The psychology of your life story: Dark Knight insights

Whether you know it or not you're living out  a story. Most people aren't conscious of their stories but somewhere in the back of your mind  it's there; it's in the things you say, in the things you don't say, in the countless choices you  make each and every moment. And so the single most important question you can ask is "what story  am I living?

" In his book 'The Redemptive Self' psychologist Dan McAdams points out that we  all have a storytelling mind. We see it in the folktales we tell, in the myths and legends we  find all around the world. Stories are told in every known culture.

He says that: "the stories  we tell about our lives aren't just stories, they're who we are, they're the identity we choose  to claim, but what's crucial is that these stories can change and grow, and when we rewrite our  stories or when we tell them differently, we're not just changing the way we remember the  past, we're also reshaping who we are and who we will become. " This idea is called "narrative  identity" and it's so deeply hardwired into the way we think that our brains do something  remarkably linked to at least one core part of storytelling; it's called episodic memory.  Episodic memory is how you remember the scenes and events from your past, like your first day  at school, the time you met your best friend, or or a sunny afternoon with a loved one, and  so your life is really made up of a series of episodes one after another.

But to make sense  of those episodes and to find meaning in them you have to organize them into a story and that  story is what ties together all the things that have happened in your past, the way your life  unfolds in the present, and all the things you imagine in your future. As you move throughout  the world you carry the story inside you. When you aren't sure where to go next, this is the  story that guides you.

It's why psychologists have long known that storytelling is one of the  most effective tools for changing people's lives. What this means is that if you really want to  understand who you are and where you're going you have to understand the story you're telling about  your life. So how do you do that?

Let me show you. One of my favorite things about Christopher  Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy is that it's not really about the physical battle between Batman  and the Joker (although there is plenty of that) It's really about asking the deeper question of  who we really are. Batman and the Joker each give us two different stories about what it means to  be human, two mutually incompatible views of human nature and then it asks us to decide: which of  these stories is true?

And that makes it a great great place to start when we're thinking about  your life's story. McAdam says that there's really two main ways we tell the story of our lives. The  first is through what he calls the contamination sequence.

If you imagine your life as a timeline,  the contamination sequence is a way of telling your story where good things happen but they end  up being ruined by bad things that come after it. We see it in a lot of the "if only" stories  people tell. If only my parents supported me more, if only I made different choices when I was  younger, if only I subscribed to this channel and clicked the like button.

Anyway the basic idea of  the contamination story is that something very bad happened in the past; something so terrible that  it stained us forever. It erased all the good that came before it and so now we're stuck. We can't  move into a positive future.

People who tell their life story this way often point to an early loss  or a setback that they never seem to recover from. This loss then sets the tone for the rest of their  story so that even when something good happens they expect something bad to come and ruin it.  They see their lives as a continuing pattern where good things always turn bad, old injuries never  heal, the same damaging patterns are repeated again and again, and they can never move forward. 

And so it's a story that keeps them trapped in the past. Research shows that the more someone  explains their life in terms of contamination the more depressed and anxious they tend to be, the  more pessimistic and hopeless they feel, and the more they suffer from mental and physical health  problems. The classic example is the "fall from grace" in the Bible where Adam and Eve lived in a  perfect world: the Garden of Eden.

But when they disobeyed the Creator this was the contaminating  event; it forever ruined their perfect paradise and from that point on they were cast out and  they could never go back. In the Dark Knight, if there's one character that embodies the  contamination sequence it's the Joker. Whenever he asks "want to know how I got these scars?

" he  tells a disturbing story of trauma from his past that made him the way he is. His scars are  a symbol for this pattern of contamination, and since scars never really go away, they're  a constant reminder of the pain he suffered, the emotional wounds that won't heal. In one  scene he tells a story of his beautiful wife who was scarred in a terrible injury.

"I just  wanted to see her smile again," he says and so he scarred himself thinking it would make her  happy but it doesn't. She ends up leaving him. The message of contamination is clear: "I was  happy once, I had love in my life but it turned ugly and I was abandoned in the end.

" In another  scene he tells the story differently, this time it's his father who gave him the scars. "Why so  serious? " his father asks him.

His father was an abusive drinker who came after him one night. Each  time the Joker tells his story the details change. We have no idea if any of these things really  happened and yet the basic theme of contamination is always the same: "horrific things happened in  my past, it ruined everything good in my life, and it made me the way I am.

