Dr. Robert Butler (1927 – 2010), a world-renowned gerontologist and psychiatrist, was one of the first physicians to write about the life review process, a process he defined as “the tendency of older people towards self-reflection.” (1) He determined that as we age, we naturally gravitate towards this process, with the goal of giving meaning to our lives. By ​remembering and reflecting on the past, the life review process fosters understanding and allows us to come to peace with the past and the present.

When I reflect on what my first client had to say about the process of working with me to create her memoir, I see how perfectly her response fits with what I’ve learned about the value of life review. She said, “The experience of looking back over my life was profound. Telling my story out loud, then having a skilled writer turn it into a coherent narrative, has been an amazing experience. I can see in the written pages and photographs from my life a kind of sense and structure that is vastly comforting.”

Whether an older adult captures their life story in a book, a video, an audio recording, or simply talks about their life to someone who will listen deeply, the act of going through the life review process can make a powerful difference in their understanding of themselves, their past, and their legacy.

You may be surprised to learn (as I was) that one important contributor to our resilience and our ability to ride the ups and downs of life is our knowledge of our family's story. I first read about this claim and the research that backs it up in a 2013 New York Times article by Bruce Feiler. The article, titled "The Stories That Bind Us," discusses the groundbreaking research of Dr. Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta.

In his quest to test this hypothesis, Dr. Duke and a colleague developed a series of twenty questions that would provide a measure of how much a person knows about his or her family’s story. Example questions included: Do you know how your parents met? Do you know where some of your grandparents grew up? Do you know the source of your name? Do you know some of the lessons that your parents learned from good or bad experiences?

As stated in the New York Times article, "The more children knew about their family's history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successful they believed their families functioned. The Do You Know? scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children's emotional health and happiness."

Just a few months after completing this research, the attacks of 9/11 occurred. Dr. Duke and his colleague followed up with their research subjects and again saw that the children with the most knowledge of their family's history tended to be more resilient to the stress created by this horrific event.