Finding a Communal Story: A Conversation With Robyn Fivush, PhD

Geoff Mitelman: I’m Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, founding director of Sinai and Synapses. I’m sitting here in New York, but sitting in her office in Emory is Professor Robyn Fivush, who is a professor of psychology and has an emphasis on the social construction of autobiographical memory and the relations among memory, narrative, identity, trauma and coping. I came across her because she was interviewed in an article in the Atlantic just a couple of months ago entitled, you won’t remember the Pandemic the way that you think that you will. And it was such a fascinating way to think about the way that our history and our memory change and adapt both as our individual stories change, as our communal stories change. And thinking about the way that we’re transitioning into this new world in the pandemic and the way that we think about memory in general was such a fascinating question. So, Professor Fivush, thank you for taking some time to talk with us here this afternoon.

Robyn Fivush: Thank you, Rabbi Mitelman. It’s just delightful to meet you and to be here to talk with you and your audience about memory and family stories and the power of storytelling in our lives.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, I’d love to start with that, because I know one thing that you really focus on are questions of family stories, and that’s a rootedness here – that in Judaism, that is a key aspect of what Judaism is, that the Torah is really the family story of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. And Judaism, as a religion, is predominantly home-based. It’s the home rituals that you create the memories around Rosh Hashanah and Passover and Seder and Hanukkah. Those are where we build those kinds of connections and those stories. So, I’d love for you to share a little bit of: How do family stories end up getting created and why are they so important for us?

Robyn Fivush: Absolutely. And first, let me say I completely agree with you, that Judaism makes family stories very, very visible – a very critical part of the tradition. But so do most traditions. I mean, stories are really, from the birth of humanity, the ways in which we’ve communicated with each other. Stories are the way we understand who we are; how we understand each other; how we understand how the world works. I mean, you can imagine, even back in our ancestral past, sitting around the campfires and telling the stories of what our parents did, what our ancestors did, how the big hunt went, how the gods created the world – whatever those stories are that made things meaningful, they made sense out of our experiences.

So, stories are very much the way that humans make sense, make meaning out of what happens to them. And this starts, really, from birth families. Parents, grandparents are already whispering stories into babies’ ears. They’re already telling them who they are and who they’re going to grow up to be, and who their parents are, and who their brothers and sisters are.

And we just spontaneously do this. I mean, if you think about just what you’re going to do later today – we’re having this interview now, and probably right after this interview, I’m going to go into the other room. I’m going to tell my husband about what happened during this interview. I’m already creating this story about my experiences. I’m already processing it and making sense out of it in interaction with my family, because that’s how I make sense of myself and my experiences. And this is how children are brought into the world and are brought up to make sense of things.

So, when we think about family stories, there are lots of things I want to say about that. One is [that] there are all different kinds of family stories, and a lot of family stories are just the everyday touchstones – telling each other about what we did during the day may not even be a shared experience. I’m informing you of what I did during my day, and my family is informing me what they did during the day. But those are important ways to come back together and to re-bond as a family. “We’re all in this together. We all know what each other is experiencing.”

But then there are also the family stories where we revisit ,and we savor the things we’ve done together. So that may be the family that’s living in the house together, right (I was going to say the summer vacation last year, but most of us didn’t have a summer vacation last year), but the time we went to the beach three years ago, or when we went to grandma’s for Hanukkah or Christmas.

So, the stories that we share together, that helps shape who we are, how we interact, how we understand each other. It helps us validate each other’s emotions and validate each other’s understanding of how the world works.

But I’ve also become very interested more recently about these more distant stories, what can be called “family history stories.” And these also emerge remarkably frequently in everyday family conversation. And this can be as simple as a parent just mentioning something that they did when they were a child, or a child asking, “Did you do that when you were a kid?” And they may not even be full-fledged stories, but they connect across the generations. And what we’re learning now from our research is that families who engage in more of this kind of even spontaneous miniature storytelling – small, little stories – have children and adolescents who have higher levels of self-esteem, positive relationships with their parents, more positive relationships with their friends, and show a higher level of meaning and purpose in life.