" The fact that the Joker  changes the details of his story is important because as McAdams says a life story is less about  what actually happened to us and more about how we make sense of what happened. It's the meaning we  draw from our experiences that shapes our identity and for the Joker this message of contamination  IS that meaning. It informs his world view and the way he sees every other person he meets.

He  believes that at our core we're all driven by our darkest and most horrifying impulses. "You  see their morals, their code, it's a bad joke dropped at the first sign of trouble. People  are only as good as the world allows them to be.

I'll show you. When the chips are down these  civilized people they'll eat each other. " The Joker isn't looking for money or fame, he can't  be reasoned with because what he really wants is to show the world that deep down everyone is as  hateful and destructive as he is, and so he sets up impossible choices, he puts innocent people in  danger, and he spreads terror throughout the city to show that even the most upstanding people can  do unimaginably cruel things to each other when they've lost everything; all it takes is one bad  day for the veneer of civilization to fall apart.

"You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when  things go according to plan, even if that plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that  someone will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics.

If you introduce  a little anarchy upset the established order, everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos,  you see madness is like gravity, all it needs is a little push. " It's an incredibly bleak world view  but a lot of people share it and it's not all that different from what the psychologist Sigmund Freud  had to say.

Freud also believed that deep down we're all motivated by dangerous and aggressive  impulses that we can't begin to understand because we're not even aware of them; they're  unconscious. Freud believed that the mind was ruled by inner conflict that could push us into  madness at any moment, and if it weren't for the laws and institutions that keep us from acting  out this dark side, society would fall apart. These concepts are rooted in the ancient Greek  idea that "Character is Destiny.

" What does that mean? It's the idea that you have a fundamental  nature that determines everything you do; you're internal qualities, your personality, the basic  core of who you are is what determines your fate, and if that character is selfish and cruel then  the life you create will also be those things. But Batman believes in a very different  story: that it's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you.

In  other words, it's not your character that makes you act in a certain way,  it's the reverse: your actions are what determine your character. Who you are at your  core is shaped through your decisions and so no matter what happened in your past no matter  what you've done or what mistakes you've made, you can change your fate by making a different  choice. One of the biggest problems with Freud's approach is that he downplays the role of positive  elements like creativity and personal growth.

His theories came out of studying patients with  mental health problems and neurosis but how do you generalize what you find in these cases to  everyone else in the world? And how do you do that without ending up with a hopelessly distorted and  pessimistic view of human nature? You can't.

Freud was really giving us a psychology of the sick, he  was showing us only one half of what we could be. What's missing is a psychology that can point  us to the other half: our positive potential. That's what psychologists like Abraham Maslow set  out to do in the mid 1900s in response to many of the problems with Freud's theory.

Maslow  believed that we're all trying to reach our highest potential. His research led him to create  what he called the 'hierarchy of human needs. ' He saw that people can do destructive things when  their basic needs aren't met but that doesn't mean we're inherently evil.

All it means is that  when you're struggling to find food and shelter, it's almost impossible to think about anything  else, but once these basic needs are met then you can move to higher aspirations  like love and self-actualization. Okay but what about situations that are truly  hopeless? Aren't there cases where people have no choice but to do horrifying things to each  other?

Isn't the Joker right about that? Well let's look at some examples where you might think  that we have no other choice. Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz in the  Holocaust; one of the most hopeless situations you can imagine.

He saw the unspeakable horrors  firsthand and yet even here he saw the human potential for good and transcendence: "We who  lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through huts comforting others  and giving away their last piece of bread, they show us proof that everything can  be taken in the end except one thing, the last of all human freedoms: to choose  one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. In the final analysis  it was clear that the sort of person a prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and  not the result of their environment alone. " For every example of brutality and violence there are  real examples of courageous people like Frankl who volunteered to heal the sick and give comfort  to the dying.

We see women like Arena Sendler who risked her life to help hundreds of children  escape the Holocaust. These acts of self-sacrifice can't be explained by pessimistic theories of  human nature alone. In the dark night the core of Bruce Wayne's transformation into Batman is  the idea that people can be saved.

For all our flaws humans are worth fighting for. Bruce isn't  perfect, he has plenty of problems but he never loses his faith in humanity. We see it in his  one rule: never kill, never take another life, because no one is beyond saving.

This is the  second way to tell your life story, through what McAdams calls the Redemption sequence. This is  a way of telling your life story where painful things happen but they eventually lead to good  things. Adversity can be overcome trauma can be healed.

