Redemption vs Contamination Sequences

You are at dinner, and someone asks about the year you left your job. You hear yourself tell it. The company came apart, the severance was insulting, it took eleven months to find anything — and that stretch is where you worked out what you actually wanted to do. The story ends on the working out.

Six months later, someone asks the same question. Same company, same severance, same eleven months. This time you end on the friend who stopped returning your calls, and how you've never quite trusted that group since. Same facts. Opposite ending.

Narrative psychologists have a name for each shape. A redemption sequence is an episode that begins in a clearly negative emotional state and ends in a positive one, so that the bad is redeemed by the good that follows it; a contamination sequence runs the other way, from a clearly positive beginning to a negative outcome (McAdams et al., 2001). Neither term describes what happened to you. Both describe which end of the episode you gave the last word.

That distinction is the whole concept. Lose it and this collapses into optimism versus pessimism, which isn't what anyone is measuring.

The direction is what gets coded

When McAdams and colleagues built the coding scheme in 2001, they were strict about both ends of an episode.

Redemption. The negative state had to be explicit. You had to describe a situation in which you suffered — pain, fear, sadness — and then either that situation changed into a good one, or a good outcome came out of it. A person sinks into alcoholism, stops drinking, and life afterwards improves.

Contamination. The mirror requirement applies. The account had to state that the episode began somewhere positive, and that the positive state was followed by a clearly negative outcome. Excited about the promotion, then learning a friend was fired to make room (McAdams & McLean, 2013).

One detail in that scheme does more work than it looks. The good outcome doesn't have to match the size of the bad event. A catastrophic loss followed by a modest gain in security still codes as redemption (McAdams et al., 2001). Nobody is weighing the ledger. The coding reads direction.

Why the same event can be told either way

Most things that happen to you have more than one consequence.

The divorce cost you the house and half the friends, and it also ended the arguing and produced a decade of work you wouldn't otherwise have done. Both consequences are real. A story has to stop somewhere, and where it stops is a choice you make each time you tell it — usually without noticing you made one.

The 2001 authors were explicit about this. The redemptive narrator elaborates a positive outcome of a bad scene. The contaminated narrator locates the negative consequence of a good one. In both cases the consequence probably did occur, and in both cases other consequences were left out (McAdams et al., 2001).

So the same divorce, the same layoff, the same diagnosis holds the material for both endings — both sets of consequences really happened. Whether a person actually swings from one to the other between tellings isn't something McAdams and colleagues measured. A telling stops somewhere, and stopping isn't dishonesty. It's what choosing an ending does.

What each shape travels with

The original study ran in two American samples. Seventy-four adults between thirty-five and sixty-five gave interview accounts of eight key scenes, and 125 undergraduates wrote accounts of ten. The midlife adults weren't a cross-section: they were called back from a larger pool precisely because they scored a standard deviation above or below average on generativity — the concern with contributing to those who come after.

Among them, the high scorers told more redemption and less contamination than the low. Redemption went with life satisfaction, self-esteem and a sense of coherence in life, and against depressive symptoms. Contamination ran the other way (McAdams et al., 2001).

The student sample carried only the redemption half across. Undergraduates produced so few contamination sequences that McAdams and colleagues dropped contamination from that study altogether. Their scenes were also rated for overall emotional tone, and redemption tracked wellbeing somewhat more closely than tone did (McAdams et al., 2001).

A later study makes the point from another angle. Lodi-Smith and colleagues followed 170 students across four years of college and coded the stories they told about how they had changed. Redemption didn't group with positive tone. It grouped with coherence and with causal explanation — with the work of accounting for a change, not the mood of the account (Lodi-Smith et al., 2009).

A redemptive story isn't a cheerful story

The 2001 authors said it outright: scenes scoring high on redemption aren't simply happy stories, and plenty of happy stories aren't redemption sequences (McAdams et al., 2001).

It follows from the coding. A redemption sequence has to contain real suffering, described explicitly, or it doesn't qualify. A story with no dark opening can't be redemptive — there's nothing there to redeem.

Contamination carries a symmetrical oddity. To score, the episode has to begin somewhere genuinely good, stated as such. By that rule, a life narrated as uniformly grim yields few contamination sequences — contamination is a story about having had something.

Neither label is a reading of your mood. Each is a reading of where you set the two endpoints.

The redemptive story has an address

Here's the part most popular coverage leaves out.

The redemption sequence is one theme inside a larger prototype McAdams called the redemptive self: a protagonist who senses an early advantage, wakes to others' suffering, and turns bad scenes into good outcomes. Guo, Klevan and McAdams studied it in 157 late-midlife American adults, and they're direct about where it comes from. The prototype has had high currency in American culture and literature going back to the seventeenth-century Puritan settlements in Massachusetts (Guo, Klevan, & McAdams, 2016). Those same authors close by asking whether it exists in other cultures at all.

Habermas states the general version plainly. Narrative is a universal format for sharing experience; the life story may not be universal. The prototypical Western life story descends from literary autobiography and reaches back only to the eighteenth century. Given that variation, he takes it as plausible that what counts as a good life story varies with culture too (Habermas, 2011).

That material isn't background. In Hammack's study of Israeli and Palestinian youths, which McAdams and McLean summarize, both groups had drawn their communities' master narratives into personal identity — redemptive stories predominating among the Israeli youths, contamination and tragedy among the Palestinian ones (McAdams & McLean, 2013).

What noticing a pattern doesn't license

Seeing contamination in your own accounts isn't an instruction to reframe your losses as gifts.

No one has run the experiment that would settle whether it helps. Reviewing the field in 2013, McAdams and McLean ask whether redemptive narratives raise wellbeing or whether wellbeing produces them; they point to two longitudinal results leaning toward the first, and still conclude that considerably more research is needed (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Every design here is observational, so nothing tells you what happens when a redemptive ending is forced onto an episode that doesn't have one. The 2001 authors add a possibility that's easy to skip past — some people narrate redemptively because that's genuinely how the events went.

The associations also carry exceptions with an age on them. In early adolescence, boys who made more meaning of their stories showed lower wellbeing than boys who made less; by late adolescence that appears to turn around (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Habermas, summarizing McLean and Mansfield, notes that autobiographical reasoning isn't uniformly good for a person — how adaptive it is may vary with context, content and age, and brooding is not reflecting (Habermas, 2011).

The unit is small, too. In that scheme a sequence is coded from one episode, told on one day, to one prompt (McAdams et al., 2001). It isn't a diagnosis, and a run of contaminated episodes isn't a condition.

What to do with the pattern

Read your own accounts for the endpoints rather than for the events.

Take the hardest year you have. You know the one. Tell it out loud, or write it down, and mark where you chose to stop. Then tell it again next month and mark that. If both versions end in the same place, you've watched yourself do the same thing twice — though two tellings aren't a measurement. If they don't, you've just watched yourself pick an ending.

A narrative assessment does that arithmetic across more episodes than you can hold in your head. That's the only advantage it has. It's a mirror, not a verdict. It can report where your stories tend to stop; it has nothing to say about where they ought to.

You are allowed to leave an ending where it is. Some losses haven't produced anything good yet, and saying so isn't a failure of narration — it's an accurate report on an unfinished story. Noticing where you stop is worth more than any rearrangement you could force.