And then there are the big stories. We were talking about this just a little bit before. These are the family stories that are told again and again and again, every Thanksgiving, every Passover. And it may be the story of what happened to our family at this Passover – maybe the story of the Jews and the Exodus. But that story has to be told over and over and over because it reifies, reinvents us, re-energizes us, and creates a sense of identity.

Geoff Mitelman: And when we think about stories and memories, we often think that we’re trying to think of a unique moment – of, like, our wedding, or the article from The Atlantic of, like, “I remember March 13, 2020,” or a tragic event of 9/11, or the birth of a child. We think of these memories like, “Oh, I remember that specific sort of flashbulb memory.” But maybe even more important are the memories where we can’t necessarily distinguish of “Which was that Shabbat or that Shabbat?” “Which was it, Passover 2012 or 2013?”. And in some ways, that’s actually even more important, because it builds on itself. And as you said, it reifies it. It becomes very real and something that we can hold on to.

Robyn Fivush: Absolutely. Clearly, we have those “landmark memories,” things that, and fortunately – usually positive – we expect in the life. A graduation, a wedding, the birth of a child – unfortunately, some negative things as well (death of a loved one). Those are markers. We expect those things to happen, and we do organize our life story around those kinds of markers.

But it’s the everyday texture, the recurring events, the repeated events, that really give more of a sense of individual meaning to our lives. And those recurring events are particularly important for bonding families together. What we found in our research is that when people are asked to tell us about those kinds of recurring events – “tell us stories that your family, tell us events and experiences that you’ve had with your family that happened on a regular basis.” And people talk about things. Things like, “My father drove me to high school every day during the entire year of my senior year, and I remember those wonderful conversations.” Do you remember any specific conversation? Maybe not, but I remember how wonderful and warm that was to have that special time with my father.

Similarly, “Whether it’s Shabbat or church or whatever it is that your family does on a recurring basis, do you remember any particular Shabbat dinner?” Well, maybe one stands out for this reason or the other, but I can tell you the story of those Shabbat dinners, and I can tell you how they made me feel in terms of my relationships with my family and what that means for who we are as a family.

Geoff Mitelman: You’re raising an interesting question that I want to spend a few minutes sort of teasing out, because one of the things that I’ve certainly believed – and it certainly sounds like this – is the worth that you’ve really come to appreciate and work on, which is that the purpose of a story is not necessarily to have an accurate representation of what happened, but to be able to build the connections and the relationships. And I think that’s a challenge, right? When we try to say what actually happened, what is the history of what happened – in a lot of ways, that’s less important than what’s the memory that’s recreated.

And sometimes, when we’re trying to recreate things, what we remember is the story that we’ve told every year, but it’s not actually what happened, but what happened is what we think actually happened. The real story gets lost to history because the emotional valence is what’s imparted, and the emotional valence is what’s remembered. So how do we draw this distinction between an accurate representation of a memory versus the goal of a memory, of building an emotional connection there?

Robyn Fivush: You’re drawing a really, critically important distinction, and I want to say a couple of things. There are times when accuracy really matters, and what really happened really matters. And we can think of lots of situations where that’s the case. But for the most part, that’s not how our memory works.

So, even though we may need that accuracy for certain kinds of functions, for holding people responsible or accountable, it’s not how memory works. People think that memory is like – pick your technology – a tape recorder, a video recorder, a computer. We keep updating the metaphor we use, but in fact, that’s not how memory works at all. Memory is highly reconstructive. We remember patterns. It’s exactly what we were talking about – like, I can’t remember any particular Shabbat dinner, but I have a sense of what happens at Shabbat dinner and what usually happened, and I can remember details. Was it this one or that one? Our memory – it’s not that it’s wrong, but in reconstructing our memories, we take bits and pieces from related events.” Was it this Friday, or was it the Friday three weeks after that?” I’m not necessarily importing something from something that’s completely irrelevant. I’m not saying, “Oh, I must have been in Paris.” I mean, I’m not coming up with something that’s completely confabulated, but our memories work very much in order to predict what’s going to happen next.