We all suffer tragedy and loss but we  keep going, we move forward and the very act of facing these things transforms us and makes us  stronger and more resilient than we were before. Probably the most well-known Redemption story  is the death and resurrection of Christ. Jesus is the Incarnation of the divine who comes into  the world to heal the sick and the dying.

One day he's betrayed. He's put on trial, he faces  false accusations, but even still he forgives them. He gives up his life so that humanity can be  redeemed, and through this act of self-sacrifice a broken and sinful world is restored.

Notice that  the Redemption sequence isn't just a happy story where nothing bad happens; it's a story where  lots of bad things happen, but they turn into something positive in the end. We need adversity  because without it there can be no redemption in the story. In a similar way Bruce's transformation  into Batman is also a story of redemption.

We see it throughout his life and in one of the earliest  lessons from his father: "why do we fall Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up again. " But the  biggest test of this philosophy comes when Bruce suffers the most tragic loss of his life.

His  parents are killed, his family shattered leaving him terrified, alone, and with a profound sense  of loss that he carries with him for the rest of his life. He has every reason to be angry at the  world. He has all the makings of a tragic villain, and yet he doesn't become one.

Why? What makes one  person a hero and another person a villain? One of the major themes in the Dark Knight night is  that there's a very thin line separating good from evil, sanity from madness, heroes from villains. 

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. " In many ways  Batman and the Joker are really mirror images of each other. Each one is living out the unchosen  life of the other.

Both have suffered trauma and loss. Both are outcasts who live on the margins  of society. And so the Joker tries to show how similar they really are.

"Why do you want to kill  me? " " I don't want to kill you, what would I do without you? You complete me.

" "You're garbage who  kills for money. " "Don't talk like one of them, you're not, even if you'd like to be. To them  you're just a freak like me, they need you right now but when they don't they'll cast you out  like a leper.

" On some level the Joker senses that Batman has been deeply wounded by a tragic past  just like he has. They have more in common than he wants to admit, and so he tries to push Batman  closer to the contamination story as if to say, 'you can stop pretending, take off the mask and  you'll see we're both the same. ' But as the Joker puts more and more lives in danger he's trying to  get Batman to break his one rule, to never take a human life and if he can do that then he can  make the ultimate contamination story.

He he can show the world that there are no heroes and that  even the most self-sacrificing people are really just villains underneath the mask. For the rest of  the film we see the consequences of each of them playing out their world view and the question  becomes: will Batman survive this confrontation with the Joker? And even if he does will he still  be a good person by the end of it?

Or will he become a villain? Which view of human nature will  win? But there is something very important that separates them; it lies in what the psychologist  Carl Jung called "The Shadow," and for reasons we're about to see, understanding it is one of  the most powerful ways to reshape your life story.

We looked at the shadow in this video but briefly,  the shadow is the unconscious part of who we are. It's made up of all the things inside of us that  we reject and try to hide because they don't line up with how we see ourselves. In childhood  we're all taught that certain things are socially acceptable and other things aren't.

We learn to  hide the parts of us we're ashamed of, pushing it away deep into the unconscious mind. This happens  naturally in every human mind. As we grow older and find more and more things about ourselves that  we don't like, we repress more and more of who we are and the shadow grows bigger and stronger,  but the things we repress don't just disappear; they influence everything we do without us even  realizing it; it happens beneath our conscious awareness.

And so the more we try to deny it the  stronger it becomes, and the more it acts out in damaging ways. So what do you do? You have to face  these dark parts of who you are because one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of  light but by making the darkness conscious.

Jung saw that we all have the capacity for good  and evil and yet most people think of evil as something that exists outside of themselves.  Once you decide that evil only exists in other people or in certain groups of people, then you  can justify doing all kinds of horrific things to them. We see it throughout history where some  of the worst atrocities were done by people who believed they were doing good.

The psychologist  Stanton Samenow wrote the book "Inside the Criminal Mind," he ran one of the longest most  in-depth research studies of criminal offenders lasting 17 years and he found that overwhelmingly,  even the most violent criminals thought of themselves as good: "no matter how long their  trail of carnage, no matter what suffering they caused, every one of them retained the view that  they were a good person. " Even the Joker doesn't see himself as a bad person. "You know what I am? 

I'm like a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things. 

I'm not a monster I'm just ahead of the curve. " Like every villain he projects all of the  unresolved hate that's inside of himself outward into the world. That's the nature of  projection.

