Narrative Identity: Who We Leave Out in the Stories About Ourselves

We all have a story about who we are.

It starts off simple. We collect fragments picked up from family, early relationships, culture. You were the strong one. The emotional one. The fixer. The mess. The achiever. The burden. The one who held it together. The one who always fell apart.

At some point, those fragments start to arrange themselves into something coherent. It’s how we make shape of the chaos.
We say: this is what happened. This is who I am. This is how I became.

But the problem is it’s easy to feel stuck.

Narrative identity says: the self is not fixed, but told.

In my research, I look at how we construct meaning not only through thought, but through relationship: how we locate the self in proximity to others. Who we are is shaped not just by memory, but by the emotional logic of what we needed to believe in order to feel safe.

Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this narrative identity: the internalized, evolving story we tell about our lives that gives us a sense of coherence.

Sometimes the story gets distorted in service of protection. We downplay certain events. We reframe harm as normal. We cut out the parts that were too tender to name.

And so the story becomes a container… but also a cage.

And for good reason. There’s a kind of survival intelligence in this.

Omitting parts of your story can be a way of staying connected, especially when the full truth would threaten the connection you depended on.

But eventually, we find ourselves stuck inside the narrative we created. There’s a bit of an ironic twist in how we become fluent in our own mythology. What we tell ourselves in an attempt of self-preservation becomes the very thing that hurts us.

I’m the one who’s too much. I’m the one who’s not enough. I always ruin things. I don’t need anyone. I’m the caretaker. I’m the chaos.

And even when our lives change, even when the relationships shift, we keep playing the same role. Because it feels familiar and because it gives us something to hold.

So what would it mean to loosen your own grip?

It’s about returning to your own narrative with curiosity.

What did you leave out to make it make sense? And what parts of you are waiting to be rewritten into the plotline?

Your story isn’t wrong.
It’s just incomplete. All of ours are.

And as you grow, especially in connection with others, you’re allowed to update it.
That version of me was doing the best she could with the resources she had.
More happened than I originally told myself.
I’m still becoming.

Because the self isn’t fixed. It lives not just in the telling, but in the re-telling.