Discovering the Self in Storytelling

Even the extreme events, such as the near-death experiences, are often described by the survivors as seconds in which their entire life story unfolded like a film roll, and had a transformative impact by changing their life course.

In an informal caregiving environment, caregivers are faced with duties and difficulties that take up most of their daily time. For instance, caregivers experience depression, stress, anxiety, fatigue, and burden that is frequently taking a form of anger or arguments with care recipients. Feelings of despair and even resentment towards the care situation are not unlikely and in many cases physical manifestations of psychological conditions appear. Common health consequences caregivers face revolve around the situation that emotionally or physically becomes difficult for the caregiver. These situations might include a conflict about care, lack of support, life balance, financial concerns and exposure to the suffering of a loved one. Informal caregivers usually become one unexpectedly, either due to a sudden accident, illness, or stroke. In Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease the caregiver role is perhaps less sudden but progressively more intense. Caregiving creates a conflict between the lifestyle of a caregiver and the changes that must take place to incorporate caregiving in everyday life. The event itself, sudden or gradual, requires a lot of change that may range from changing or quitting one’s job, to completely changing and readjusting one’s life. A required adjustment may vary from role shift on a personal level such as from a spouse into a caregiver or from a daughter into a caregiver, to a professional level from employed to unemployed caregiver. All of these changes, affecting mental and physical wellbeing of a caregiver, also deeply disturb the dynamics and a story of oneself by creating the gap between how things should be and how things actually are.

Healing the Self Requires a Meaning-making and Comprehensive Story

Providing a comprehensive story of oneself that can be experienced through video storytelling is a potential digital solution for addressing the identity and coping mechanisms that caregiver develops throughout the role itself. This approach can incorporate caregiving as a familiar experience into a narrative identity, redefine the role, and the ways individuals find and define themselves in it. It allows caregivers to encounter most usual caregiving scenarios originating from the scripted stories designed together with the caregivers, in the form of a video story. Video storytelling engages the senses and provides the opportunity to relate with a personal narrative on a deeper level while finding meaning and transforming the narrative into a coherent story of oneself. As indicated in a study by Smyth and colleagues (2001), participants who were instructed to form a narrative out of the traumatic or difficult events showed improvement in health indicators while the rumination about trauma was reduced. Participants formed a narrative with the beginning, middle, and an end while including all the circumstances, consequences, and solutions that allowed them to form a cohesive story as an outcome. These findings point out the importance of understanding the development of our story and accepting it as a part of the personal narrative. Moreover, this shows that gaining a bird's-eye perspective over a personal story can change the understanding of the story.