Myths are the stories that cultures create to communicate who is a part of the culture, what its values are, as well as what to make of the human experience and life’s mysteries. They are more than simply other people’s religions, they are organic as well as essential to the human experience. In Part I I discussed the role of myth in culture and what makes it so important for us right now. In this post, I want to explore how that shows up in our individual mental health.
Myth as Community Identifier
The stories that a culture tells, give us a sense of who that culture is. Our “in” and “out” groups are delineated and we get a sense of where we belong, how we fit into the larger whole. Having a sense of social place is vital to the construction of our identities. We can tend to think of identity as being largely driven by individual choices such as vocation or religion, or by predetermined factors such as physical appearance but much of our identity is socially constructed.
The myths within a culture, even the implicit ones that we don’t always recognize (e.g. the myth of the silent unemotional male) help form how we understand ourselves. They act as a framework for our identity as wall as a framework for how we relate to others. When that framework is gone, we experience a kind of groundlessness and a sense of isolation from others.
The Story of the Self
Another way that myth shapes our mental health is through how they allow us to story our own lives. Myths allow us to project our own experience out onto the cosmos and make sense of it all. When a culture forms a narrative about the human experience and communicates it in myth, it subtly communicates to us which parts of ourselves are “allowed” within the group. Likewise, with values. When a culture communicates its values through myth, it conveys to individuals which parts of themselves and their experience in the world are valuable and meaningful. Much of our self worth is formed by the myths of our culture.
Myth as Meaning Creator
When Victor Frankl was in the concentration camps during WWII, he discovered something that became the foundation for his entire approach to therapy: meaning can get a person through almost any amount of suffering. In the decades since, research has borne out this truth. Meaning is essential to mental health, resilience, and flourishing.
One of the primary functions of myth is to convey meaning. The stories that we hold, not only as individuals but as societies, hold the key to cultivating a healthy sense of ourselves as well as a meaningful life. Within the American cultural landscape, we have a plethora of myths. In recent years, many of those myths and the old paradigms that they were born from have come undone. As a result, some of the challenges that come into therapy can only be fully understood when viewed from this wider lens.
Very often when we come in for therapy, we have a good sense of what’s wrong. We may be able to pinpoint some causes: family upbringing, trauma, or a recent significant event; but we may not be quite as attuned to the way that larger social narratives have helped shape both our perception of ourselves in our circumstance as well as our interpretation of the circumstance itself.
