Guided Autobiography
for Older Adults:
New Learning Based on Old Experiences
by James E. Birren & Helen Kerschner
American society is going through an age revolution, with the population of older people increasing and the population of children decreasing. This shift prompts a question: How can the growing number of older adults enhance their ability to use the gift of their life experiences? Middle-aged and older people have lived through many challenges--economic depressions, wars and social unrest, as well as personal changes involving careers, divorces, deaths and other unanticipated events. The learning and adaptations required by these many life challenges give meaning and value to the past, the present and the future.
What is the value of writing and telling our life stories? "We live our lives forward but we understand them backwards" to paraphrase an insight from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. We learn or gain understanding of our lives from a backward look. Indeed, writing an autobiography or telling it to others provides the opportunity to put the paradoxes of chance events, contradictions and ambivalence in our lives into perspective. Understanding what we have lived through is an important step to our future lives.
Organizing, writing and sharing one's autobiography is an important learning experience. As we recall what we have lived through, our sense of self-sufficiency is restored and we become motivated to take on new or neglected goals. It reminds us of Ernest Hemingway's point that "the world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places." In reviewing the paths of their lives, people become impressed with all the problems that they have survived and the many ways they have been tested by the events and the people they have encountered.
What is guided autobiography? There are many contemporary approaches to helping older adults talk about their lives. Most of them are without a defined structure or method. Often the term "reminiscence groups" is used to describe such informal groups where elders recall their experiences. Participants may choose to discuss any aspect of their lives in any order. Conversation is the essential feature of such approaches, and the underlying purpose is often to relieve loneliness in older adults' lives.
By contrast, the "guided autobiography" method I have developed is defined and structured, permits evaluation, and is in fact being evaluated. Guided autobiography was designed to assist individuals to recall, organize and share the contents of their life experiences. A structured series of themes evokes memories of events, family, money, health, work and other common threads in the fabric of life. A combination of individual writing and group discussion sensitizes participants and primes their memories of the details of their lives and encourages them to organize those details.
The method includes four key elements:
The guided autobiography method was designed more than 20 years ago within the context of university education and has served the entire adult age range. Older adults have become increasingly attracted to the method, and those who facilitate guided autobiography programs have increasingly targeted elders. In the past several years, guided autobiography has been offered in numerous settings. Examples include older adult and lifelong learning programs, assisted living and long-term care facilities, churches and interfaith groups, libraries and senior centers. Currently, the method is being offered in six diverse settings in Southern California as part of an experimental project for training master teachers of the program and for expanding the diversity of the audience.
Past evaluations indicate that participants believe there are several outcomes of participation in a guided autobiography program. They are stim-ulated to recall their life events and to develop an accepting view of them. They believe the combination of a systematic review of the major themes of life, the sharing of life stories, and the group experience in doing so result in a more integrated perspective. They often identify their participation as leading to more accepting attitudes towards others.
The latter result is evidenced by the fact that group members often continue contact after the 10-week program, holding reunions and corresponding to keep up-to-date on one another's lives. This suggests that participation in the guided autobiography experience can lead to new friendships and perhaps, for some, confidant relationships. It also may suggest that such an experience could have particular value for the relatively isolated elders and for new arrivals in a residential facility.
Where to go from here. Living longer in an increasingly impersonal society requires many adjustments on the part of older adults. They have to trade their models of later life for ones that fit in better with a changing society. People are faced with acquiring new skills in the information age and acquiring knowledge about health in the time of human genome discoveries.
Adaptations are required to changing familial relationships as the family becomes more "vertical"--with more generations alive and often with many more divorces. Older adults also must adapt to contemporary social life, dealing with phenomena like huge shopping malls where the sales personnel are strangers as opposed to the familiar shopkeepers of the neighborhoods where they grew up.
Organizing and telling your life story in a group is accompanied by important learning that supports personal change. For most of us, there isn't any better goal of lifelong learning. Guided autobiography primes old memories that may have not been recalled for years. By writing and telling your life story in a group, long overlooked memories of events and the ways you adapted to them come to the surface. It is a contemporary process for learning where we are coming from in our lives--and where we would like to go. Guided autobiography thus offers a useful map for learning in the second half of life.
James Birren is associate director of the UCLA Center on Aging. Helen Kerschner is president of the Beverly Foundation, Pasadena, Calif.