"We don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are" and so the only real  hope we have of challenging the evil we find in the world is to become conscious of the shadow in  ourselves. This doesn't mean acting it out the way the Joker does, it means becoming aware of the  darker elements within us so we can gain mastery over them. Jung says that "the shadow is a moral  problem that challenges the whole ego personality for no one can become conscious of the Shadow  without considerable moral effort.

To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark  aspects of the personality as present and real. " And when you do that you'll find that the shadow  isn't just the destructive parts of who you are, it has enormous positive potential. Many of  your greatest gifts, the undeveloped talents you left behind in your childhood, are hidden  somewhere in inside the Shadow.

The challenge then becomes to reclaim these lost parts of who  you are so you can heal that inner divide and become whole. "Wholeness is not achieved  by cutting off a portion of one's being, but by integration of the contraries. " And so  the shadow isn't something we fight against or try to destroy, it's a part of ourselves that  we're meant to explore, so we can expand our sense of self and make it a conscious part of  who we are.

So how do we go about doing that? Jung says that the meeting with oneself is  at first a meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door whose  painful constriction no one is spared who goes down the deep well.

Jung uses the analogy of  going into a dark well as a metaphor for facing the Shadow and that image is exactly what we  see again and again in the Dark Knight trilogy. One of Bruce's early memories is falling into a  well where he's trapped with no way out. Suddenly he surrounded by bats, it's a terrifying scene  but it's his father who carries him out.

"Don't be afraid," he says "every creature feels fear,  the bats flew out not because they were bad but because they were scared of you. " His father takes  the family out to the theater where they see the opera Mefistofele, but when monsters start dancing  on stage Bruce gets scared and overwhelmed. "Can we please leave?

" They go out into the alleyway  and it's here that their lives change forever. They run into a mugger and in a botched robbery  his parents are killed. From that moment on Bruce blames himself for the way they died.

"If only I  hadn't gotten scared. " All of it becomes a part of his shadow. As he gets older the bat comes to  symbolize all of the things he's most afraid of.

Inner demons. Feelings of guilt and grief. The  rage he feels at a world that does so little to protect good and innocent people.

He tries to push  it all out of his mind. Most people are afraid to look at the darkness in themselves because  they're afraid it might consume them if they do but it's just the opposite: the shadow takes  hold of us only when we're unconscious of it. Because "until you make the unconscious conscious  it will drive all your behavior and you will call it fate.

" In one of his darkest moments Bruce  confronts these feelings. "This confrontation is the first test of courage of the inner way,  a test sufficient to frighten off most people, but if we're able to see our own shadow and  can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved. " The  shadow is the doorway to who you really are, it's where you have to go to find your true  authentic self.

Bruce goes back to the scene of his childhood well where he first saw the bats all  those years ago, and as he goes down into the dark he finds that it actually leads into a huge cave;  an undiscovered space underneath his family home. It's a metaphor for going inward down into the  unconscious mind. This is where he takes the bat: the symbol of the darkest most terrifying  parts of his past and decides to change it.

"People need dramatic examples to shake  them out of apathy and I can't do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man I'm flesh and  blood. I can be ignored, destroyed, but as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be  everlasting.

" "What symbol? " "Something elemental, something terrifying. " Bruce's transformation into  Batman is really a metaphor for integrating the shadow.

It's how we can transform the pain of  the past into something constructive and good, through a kind of inner alchemy we also change  ourselves. For Bruce the meaning of the bat and what it represents is completely transformed;  it's no longer a symbol of contamination, the bat becomes a symbol of hope, a signal that good and  innocent people don't have to be afraid anymore; that even a city as fallen and corrupt as Gotham  is worth saving, and we can stand together and heal our broken world. We see the same Motif  again in the Dark Knight Rises where Bruce finds himself deep underground in a dark pit, but  this time it's not the well from his childhood, it's a strange prison that opens up into a wide  open sky; he's in a completely different country surrounded by prisoners who've given up on life. 

"I'm not going to die in here," Bruce says. "Here, there, what's the difference? " Bruce tries  to climb out but there's a point where he has to make a huge jump to the other side.

He  tries but each time he falls hanging by a rope, in a literal pit of despair. Why does  he keep finding himself down here? Most people think that psychological growth  happens in a straight line.

They think that if you put in a certain amount of work on yourself then  you're supposed to see steady improvement that only ever goes up. We expect growth to be linear  and predictable, but life doesn't work this way. Jung says that "there is no linear evolution there  is only a circumambulation of the self.