I mean, if you think about why our memories evolved, [they] evolved to be directed towards the future, towards understanding who we are, and what we want to do and be in the future, and how to direct our behavior. That’s both in terms of how do I navigate airport security to how do I achieve my goals of being a loving parent. That’s based on what we know from the past. So, in order to do that, we really take information from wherever we can get it. We are creatures that will take everything we can and use it however we need to. So, memory is never going to be 100% accurate. It’s always going to be reconstructed in some ways. Then the question becomes, “What is true? What’s true to me, what’s true to our family, and why are we telling the story?”

Geoff Mitelman: And one of my favorite lines, and I heard it from my colleague Cantor Ellen Dreskin (who I’m sure said it in the name of someone else, but I’m going to quote her, because she’s the one that I remember hearing it from), which is, “Something doesn’t have to be factual for it to be true.” And I think that’s something to think about as we study sacred texts. That’s something, as we think about looking back on history – we’re seeing this in school boards all across North America right now, of: How do we tell the story of slavery and American history? And there are some people who are saying, “Wait a second, we’re changing the story?” And yes, we’re changing the story. We have better and new accurate information, and our moral compass has changed in 2021 [from] what it was 100, 150 years ago. And being able to own that, and to be able to say that’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be able to change the story.

Robyn Fivush: That’s exactly right. I think that we need to understand that if memory is, in fact, directed towards the future, what kind of a future do we want? And if we want a more tolerant society, if we want a more open and inclusive society, then we have to be open to many, many stories and many, many ways of telling them. And that’s one of the things that’s very powerful about storytelling, is that I can tell my story, and you can say, “That’s not my story. My story is something different.” But you can still validate my experience and my understanding of things. Neither one of us has to be right or wrong. We just have to understand where each. Other is coming from and understand how that story works for us in terms of making sense of our experiences.

Geoff Mitelman: Right. And what is our ultimate goal here? And being able to say, “This is my story.” I can’t say, “No, that’s not your story. You’re wrong.” That’s a useless – no one would actually ever say that. I hope nobody would actually ever say that. But being able to say, “These are the facts, these are the things that we can at least agree on, but my interpretation of it may be different from yours or what I focus on; the facts may be different from where I am and from where you are. “And being able to at least come with these kinds of questions from a point of curiosity, of being able to say, “Tell me, how did you come to this story? What’s prompting you to be able to have these particular set of facts or these stories? What are your values that are guiding you to be able to tell this?” So that I can then say, “Well, then these are my guiding core values,” and then there can hopefully be a more constructive conversation, rather than a destructive conversation.

Robyn Fivush: So, coming back to family stories, this is exactly what we see within families as well. So many of the families we work with – fortunately, most of the families that we work with tell these kinds of collaborative, validating stories. It’s not that everybody in the family remembers it exactly the same way, not at all – as you know from sitting around a family dinner table, there are going to be disagreements, and your sister is not going to agree that she was the favorite child, not you. So there are definitely family disagreements, but families that come to those points of collaboratively telling the story [are] laughing over it and asking, “Well, I didn’t know that’s how you felt about it. Tell me more about that. I didn’t understand that you saw it that way,” and are open to reevaluating, reinterpreting – those families have children and adolescents who are doing better on a whole host of measures – again, self-esteem, a sense of positive relationships and attachment, and quality of relationship with parents, other families. Again, fortunately, not as many that we work with don’t quite have that collaborative style. It’s more of an imposing, it’s like, “What do you mean? You saw it that way. That’s not what happened,” Like closing down the child’s perspective.

And we know now, from a good bit of research, that that has really negative ramifications down the road in terms of child outcome and in terms of sense of self. And there is research  – not so much what I’ve done, but what lots of other people have done – that can scale that up and say “that’s not just how families work, that’s how communities work.”

Geoff Mitelman : And that leads to a great question, because families are not in isolation. They’re part of a community. They’re actually part of multiple different communities there. I think that’s also a really important and often overlooked part of who we are – that as an individual, our memory is not an individual memory. My memories of different things are going to be different as a husband than as a father, than as a son, than as a community member, than as an American. My memories are going to be different based on what my role is. And the role of the family is going to be different based on “What community are they part of?” Are they part of the local town community? The Jewish community, or the Christian community, or whatever faith community they may or may not be part of – or team sports, right? There are different ways in which we situate ourselves in context, and the story that we tell is going to be different based on the need of that larger community.

