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Feeling lost in life? Turn back to the stories you loved as a child.
- Maya Sat on Her Living Room Floor Surrounded by Boxes
- What Is Narrative Identity?
- What the Research Actually Says
- How This Shows Up in Driven Women
- What Bibliotherapy Tells Us About the Power of Story
- The Both/And Reframe
- The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Your Stories
- The Systemic Lens
- How to Use Your Childhood Stories as a Compass
Maya Sat on Her Living Room Floor Surrounded by Boxes
She’d just turned 38. The promotion had come through — finally, after three years of grinding for it — and she’d done what she thought you were supposed to do: she’d celebrated, updated her LinkedIn, texted her mother. Then she’d come home to her apartment, poured a glass of wine she didn’t really want, and sat down on the floor.
The boxes were from her storage unit. She’d cleared it out that weekend on a whim, something to do with the restless energy that had nowhere to go. Most of it was junk. But tucked into one corner, she’d found a stack of her childhood books. A Wrinkle in Time. The Secret Garden. A battered copy of Anne of Green Gables with her own name written in purple marker on the inside cover.
She sat holding that last one for a long time. She didn’t understand why her chest felt tight. She didn’t understand why something that had been quiet inside her for years suddenly felt — loud.
In my work with clients, I see this moment more than you might expect. The life that looks successful on paper. The achievement that lands with a thud instead of a roar. And then, unexpectedly, something small and old — a book, a song, a half-remembered fairy tale — cracking something open.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s not escapism. It’s your psyche, pointing toward something it’s been trying to tell you for a long time.
The stories you loved as a child weren’t just entertainment. They were clues. And if you’re willing to sit with them, they might be among the most important information you have about who you actually are — and what kind of life you’re actually trying to build.
What Is Narrative Identity?
NARRATIVE IDENTITY
Narrative identity is the internalized, evolving story a person constructs about their own life — integrating memories of the past, the experience of the present, and hopes and intentions for the future into a coherent and meaningful sense of self. It is not a fixed autobiography but a living, ongoing process of self-authorship. Psychologists describe narrative identity as a “personal myth” — a story that gives your life unity, purpose, and meaning.
In plain terms: It’s the story you tell yourself about who you are and why you became this way. It’s the thread you use to connect your past self to your present self — and to imagine who you’re becoming. Most of us do this automatically, without realizing we’re doing it at all.
Narrative identity isn’t just an abstract psychological concept. It’s the story you reach for when someone asks, “How did you end up here?” It’s the frame through which you interpret a disappointment, decide whether a relationship is working, or explain to yourself why something that “should” make you happy just doesn’t.
And here’s what’s critical: that story doesn’t begin in adulthood. It begins in childhood — in the stories that resonated so deeply you couldn’t stop returning to them. According to Dan P. McAdams, PhD, Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and one of the world’s foremost researchers in narrative psychology, the building blocks of narrative identity are laid down remarkably early.
Narrative tone — whether we approach life with basic hope or basic wariness — traces back to infant attachment. The imagery we use to make sense of the world emerges in preschool-age play and imagination. Our core motivational themes — what we’re actually working toward, underneath all the activity — take shape during our elementary school years. The books, heroes, and stories that captivated us during that developmental window weren’t random. They resonated because they matched something already forming inside us.
Revisiting those stories isn’t indulgent. It’s archaeological. You’re digging up evidence of who you were before the world had its full say in who you became.
What the Research Actually Says
The science on this is more robust than most people realize. Two researchers in particular have built careers on exactly this question: how the stories we tell — and are told — shape who we become.
Dan P. McAdams, PhD, Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, has spent decades researching what he calls “personal myths” — the life stories that give individuals a sense of unity and purpose. His central argument is that modern adults construct narrative identities starting in late adolescence and continuing throughout life, and that these narratives draw directly on the emotional and thematic material of childhood. His research documents how themes of redemption, intimacy, and agency — the kinds of themes that saturate fairy tales and children’s literature — become the scaffolding of adult identity. When you loved the scrappy underdog who found her people, or the misunderstood girl who turned out to have extraordinary gifts, you weren’t just enjoying a plot. You were practicing a narrative structure that your developing psyche would later use to understand your own life.
Robyn Fivush, PhD, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Developmental Psychology at Emory University and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts, has spent over three decades researching how storytelling — particularly family storytelling — shapes autobiographical memory, identity, and psychological resilience. Her research demonstrates that children who grow up in families where stories are told with emotional richness, coherence, and meaning develop stronger autobiographical selves and show better outcomes related to identity, wellbeing, and coping with stress. Story, Fivush argues, isn’t decoration. It’s a fundamental developmental tool. In her book Family Narratives and the Development of an Autobiographical Self, she writes that it is through stories of everyday experience that each of us constructs a “narrative identity that confers a sense of coherence and meaning to our individual lives.”
