 Speaker_02
But the problem with an ascending, everything's great all the time, is it's not. And life happens. And if that's your model, when something bad happens, you have no resources.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
You have no, well, I know Grandpa Joe went through something like this and was okay. You have nothing to rely on. So you just have no coping skills. Descending, of course, is this kind of spiraling down into rumination.

00:43:49 Speaker_02
So the oscillating story is one where you have a sense of life has its ups and downs, but we are a strong, persevering family. We will overcome. We will get through this.

00:44:13 Speaker_04
You say that it's really valuable for parents to share stories of their own transgressions with their children. What are these transgression stories and why are they important to share?

00:44:24 Speaker_02
Transgression stories are stories that really challenge our sense of who we are. We did something that we're ashamed of, not proud of, we feel guilty about. We hurt somebody or did something wrong. And we all do it.

00:44:39 Speaker_02
I mean, hopefully, in our lives, small transgressions. We lie. We cheat. Maybe we do a little bit of stealing. Or we betray a trust. We break a promise. So for example, we're working with adolescents.

00:44:55 Speaker_02
So the stories that the parents tell, the transgressions are minor. They cheated on an exam. Relatively minor. A lot of them are about lying to their parent or sneaking out.

00:45:07 Speaker_02
I think sometimes adolescents and young adults think that their parents don't understand. what it is to go through teenage angst, don't understand what it is to be angry or dark or moody. But in fact, we all have those memories.

00:45:32 Speaker_02
And it's one thing to say, oh, yes, I felt like that too when I was your age. I think it's another thing when you tell a story like this, it gives it a texture, a reality. It's like, You really were a brat. Wow, you do get it. You get who I am.

00:45:48 Speaker_02
You get what I'm feeling.

00:45:58 Speaker_04
You also say that collecting and saving physical objects can also keep family stories alive. Robin, you treasure an object that connects you to a woman whom you've never met named Annie Lester. What is this object and who was Annie Lester?

00:46:15 Speaker_02
The object is a diamond engagement ring. So when I married my husband, unfortunately, both of his parents died relatively young and he neither was alive when I met him. So I never had the opportunity to meet either one of them.

00:46:31 Speaker_02
But when we got married, he was able to give me his mother's ring. His mother's name was Annie Lester. He has a fairly large and very good storytelling family.

00:46:48 Speaker_02
So I have been enmeshed in stories about Paul, his father, and Annie Lester, his mother, and everybody has these fabulous stories. But I never got a chance to meet them. But through this ring, I feel connected to his mother.

00:47:05 Speaker_02
And his mother was, she was a wisp of a woman who was a force of nature. She also was very wild in her teenage years, settled down, and was just fiercely loyal to her family.

00:47:25 Speaker_02
And anybody who did any kind of threatened harm to her family got a lesson from Annie Lester. She had a sharp tongue and wasn't afraid to use it. She was stubborn, but unbelievably loving. And I just love those characteristics.

00:47:46 Speaker_02
So I feel connected to her, even though I've never met her. Stories carry a connection, even when that person is no longer there. And that connection, for me, with Annie Lester, is a connection of love and compassion.

00:48:05 Speaker_02
So that I can still feel that love and compassion, even when the person is no longer there.

00:48:25 Speaker_04
As you were listening to today's story, you may have found yourself casting your mind back to your own family. Did you come from a storytelling family or a taciturn family?

00:48:34 Speaker_04
Did you notice that some people in your family love to tell stories, while others didn't see the point of it?

00:48:40 Speaker_04
In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we explore the complex gender dynamics in family stories.

00:48:50 Speaker_04
We explore why women tell stories differently than men, and why both men and women tell stories about women differently than stories about men.

00:49:00 Speaker_04
Robin also shares some specific techniques to elicit from family members the deep, rich, elaborative stories that seem to predict better mental health and self-esteem, especially for young people.

00:49:12 Speaker_04
If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, How to Bind Your Family Together. If you're not yet a subscriber, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hiddenbrain.

00:49:28 Speaker_04
You can get a free seven-day trial in both places. You'll instantly have access to all our subscriber-only content, including past episodes and stories where listeners ask our favorite guests their own questions.

00:49:40 Speaker_04
Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Robin Fivush is a psychologist at Emory University. Robin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

00:49:57 Speaker_02
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

00:50:02 Speaker_04
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

00:50:17 Speaker_04
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Today's story comes from Gary Dietz.

00:50:36 Speaker_04
He wants to thank four unsung heroes who helped him over the span of two hours. Gary's son, Alexander, has a rare genetic condition that causes intellectual and behavioral challenges.

00:50:49 Speaker_04
Some time ago, for Alexander's 24th birthday, Gary and his partner, Eileen, decided to give Alexander one of his favorite experiences, a walk around Boston.