So, how do we build a communal story? This is also something that I think I’m even thinking even larger, in terms of the United States – because this is something that I don’t think we have a shared American story anymore. I think it is very hard to be able to have shared American stories, and I think that’s a real challenge.

Robyn Fivush: Wow, there was a lot packed in there. Let me start by saying “family” itself is a term that is very loosely defined. I mean, in contemporary America, a lot of people think of the family as parents and children living in a household together. But that’s historically, or even culturally, not necessarily how families are defined. They’re defined much more intergenerationally. Sisters and brothers continue to live together – aunts and uncles, children, et cetera. And in a lot of cultures, and I think more and more in American culture, there are just different configurations. It could be friends who live together as a family. And obviously, it’s no longer just the heteronormative family.

So, I think we need to be aware of the fact that when we say “family” and “family stories” – they exist in all kinds of families. And it may be the family you sit down together with most frequently over dinner that shares most tightly those family stories. But it’s whoever you’re sharing your stories with – friends, relatives, blood kin, blended families – so, very, very broad.

In terms of the American story – that’s complicated, because Dan McAdams has argued that there is a kind of master narrative, a cultural narrative of the American myth. I think he works specifically on how this influences individual identity. Lots and lots of people have made this argument – you know, the rags to riches, the very individualistic – you know, hard work, perseverance, overcoming obstacles. And Dan McAdams has called it the “redemptive hard-scrabble life”. Working hard, persevering, overcoming and achieving success. Oprah Winfrey, Dolly Parton – I mean, we have lots of modern examples of this.

The problem with that narrative is that, one, it’s imposed on people who are not living that narrative, and that’s a problem. And it makes other narratives invisible. And so, to be more open – what we were talking about earlier, really hearing other people’s stories and hearing other people’s narratives – requires us to understand that “That may be the narrative I grew up with, that may be the narrative that worked in my life, but I have to hear these other narratives, and I have to be open to other ways of understanding the world.”

But then that creates – Human beings want answers. They want closure. They want “Tell me what to do,” so to speak. I mean, that’s just who we are, right? We don’t like to live with uncertainty or ambiguity. It’s uncomfortable. It creates tension. But that’s where we are, and it’s where we have to be. We’re in such a complicated society that there is ambiguity, and there is uncertainty, and there’s tension. So, I think we’re at a place now where we have to figure out how to live that kind of tension.

And I think this actually brings us to the pandemic, because the pandemic has thrown us all into this place of uncertainty. And nothing is what it seemed before, in many, many ways. And because it’s ongoing, we don’t have a narrative. We don’t know how this story ends. So, I think that’s one of the reasons that so many of us are so anxious and so stressed right now, because there’s no way to resolve the tension or the ambiguity I’m thinking about.

Geoff Mitelman: There were memes that were being shared – maybe the third or fourth week of March of 2020, particularly – I have two young kids, so this is all over my Facebook feed – which is that, “What your kids are really going to remember of the pandemic are the jigsaw puzzles and the walks and the family dinner, and the parents are going to be home…” And that was sort of this anticipation of, “We’ll all be home for two weeks, and it’s going to be this blip on our radar screen.” And that’s not at all what the pandemic experience has been. And at the same time, as we’re now coming in through, now, for several months, of –“Oh, right. I was at this time in the pandemic last year.” I’m thinking about, for example, as we’re recording this at the end of summer of 2021, a year ago, our family read Harry Potter. We read a chapter of Harry Potter every day, basically from May to September of 2020. And I have real nostalgia for that. It was a very special time. And there are a lot of people for whom that time in the pandemic is still so tense, and there’s not going to be nostalgia. They’re ready to – “I need this to be able to be done so I can live my life now.” And I think there’s a split of where people are able to [say] “Okay, I’m going to navigate this and I’m going to be okay.” And there are some for whom it is not going to be okay. And the continued uncertainty is deeply detrimental.