What both researchers agree on: the stories we internalize in childhood — including the ones we chose, the ones we returned to, the ones that made us feel seen — become part of the architecture of identity. They don’t disappear when we grow up. They go underground. And they keep shaping us from there.
For driven women who came from relational trauma backgrounds, this is particularly significant. The stories you were drawn to as a child may have been the places where your psyche found what it couldn’t find at home: a sense of agency, a safe and attentive relationship, a world where your particular kind of goodness was valued. Those stories weren’t escapism. They were survival. And they carry information about your deepest needs that adult achievement has often buried — but never erased.
How This Shows Up in Driven Women
Elena was an emergency medicine physician. She’d wanted to be a doctor since she was seven. When I asked her what she’d loved to read as a child, she laughed a little — it felt like an odd question — and then said, almost immediately: Harriet the Spy.
She’d loved Harriet’s relentless need to observe, to understand, to know what was really happening beneath the surface of things. She’d loved that Harriet had a private world — her notebook — that no one could take from her. She’d loved that Harriet was difficult, and that the story didn’t apologize for it.
As we talked, something shifted. Elena had been describing herself for years as someone who loved “figuring things out” — it’s what had drawn her to medicine, she said. But sitting with Harriet, she recognized something more specific and more vulnerable: she’d spent her whole career trying to understand what was really happening with the people in front of her, in rooms where everyone was frightened and no one was being fully honest, because that’s what she’d needed someone to do for her as a child. She’d been practicing empathic attunement since she was seven. She’d just called it curiosity.
This is what I see consistently in driven, ambitious women who come from complicated childhoods: the stories they loved aren’t separate from their careers, their relationships, or their struggles. They’re woven through all of it. And naming that connection — with care, without pathologizing it — can be profoundly clarifying.
The woman who loved the solitary, misunderstood heroine who finally found belonging may be running a team of fifty people and still, quietly, waiting to feel like she truly fits. The woman who loved stories of children who had to figure everything out alone may be the most competent person in any room — and the most reluctant to ask for help. The woman who couldn’t stop reading about girls who escaped, who traveled, who built new worlds — may be living a life that looks like freedom on paper and feels, somehow, like a smaller version of what she’d imagined.
The story isn’t the diagnosis. But it’s a doorway.
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What Bibliotherapy Tells Us About the Power of Story
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BIBLIOTHERAPY
Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic approach that uses reading — fiction, memoir, poetry, or other narrative forms — as a tool for emotional healing, self-understanding, and psychological growth. It can be used in structured clinical settings or more informally as a reflective practice. Bibliotherapy operates on the premise that engaging with stories about human experience allows readers to identify with characters, recognize their own feelings, and develop new perspectives on their circumstances. It has been studied in clinical contexts ranging from childhood grief to adult depression and trauma recovery.
In plain terms: Bibliotherapy is the practice of using books and stories as part of healing. It recognizes what most readers already know intuitively — that a story can do something to you that no list of facts or advice ever could. The right book at the right moment can make you feel seen, break something open, or give language to something you didn’t know how to name.
Research on bibliotherapy documents effects that go beyond mood or coping. Engaging with stories — particularly stories where characters navigate struggle, growth, and transformation — activates what psychologists call “identification.” You don’t just observe the character. You inhabit them. And in inhabiting a character navigating something painful or complex, you’re also practicing the emotional and psychological moves required to navigate it yourself.
For children who grew up in environments that didn’t provide consistent emotional attunement — where the adults around them were unavailable, unpredictable, or frightening — stories often became the primary place where they could safely process fear, longing, loss, and hope. The story was the container the relationship couldn’t provide.
This is one reason why, for many women who come from relational trauma backgrounds, childhood books and stories hold an almost charged quality. They weren’t just pleasurable. They were necessary. Going back to them isn’t regression — it’s retrieval.
“The miracle of individuation and reclamation of Wild Woman is that we all begin the process before we are ready, before we are strong enough, before we know enough; we begin a dialogue with thoughts and feelings that both tickle and thunder within us.”
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, PhD, Jungian Psychoanalyst and Storyteller, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, devoted her career to this premise: that the stories women were drawn to — the myths, the fairy tales, the folk narratives — contain encoded psychological truth about what we most need and most fear. Estés called this “psychic-archeological” work: digging beneath the surface of a story to find what the psyche already knows.
You don’t need to be in therapy to begin this kind of excavation. But it helps to have someone who can sit with you in it.
The Both/And Reframe
Here’s where I want to slow down, because this part matters.
There’s a version of this conversation that turns quickly into pathology: You loved the lonely orphan because you felt alone. You were drawn to the misunderstood heroine because you felt misunderstood. Your childhood was hard, and your books were your escape. And while that may be true — and worth exploring — it’s only half the picture.
