Transforming Your Narrative: The Power of Redemption in Relationships

By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app

Human beings are story tellers. We use stories to entertain, teach, warn, and convey history. Synthesis of 2,000+ works of fiction show that nearly all stories take a form that falls into six main emotional arcs, or plotlines.^1,2 Here are a few of the most commonly repeated emotional arcs that we tell and consume: 

• Rags to Riches – rise (Pride and Prejudice, Tangled, Holes)
• Man in a Hole – fall then rise (The Hobbit, Finding Nemo)
• Double Man in a Hole – fall rise fall rise (Harry Potter, Lion King)
• Cinderella – rise fall rise (Frozen, Up, Aladdin)

These stories also represent the form of narratives that are running in the background of our minds about our own lives and relationships. I want to offer a deeply transformative idea: You are the protagonist of your story. You are on a hero’s journey. The type of narrative you are telling shapes your values, goals, and direction.

On the subject of narratives, psychologist Dan McAdams says this:

The stories we construct to make sense of our lives are fundamentally about our struggle to reconcile who we imagine we were, are, and might be in our heads and bodies with who we were, are, and might be in the social contexts of family, community, the workplace, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, and culture ³

To go further, the narratives that we hold—about ourselves, friends, parents, spouses, romantic partners, children, siblings, the world— are how we organize our choices, words, and actions towards them.

Two particular narrative forms on which relationships operate are narratives of Redemption and Contamination.⁴ Perhaps, given the struggles of your life, things have felt contaminated from the start, and you’ve built a narrative around how all good things come to an end or relationships sour eventually. Perhaps it has felt like one battle after another, one loss after another.

Or perhaps your “life was going well, until PERSON A came into it.” That the answer is “this is contaminated and unsalvageable. I’d be happier and better off without PERSON A.”

Or perhaps we shift focus to the unavoidable themes of contamination in the world at large (climate, politics, healthcare, the church). That there is nothing left to do but watch it burn. What’s the point? Who can argue with the fact that there is plenty to feel despondent about right now.

If your short-term goal is to shed your life of inconvenience and friction, then contamination narratives work great. But the long-term costs are high.

If the true desire of your heart is for deep, beautiful, committed relationships and communities, you might consider an alternative. Take the risk to dream about what relationships in your life could look like. In your hero’s journey, what would it look like organize your life and personal relationships around a narrative of redemption? The arc of this story is something good, turned difficult, turned good again.

A redemption narrative does not suppress the truth, and it does not require burying the reality of suffering and pain. In a redemption narrative, acceptance of the struggle that you are experiencing is a necessary part of the journey. With a narrative of redemption running in the background, the work that we put into relationships deepens our eventual satisfaction and meaning. Redemption narratives guide us to action that hopes, towards something deeply worthwhile.

Contamination narratives guide us to positions that things are ‘unchangable’ or ‘unsalvagable.’ These types of narratives lead us to avoid the pain of deeper investment and engagement and to hedge towards beating others to an inevitably hopeless result. When operating out of a contamination narrative, why risk time, vulnerability, painful communication, or apologizing for my actions? If I am operating under the assumption that the eventual outcome will be rejection and loss, then I organize myself around self-protection from that outcome.  

Alternatively, here are some of the actions that spring from a redemption narrative:

• The hero organizes motivation around breaking the cycle of divorce and addiction in his family.  
• The hero circles back to a friend after a falling out to unpack what happened.
• The hero says “I’m sorry, and I forgive you too.”
• The hero steps out of her comfort zone to join a club or develop a hobby with a goal to feel more connected.
• The hero shows up for his children after a painful divorce.
• The hero apologizes to her child after getting angry over a disagreement.
• The hero shows up for an aging parent in a time of need, even though the emotions and history are complicated.
• The hero risks vulnerability, “what happened between us hurt me, and I acted out of that hurt.”
• The hero breaks the silence in a relationship by re-engaging in a conversation, starting with taking responsibility for the pain that he caused.
• The hero wakes up early, makes coffee, and delivers it to her spouse even in the midst of an unresolved conflict.
• The hero holds hope that relationships, despite being difficult and painful, are worth it.

By showing up in these ways, based on the hope of redemption, we align with our aspirational selves. We model redemption for the people in our lives.

In the end, redemption narratives share the same structure: Something good, turned difficult, turned beautiful.

1 Reagan, A. J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D., Danforth, C. M., & Dodds, P. S. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ data science, 5(1), 1-12.

2 Lafrance, A. (July 12, 2016). The Six Main Arcs in Storytelling, as Identified by an A.I. The Atlantic Monthly

3 McAdams, D. P. (2008). Personal narratives and the life story. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 242–262). The Guilford Press.

4 McAdams, D. P. (2013). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by-revised and expanded edition. Oxford University Press.

5 McAdams, D. P., Reynolds, J., Lewis, M., Patten, A. H., & Bowman, P. J. (2001). When bad things turn good and good things turn bad: Sequences of redemption and contamination in life narrative and their relation to psychosocial adaptation in midlife adults and in students. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 27(4), 474-485.