Robyn Fivush: And this, again, brings us back to family stories, and why they’re so powerful. Individuals who grew up in families that tell a lot of stories, and particularly stories of parents and grandparents and family history – a lot of those stories, a lot of the best stories, are stories of challenge and stories of struggle and stories of perseverance. It comes back to the redemption stories, but they are – no one gets through life scot-free, right? No family gets through life without facing challenges and difficulties and tears. And when we tell the stories of how we persevered as a family through previous really difficult times – I’m thinking of my husband, who grew up with a father who had been a POW in World War II. And it’s not that his father shared a lot of those stories, but knowing that his father had had that experience and persevered gave my husband a kind of strength of character, of knowing that “Hard times come, difficult things happen, but we can persevere. If we hold on to each other, we can make it through this.” I think that’s also one of the reasons that the stories of the Torah are so powerful, and why in retelling the stories year in and year out, it gives Jews such a sense of strength. These stories of hard times actually help us through the hard times we face now.

So, what we know is that adolescents who know more – and actually adults as well – who know more of their family stories and their family history – and I don’t mean the DNA tree (I mean, I think it’s great if you want to do your DNA tree. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that), but it’s the stories. It’s the lived experience of these individuals that gives us a sense both of our place in history and our perseverance through history.

Geoff Mitelman: And what I remember reading, and I wish I could remember what book it was under, but that stories are sort of a dry run-through where we can experience something without actually having to go through it. We can hear how somebody went through a challenge and overcame it and not actually have to do it ourselves, but to know that we don’t have to make the mistakes that our ancestors made as well, if we’re aware of what the past mistakes have been. And I think there’s probably a tremendous amount of value in being able to teach children, “This is something that I struggled with,” or, “This is something similar to what my parents struggled with,” so that they know that they’re not alone. This is not the first time that anyone’s dealt with these kinds of things and that there are ways that they can, if not go through it, at least manage it and be able to at least make sense of it in some way.

Robyn Fivush: Absolutely. And I think this is particularly important in adolescence and early adulthood when we’re struggling to create a sense of who we are and who we want to be, when we’re really exploring “What are our values? What are our beliefs?”

What we’re seeing with adolescents and young adults [is that] those kids who are able to tell stories that they know about their parents that include some kind of moral or life lesson are doing substantially better than adolescents and young adults who are not making those kinds of connections. One of the really powerful things in these stories that we hear again and again and again is, and “I’m like my mother in that I’m also strong, I also stand up for people.” So, the stories that parents are telling their kids really help them to understand how to be in the world. They provide models for how to be in the world.

Let me say a couple of things, because parents always ask me this. Adolescents always roll their eyes. You always think they’re not listening to you, but I’m telling you, they are. We’ve now done research with hundreds and hundreds of adolescents cross-culturally. Adolescents know these stories. You think they are not listening when you’re telling them these stories. They are. They may be rolling their eyes, but they are listening and they are hearing them and they are internalizing them and using them – so be assured.

The other thing is, parents worry that, “Well, what if I don’t have a story? Or what if I’m not a good storyteller?” Or “How do I do this?” And the answer is – going back to what I said – there are all kinds of family stories. Sometimes it’s just a snippet. “I know what you’re going through. I had that same problem with a girlfriend in high school.” Maybe your son will say, “Really? Tell me about that.” Maybe not. But there’s some connection. Sometimes it’s just a touchstone, it’s just a snippet. Other times, it becomes elongated; stories aren’t always told at one point in time. They’re told in small pieces over time. And then, of course, there are the stories that become the family stories, right?

But it’s these small moments that we’re not even aware that [are] happening, but they’re happening, and they matter.

Geoff Mitelman: And I think that’s one of the things that is a key piece, that is not just Judaism – I think lots of religions, as well. But I’m speaking from my own tradition because that’s my tradition.

One of the real values of religion and Judaism as a whole is that it situates ourselves in a larger context in a larger story – that we matter on some level, and that our story is not just our story, it’s part of a larger story; whatever family story or tradition, you’re part of that story. So if you are a family in India and you grew up Hindu, that is part of that story as well, right? That’s a link in that particular story, that it’s not that one is better, or the other one is right and the other is wrong. It’s that these are the family stories that give us meaning, and it allows us to be able to have a better sense of, I think, individual identity, of “Who am I? What do I value? How do I act as part of a family?” However we define a family.

