Listening to Life Stories

Listening to Life Stories: A New Approach to Stress Management in Health Care is about a simple storytelling process, the Life Narrative Interview (LNI), that research shows can help medical patients have a better experience during a hospital stay. By focusing on positive life experiences, the LNI helps a person reconnect with their high points, defining moments, and finest hours. Remembering those positive experiences helps buffer the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that so often accompany life difficulties such as change, loss, or medical illness and treatment. The process for administering the LNI can be taught to hospital volunteers, and a low-cost volunteer program can be created to increase patient satisfaction with their hospital experience. In this reprint of our original book, we discuss the research supporting the use of Life Narrative Interviews and describe the skills necessary to conduct them with medical patients, people having difficulty, or with family members or friends who would simply enjoy talking about the positive experiences of their life.