00:51:00 Speaker_04
On a warm fall day, the three of them drove from their home in New Hampshire to Charlestown, Massachusetts. From there, they got on the ferry to Boston's North End.

00:51:10 Speaker_03
And when we got on the ferry, my first unsung hero of the day was actually the woman taking tickets on the ferry. It was a very crowded and beautiful day. And she could see that there was something slightly amiss with Alexander. He seemed very nervous.

00:51:25 Speaker_03
And I thought that was extremely perceptive and compassionate of her. And while we were waiting on line, the woman taking the tickets just waved us by. It was a very subtle thing to do, and it made the ferry ride a little bit more bearable.

00:51:41 Speaker_04
After they got off the ferry, they found a restaurant. Alexander seemed fine, so they went inside. But right after they ordered, Alexander started to get agitated, and soon he was having a physical meltdown.

00:51:53 Speaker_03
And this was going to be very challenging within the city, because when he has a physical meltdown, he can hurt himself or others and we really shouldn't be in a restaurant. And this hadn't happened when we'd been out really for a few years.

00:52:08 Speaker_03
So we very quickly asked the bartender, he was a really cool young man, and we had just put our order in and I said, excuse me, sir, is it too late to cancel our order?

00:52:18 Speaker_03
And having worked at restaurants when I was a kid, I kind of knew it was probably too late to pull the order, but he just waved us off and he said, no problem, I get it. You guys come back another time when things are better for you.

00:52:32 Speaker_03
And again, this concept of perception and compassion happened a second time that day.

00:52:39 Speaker_04
They left the restaurant and walked around, hoping Alexander would calm down. Gary decided to call an Uber to get back to that car in Charlestown. As they waited for the Uber, Alexander became more distressed and began to get aggressive.

00:52:53 Speaker_04
Gary and Eileen had to physically restrain him. And that's when the Uber driver pulled up, a man named Muhammad.

00:53:01 Speaker_03
Muhammad was completely nonplussed. It was just like a normal thing for him, which I thought that was really weird.

00:53:08 Speaker_03
Because when we got in the car, he actually pulled his seat forward, leaned forward, put his hands all the way on the dashboard so that Alexander couldn't grab him. And it was really clear to me

00:53:19 Speaker_03
that he knew what was going on, which was really surprising, honestly. So he started to drive the Uber, and Alexander was still at the height of his meltdown.

00:53:30 Speaker_03
And the only words, really, that Muhammad said to us the whole time were, in sort of broken English, I have a cousin, same thing, I understand. And at that point, it was super heroic for me, because I was worried

00:53:47 Speaker_03
that the Uber driver would kick us out because Alexander was being dangerous or that I would be embarrassed or any one of the million feelings that parents of special needs young adults that have challenges experience.

00:54:01 Speaker_03
But he immediately made me feel as comfortable as I possibly could at that point for the few minute cab ride back to Charlestown where our car was parked.

00:54:12 Speaker_04
They got out of the car. By this point, all of them were hot and sweaty. Alexander needed water, so they found a cafe and sat down at the patio. But it was about to close.

00:54:23 Speaker_03
And so I sort of waved to the person who was inside the cafe, and she waved back to me, clearly indicating, we're closed, we're closed. And I try to make signs to her that, you know, I know you're closed, but I really need your help. Can you come out?

00:54:38 Speaker_03
And after a few seconds, she sort of caught on to the context.

00:54:42 Speaker_04
She brought them some ice water. Gary rubbed it on Alexander's head to help cool him down while Eileen went to get the car. By the time she came back, Alexander was finally getting back to his normal self.

00:54:55 Speaker_03
He gave us a hug and a handshake, which is the way he indicates that he's calmed down. And we were ready to drive back to New Hampshire. Eileen and I were a mess.

00:55:06 Speaker_03
But the only thing we could really talk about that made us feel better were these four people that really showed that situational awareness, that compassion, that ability to really put themselves in our shoes.

00:55:19 Speaker_03
And that's really why I call them heroes.

00:55:25 Speaker_04
If Gary could speak directly to his four heroes, this is what he would say.

00:55:30 Speaker_03
Your grace and helping me and my son and my family in that moment may seem like a little deal to you, but to me,

00:55:41 Speaker_03
It changed our day and also changes ever so slightly my perception of how crappy the world can be sometimes for my son and for the things that we experience with my son. So just because it seemed little to you doesn't mean it wasn't giant for us.

00:56:01 Speaker_03
And so I want to thank you for that.

00:56:11 Speaker_04
Gary Dietz of Brookline, New Hampshire. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. You can find more stories like this on the My Unsung Hero podcast or on our website, hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.