And then how do I see ever-larger connections and circles of concern and people that I’m responsible to and responsible for, that being able to know that there are certain universal stories that cut across almost all of human history – there are basically six stories that have ever happened that we hear that people tend to go back to over and over, and knowing that we’re part of a larger tradition and a larger part of a community and a link in a chain of tradition that goes back to however many ancestors, and the family story here – but then, God willing, three or four generations from now, our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids will be telling the stories of what we do.

Robyn Fivush: Absolutely. And again, I think that stories are human. Humans are storytellers. Humans tell stories all the time. Those stories are unique and part of our individual, family and cultural traditions. But what’s really interesting is – I think what you said is, also, that they’re human, and they connect us.

So. one of the things that we do at Emory – quite frequently, actually; we use it both in the classroom and as ways to get to know our students better – and we use it in the dorms, and lots of places – is something called a “story circle.” And it comes out of improv theater, roadside theater. My colleague Viola Hartfield-Méndez introduced us to this technique. But it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s [when] eight or ten people sit around in a circle, and you each have two minutes to tell a story about X. So, “tell a story about how you came to be at Emory,” or “tell a story about how you came to join this temple.” And you have two minutes, and there’s no cross-talk. You can pass, but [it will] come back to you. And everybody takes their two minutes and tells a story, and it’s eight or ten people. And at the end, you realize there were so many different, unique perspectives, and yet, they were all the same.

So, it’s this very powerful way of understanding that, while all of our stories are unique and we each have our own independent identity, we are all connected to each other through our human experience.  And stories are ways of creating meaning. Out of those human experiences.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, and you’re linking to one of my favorite texts from the Mishnah, from rabbinic literature, that I think it’s Sanhedrin 4 or 5, where the rabbis ask, “Why did God create only one human being?” At least from the rabbinic perspective, they could have – God created all the seas and plants and birds and animals, but God created just one human being. Why with just one? And the rabbis say, “So that every human being is stamped in the mold of Adam.” There’s a common humanity, and yet no one is exactly like anybody else. And a human king stamps a coin, and they’re all exactly the same. But every human being is stamped in the mold of Adam. Everyone has, I think, the very same core needs and emotions of safety and security and love and meaning. And those are all things that are deeply, deeply human. But how they manifest themselves as individuals and as a society – that varies from place to place. So, it’s not that one story is right and the other is wrong – it’s that they’re different ways of trying to achieve the same kind of goal.

Robyn Fivush: Exactly. Yes. I love that analogy. It’s perfect.

Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s something that’s so often overlooked. And thinking about the different kinds of stories that we tell – and we see this in religion and we see this in politics for sure, which is that people will tell a story, as you said, not to necessarily look back on the past, but to be able to look towards the future and to be able to say, “This is where I want to be moving forward.” And that’s how both religion and politics aim to do. They want to tell a compelling story, to convince people to be part of that community there, but it becomes very ossified – “This is not my story. This is the right story, and any other story is the wrong story.” And I think it can be very reassuring to be able to say that there are multiple different right stories that can exist in this world.

Robyn Fivush: Yes. And that goes back to being able to hold that tension and that ambiguity – that there’s something that unites us all, yet there’s also something that makes us all unique. And how do we hold both of those together?

Geoff Mitelman: I’m wondering if you’ve done some work in your research – I’m curious as to what prompts people to be able to or not be able to, but to want to hold on to their version, their story. And you talked about this, too – that sometimes in family dynamics, “this is the right story, this is what happened.” What’s the motivation for that? And are there ways that we can move beyond the calcified, “I’m right, you’re wrong”?

Robyn Fivush: Perspective stories, particularly stories that we tell about ourselves and to ourselves, are the way we define who we are. They’re the very core of our identity – “This is the kind of person I am.”