The both/and is this: You loved those stories because they were hard — and because they were true. Because they showed you something real about the world, and something real about yourself.
Sarah grew up in a household where emotions were treated as inconveniences. She learned early to be efficient, capable, and emotionally contained. Her favorite childhood book was The Secret Garden — the story of a girl who discovers a locked, neglected garden and, through tending it, discovers herself.
When Sarah came to work with me, she initially framed her love of that book as evidence of her childhood loneliness: I liked it because she was alone, and I was alone. That was true. But we stayed with it. And what emerged was richer: she’d been drawn to Mary Lennox because Mary was difficult — sharp-tongued, demanding, unlovable by conventional standards — and the story didn’t try to fix her. The garden didn’t require her to be softer. It required her to show up, to tend something living, to stay even when it was hard.
Sarah hadn’t loved that story only because she was lonely. She’d loved it because it showed her a version of herself — difficult, determined, hungry for something growing — that deserved a story. That deserved a garden.
Your childhood stories contain both your wounds and your wisdom. Both your needs and your strengths. Both what was missing and what was already there, waiting.
The question isn’t only: What did that story reveal about what I lacked? The question is also: What did that story reveal about who I already was?
That distinction — held gently, with care — can change everything about how you understand your past, and what you’re building toward.
The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Your Stories
Most driven, ambitious women don’t have time to think about their childhood books. There are deadlines, deliverables, relationships to manage, and a life to run. The idea of sitting with a battered copy of Anne of Green Gables and asking what it means feels, if they’re honest, a little self-indulgent.
But here’s what I see consistently in my clinical work: when women disconnect from the threads of meaning that have run through their lives — when they lose touch with what they actually care about beneath the layers of obligation and performance — something flattens. The career succeeds. The external life organizes. And there’s a quiet, nagging sense that they’re living adjacent to their lives, rather than inside them.
This is one of the most common presentations I work with. Not crisis, not breakdown — just a low-level, persistent sense of being lost while appearing found. Functioning, but not thriving. Checking boxes without being sure whose list they’re on.
The woman who can’t name what she actually wants — not what she should want, not what her parents wanted for her, not what her industry values — often just hasn’t had the chance to look backward far enough. The answers she’s looking for predate the career. They predate the relationship. They might live in a stack of books in a storage unit somewhere, waiting.
Ignoring those stories doesn’t make them irrelevant. It just means they’re running below the surface, unnamed, shaping choices and reactions in ways you can’t track because you haven’t looked at them directly. If this resonates, exploring it with support — in therapy or coaching — can be genuinely illuminating.
The Systemic Lens
It would be incomplete to talk about childhood stories and identity without naming the obvious: not all children have equal access to stories that reflect them back.
For decades, the dominant children’s literary canon was overwhelmingly white, Western, middle-class, and heterosexual. The heroes were, by default, a particular kind of person — and if you weren’t that kind of person, you were either invisible in the stories, or you learned to identify across a significant gap. You learned to find yourself in characters who didn’t look like you, didn’t live like you, didn’t share your family structure or your culture or your experience of the world.
That gap matters. Women of color, first-generation women, queer women, women from working-class or immigrant backgrounds — many of them grew up looking for themselves in stories and finding only partial reflections. The hunger for a story that truly fits isn’t a personality quirk. It’s a response to a real absence.
What this means, practically: if you do this reflective work and find that the characters you most loved were nothing like you — if you find yourself having identified most deeply with the hero despite the hero being male, white, or otherwise unlike you — that’s worth noticing. It doesn’t mean the identification wasn’t real or wasn’t meaningful. It means you were doing something additional: you were reaching across a gap the culture created, finding what you needed in imperfect containers.
And it means that when you encounter stories that do reflect you — fully, accurately, without asking you to translate yourself — the resonance tends to land with particular force. That’s not coincidence. That’s recognition. It’s what representation does, and why it matters, even in books.
If you came from a background where the stories around you didn’t see you, this work may involve grieving that absence as much as mining what’s there. Both are valid. Both belong in the process.
How to Use Your Childhood Stories as a Compass
This isn’t an abstract exercise. It’s a practical one. Here’s how to actually do it.
Start by retrieving the stories. Set a timer for ten minutes and write down every book, movie, fairy tale, or story you can remember loving as a child. Don’t curate. Don’t censor. Include the ones that feel embarrassing or silly now. Include the ones you barely remember. Just let the list exist.
Then narrow your focus. Which ones do you return to emotionally, even now? Which characters do you still think about? Which stories, when you mention them, produce something in your chest — warmth, or ache, or that particular feeling of yes?
Sit with the following questions:
- Who was my hero in that story — and what qualities did they have that I most admired? What did they represent to me?
- What was the central problem or struggle in that story? What was at stake?
- What was the relationship in that story I most wanted — for myself?
- What kind of world did that story imagine? What were its values?
- What did the hero need in order to find their place in that world?