" What does that mean? For me it means that growth is a lot  like moving along the edge of a circle. It's like a spiral.

Life moves us towards challenges  that resurface again and again but in new and different forms. It doesn't mean we failed, it  means that each time we face them we're finding new insights that we couldn't have understood the  first time. As the saying goes "the path isn't a straight line, it's a spiral, you continually come  back to the things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.

" It's no coincidence then  that Bruce's climb out of the pit also looks like a spiral. To find his way out he has to move  along the circular walls as he climbs higher. With each turn of the spiral we build on the lessons of  the past, we integrate them more fully into who we are, and we move closer to becoming whole.

It's  this process that Jung called individuation. At some point we all find ourselves in a dark pit.  Maybe the plan you had for your life didn't work out the way you wanted it to.

Maybe you had a  setback or you suffered a loss and it feels like you're back where you started. It can feel like  all the progress you've made has been wasted, but it's not. Everything in life moves between times  of growth and times of stagnation.

All of nature passes through these cycles, but in these low  points often what we need most is to do something that feels uncomfortable. Tap into the Shadow and  you will find new life. In her book "Meeting the Shadow," the psychologist Connie Zweig says that  "the shadow, when it's realized is the source of renewal.

The new and productive impulse cannot  come from the established values of the ego. When there's an impasse and a sterile time in  our lives we must look to the dark. The shadow is the door to our individuality.

No progress or  growth is possible until the shadow is adequately confronted. It's not until we have truly been  shocked into seeing ourselves as we really are instead of as we wish or hopefully assume we are  that we can take the first step toward individual reality. " To see ourselves as we really are is to  admit that we've all done things we aren't proud of.

Most people try to ignore these feelings and  so it often becomes part of the Shadow, and yet regret can be a powerful force for change. Regret  is a tough but fair teacher. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn,  no amends to make and no opportunity to be braver with your life.

Instead of denying these feelings  bring them consciously into who you are, make those lessons a part of your life story. To do  that you have to make the climb as Bruce does. An old man tells Bruce that every single person who's  ever tried to climb out of the pit has failed, all except for one.

Many years ago there was a  child who made the jump. "The leap to freedom isn't about strength, the body makes the jump, but  survival is the spirit, the soul. You must make the climb as the child did: without the rope.

"  This is another metaphor. The jump represents the leap of faith we all have to take to move into a  new unknown possibility. To make the jump you have to cut the cord.

You have to leave behind all the  old stories of contamination that keep you tied to a past that isn't serving you anymore. This  jump has nothing to do with physical strength; it's about the human spirit, the divine spark that  exists in all of us. It imbues you with the power to retell your story in a different way.

It's how  you transcend what you've been and move into what you might become. Because "it's not who you are  underneath, it's what you do that defines you. " Cutting the rope means letting go of your old  story so that a new story can begin.

It symbolizes the death of an old self and the resurrection of  a new one. It's only when Bruce cuts the rope that he finally makes the jump, and he's no longer a  prisoner of the past. This is what it means to be free.

Telling this new story of redemption doesn't  erase the pain of the things that happened to us, but it gives new meaning to it. Fundamentally this  is really what separates Bruce from the Joker, because the most cynical people really just want  to drag everyone down with them into their own pit of despair. They want to spread their  stories of contamination so that everyone feels as miserable and as hateful as they do, but  their pessimistic view is a dead end.

It can only lead to destruction and endless repeating  cycles of tragedy; the negative expression of the Shadow. But there's another part of us that  wants to heal that pain. An undiscovered self that sees the best in us, that still believes in the  power of stories to save and redeem who we are, the part that wants to tell a new story about  what our lives could be.

We see it whenever someone comes along who's bold enough to give us a  new story we can believe in, because they've seen the mountaintop, the promised land. They show us  it's possible to heal the divisions in our world, and in sharing the beauty of what they see, they  help us see it too. Even if they don't make it there with us, they inspire us to dream that we  as a people will get there.

We are flawed people living imperfect lives trying to do our best  in a world that often feels broken and corrupt, but the fundamental power to change our story is  something we all have. It lives in the small acts of kindness and self-sacrifice that happen  each and every day. "A hero can be anyone, even someone doing something as simple and  reassuring as putting a coat on a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't  ended.

" So now that we've looked at how you can understand your life story you might be wondering:  how I actually rewrite it? What are some tools I can use to retell my story in a more empowering  way? That is what we'll look at in the next video.

As always thanks so much for watching  take care and I'll see you in the next one.