And often what happens is for individuals. To become very tied to a particular story or a particular way of telling it, it’s because, in some sense, it’s very tied to their identity, and to change the story means having to change who they think they are. This happens sometimes when trauma occurs, which is very shattering to the self, but it can also happen in families where there. aren’t processes in which multiple perspectives are valued. So, you get pushed into a corner, so to speak. You get defined a certain way in ways that don’t quite jive with the way you define yourself. So you become very – I mean, think about yourself. When somebody kind of threatens your very sense of who you think you are, you become very obstinate, and so you become very tied to, you know, “This is what happened, this is the way it was.”

And what we know is that you can change your story. I mean, psychotherapy is about changing your story to some extent – changing your behaviors, changing your perceptions, changing your evaluations. But in some sense, that’s all involved in changing your story. But it’s hard to do. Frankly, one of the things that human beings do need is a sense of coherent and stable self. If I don’t know who I am, that’s really unnerving. And if you threaten my sense of who I am by invalidating my story, that’s going to be very threatening to me.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And, I mean, I’m thinking about where there’s pushback to different educational advancements and ideas because it’s a threatening piece, particularly of American exceptionalism. If we are “rags to riches” and everyone can overcome whatever obstacle they have, that can be a real sense of this is who we are. And, as you said, that’s not an accurate story for some people. But it can be very hard to be able to move away from that American exceptionalism – sort of Horatio Alger, “start at the bottom, and I overcame up by my bootstraps” – that is sort of the American master story.

Robyn Fivush: Yes. It’s also very threatening to us to think that we ourselves have transgressed or are not moral. Not moral people in some ways. I mean, that’s extremely threatening, to think that somehow, we have responsibility for harming other people. Most people don’t want that kind of sense of self. So things like transgressions – when we do something that hurts somebody else – those are very threatening to our selves.

And often we can do multiple things with that, right? We can solidify ourselves in some “they deserved it,” or “I didn’t mean it,” or “it wasn’t as bad as they thought,” or we can do some kind of defensive [maneuver], or we can stop and really listen and try and use that to grow and to learn. But that takes a lot of work. It takes community work. We can’t do that by ourselves – we have to do that with each other. We have to help each other to do that.

And it goes back to what you were saying earlier: “Well, I understand that’s how you saw it. Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about your perception, your evaluation.” What about this other person’s story?

But if we can understand other people’s experiences through their stories, we may be able to open up our own stories.

Geoff Mitelman: In new ways, and probably also along these ways of the transgressions. As we’re about to enter into Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – we’re in the month of Elul as we’re recording this now, of having to reflect on the ways in which we’ve transgressed, which is very hard to do. And when I was in the pulpit world, and I know there are a lot of rabbis who say this, they’ll give a sermon about the ways in which we can change and grow and the ways in which we’ve made a mistake. And I’ve had people come up to me and said, “I loved your sermon. I wish my husband had been there to hear it,” because it’s very easy to be able to deflect and say, “That wasn’t about me, that was about somebody else.” And it’s also very hard, as you mentioned, whether it’s trauma or even just a negative event – something that’s hard to process, a disappointment. It’s challenging to be able to reframe that.

Is there work that you’ve done or ideas that you’ve seen, of at least – trauma, I know, is a qualitatively different kind of conversation that requires a whole different set of skill sets. But as you said, we all deal with disappointments. Life does not go the way exactly we plan. What are some ways that you’ve found, or in the research that you’ve seen, of being able to reframe some of the disappointments, so that the story changes for us?

Robyn Fivush: I want to say something about trauma first, because – perhaps somewhat counterintuitively to some people – one of the best treatments for trauma is getting people to tell the story again and again and again, and to help them create a more coherent story. Because trauma is so senseless and so meaningless, one of the things that’s very difficult for people is to create any kind of chronologically sensible story that has links and causes. And to the extent that you can create a more coherent story, it actually does help with healing from trauma.

So, coherence is very important. But “coherence” is an interesting term, because coherence is not just “This happened and this happened, then this happened,” but coherence is also kind of an emotional sense-making coherence, even if that sense is, “I’ll never be able to completely understand this, but this is what I’ve been able to learn from it or take from it.” So, we can never turn trauma or other negative or challenging experiences – I don’t think the answer is to say, “Oh, not getting that job was the best thing that ever happened to me because…” But you can say, “It was a real disappointment, but this is what I learned from it.”