Then turn those answers toward your present life:
- Which of those qualities do I still most value — and do I see them reflected in how I’m actually living?
- Which of those relationships am I still, quietly, looking for?
- What does my seven-year-old self want me to know about what I’m building — and for whom?
This isn’t about reducing your adult life to a childhood wish. It’s about recovering threads of authentic meaning that often get buried under years of performance and pressure. The goal is not to live like a child. The goal is to remember what you actually cared about, before anyone else’s agenda got there first.
What I see consistently: when women reconnect with the stories that shaped them — really sit with them, really let themselves feel what those stories meant — something clarifying happens. The noise of obligation and expectation gets a little quieter. The signal of actual desire gets a little louder. And the question What do I actually want? becomes, for the first time in a long time, something that feels answerable.
If you’re feeling lost right now — if the life you’ve built looks right on paper and feels hollow in practice — you might not need another productivity system or a new goal. You might need to go back to the books that found you when you were seven. And listen to what they’re still trying to say.
When you’re ready to explore this in a more supported way, reach out. Or take the free quiz to begin identifying the patterns running beneath the surface of your life. And if you want weekly writing on exactly these questions — what it means to build a life that actually fits — the Strong & Stable newsletter is a good place to begin.
The story isn’t over. And the best chapters often require us to go back to the beginning — not to stay there, but to remember who we were before we forgot.
Q: Why do the stories we loved as children still matter when we’re adults?
A: Because they weren’t arbitrary. The stories that captivated you as a child resonated because they matched something already forming in your developing psyche — a longing, a value, a sense of who you wanted to become. Narrative psychologist Dan P. McAdams has documented how the themes and tones of childhood story preferences become woven into the architecture of adult identity. The story you loved at age eight is still, in some form, running in the background.
Q: How can revisiting childhood stories actually help when I feel lost or directionless?
A: Your childhood stories can act as a compass — pointing back toward what genuinely mattered to you before adult obligation, expectation, and performance layered over it. Asking “who was my hero, and what did they represent?” or “what did that story give me that my real life didn’t?” can surface authentic values and needs that years of achievement may have buried but never erased. It’s not about going back to childhood. It’s about recovering information that’s been there all along.
Q: What does it mean if I always identified with the protagonist who was misunderstood or had to figure things out alone?
A: It often reflects something real about early relational experience — a felt sense of not being fully seen, or of having had to be self-sufficient in ways that children shouldn’t have to be. Those story preferences frequently mirror actual childhood emotional reality. The book that felt true felt true because it was, in important ways, describing your experience. Exploring that resonance in therapy can be illuminating and, often, deeply relieving — because it means being understood, maybe for the first time, in that particular place.
Q: Is this a recognized therapeutic approach? Is there research behind it?
A: Yes. Bibliotherapy — the use of stories and reading as a therapeutic tool — is a recognized and researched approach with documented benefits for emotional regulation, identity development, and coping with difficult experiences. Narrative therapy and Jungian-influenced approaches also use personal mythology — including the stories, characters, and archetypes that have most moved a client — as a way to access deeper layers of identity. It’s gentle, non-pathologizing, and often surprisingly productive.
Q: How do I actually do this? Where do I start?
A: Start by spending ten minutes writing down every story, book, movie, or fairy tale you remember loving as a child — without editing or judging the list. Then identify which two or three still produce something in you emotionally when you think of them. From there, ask: Who was my hero, and what qualities did they have? What was at stake in that story? What kind of world did it imagine? What did my younger self most want from it? Then look for the through-lines — and where those threads are, or aren’t, present in your life right now.
Q: What if my childhood books feel too painful to revisit?
A: That’s important information too — and it’s worth honoring rather than pushing through. If returning to childhood material activates grief, anxiety, or a sense of loss, that’s a signal that there’s something there worth working with, ideally with a skilled therapist who can help you do so safely. You don’t have to go it alone. And the goal is never to force a return to painful material — it’s to work with what’s there, at a pace that’s actually sustainable.
Related Reading
Further reading from Annie’s clinical archives on identity, narrative, and healing.
- McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. Northwestern University Faculty Profile
- Fivush, R. (2019). Family narratives and the development of an autobiographical self: Social and cultural perspectives on autobiographical memory. Routledge. Robyn Fivush Research
- Estés, C. P. (1992). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
- White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W. W. Norton & Company.
- Fivush, R., Habermas, T., Waters, T. E. A., & Zaman, W. (2011). The making of autobiographical memory: Intersections of culture, narratives and identity. International Journal of Psychology, 46(5), 321–345. PubMed
- McLean, K. C., & Pasupathi, M. (2012). Narrative identity development in adolescence. Developmental Psychology.
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LMFT · 15,000+ Clinical Hours · W.W. Norton Author · Psychology Today ColumnistAnnie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.
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