So, this is one of the things that actually parents do quite spontaneously with their young children. When they talk about, “Why are you angry? Why are you sad?” Parents actually spontaneously help their children to reframe it: “Well, what could you do next time that might make it better, or so you won’t be as unhappy? Or if you were just sad about something, but then we talked about it and hugged and you felt better?”

So, reaching out to other people – we don’t always do it for ourselves. So there are things that we understand intuitively to do with our children, because we understand they can’t quite manage their emotions. But we don’t do it for ourselves. If you’re lucky, you have a good friend or spouse who does it for you. But I think it happens in interaction. People help you reframe. I think it’s hard to do all by yourself.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. And I think because, almost by definition, the emotions are so strong and can change the tint of your glasses. My sister, Joanne Harpel, does a lot of work on working with people with depression and mental illness. And when you’re depressed, for example, it’s like looking through red-tinted glasses, and all you can see is pink. You can’t necessarily see anything differently until you’re able to get a new set of glasses there as well.

I think that’s something that is hard. How can you find those kinds of conversations with somebody else? In the Talmud, it says that a “Prisoner cannot free himself from jail.” And I think being able to understand, “How can I process this? How can I make sense of this?” Without it being “it’s all part of God’s plan, it all worked out for the best” – sometimes it didn’t. And being able to own that, but then being able to say, “How do I make sense of this? What’s going to be the story? What’s going to be the coherent meaning afterwards?”

Robyn Fivush: And I want to stress that sometimes that story is, “It was just bad, and nothing good came of it. I didn’t learn anything, but it’s in the past. That’s all I can say about it.” I mean, we can’t always make lemonade out of lemons, right?

Geoff Mitelman: I think that’s such a key lesson. And I think that one of the things that I love about the Torah and the Torah cycle is that the whole goal of the Torah is, “get into the Promised Land – get to the Promised Land, get to the Promised Land, make it to the land of Canaan, make it to the Promised Land.” And the Torah ends as Moses dies – right before they enter into the land of Canaan. They never quite reach their goal. And you start back over, then, at Genesis.

And a lot of the Torah is not so nice and neat and clean. Not everybody is nice. In fact, everybody is a little bit problematic. Look, in all of our stories – not just in the Torah, but everybody that we look at throughout history  nobody was perfect.

Robyn Fivush: Neither are we.

Geoff Mitelman: Yeah.

Robyn Fivush: If we held ourselves up to the same standards we often hold other people up to, we’d be doomed. (Laughs)

Geoff Mitelman: Right. I think what you’ve brought up is so important, which is that it’s not that we’re trying to create perfection or to aim for perfection, but we’re trying to create a sense of coherence and meaning. And that allows us to – at least psychologically – take the next step, right? It’s not necessarily reaching our ultimate goal, but, “What can I do right here and right now in front of me, and look back on the past, to be able to help me in this moment right now?”

Robyn Fivush: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that is really the creation of meaning in our lives, through creating stories that allow us to understand what happened within some coherent framework. It doesn’t mean that everything turns good, it doesn’t mean that everything’s rosy, but it does mean that we have some coherent sense of who we are, how we got here, and hopefully, also, to learn a little bit from the past about how we can move into our future – maybe being more of what we want to be.

Geoff Mitelman: Well, that’s a wonderful way to close our conversation, especially [because] this is our last interview before Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So, this is a wonderful way to think about how do we grow just a little bit more as we’re about to enter into the year 5782. But Professor Fivush, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us here this afternoon and sharing your wisdom and your insights.

Robyn Fivush: It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for hosting me. I really appreciate it.

Geoff Mitelman: And if people want to follow you on Twitter, you are at @RobynFivush, and they can find you there. You can find me – I’m at Rabbi Mitelman on Twitter and Sinai and synapses at @sinaisynapses. We’re going to be taking a little break as we’re entering into the High Holiday season and the end of the summer. And we will be back in mid-October for our next round of interviews for Sacred Science. So we thank you all for joining us here this afternoon. Thank you, Professor Fivush, and thank you all for joining us here today.