Unscripted Healing: Beyond Social Media Success Stories
Social media feeds overflow with dramatic narratives of personal change: "My depression recovery story" "How I went from rock bottom to CEO!" "Watch my life-changing transformation! (with before and after photos!)" More often than not, these are carefully edited stories that compress months or years of complex growth into perfectly soundtracked minutes. Digital narratives can offer hope, however they also reinforce rigid expectations about how healing and growth should look. The messy middle gets edited out. Relapses, setbacks, and ongoing struggles don't make for viral content.
Even mental health content creators, despite good intentions, can fall into this trap. TikTok therapists compress complex therapeutic concepts into 60-second solutions. Instagram infographics reduce nuanced healing processes to numbered lists and neat flowcharts. The platform's demand for clear, engaging narratives can oversimplify the reality of mental health struggles.
And nothing is genuinely new here, these viral transformation stories follow one of the most influential storytelling frameworks in Western culture: The Hero's Journey.
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder..." So begins Joseph Campbell's description of the monomyth, better known today as The Hero's Journey. Since George Lucas explicitly crafted Star Wars using Campbell's framework, this narrative structure has dominated storytelling across media, from books to films to video games.
But Campbell wasn't attempting to conjure a formula. He was describing a pattern that he observed in myths across cultures. The Hero's Journey was meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. And that distinction matters deeply when we consider how stories shape our understanding of ourselves and our lives.
Heroic Expectations
So before diving any further, let's outline the structure of The Hero's Journey. I'm including examples from films, and every image is hyperlinked with its corresponding scene. I've chosen these films in particular as they all fully fit the Hero's Journey outline, so while I'm only highlighting a single element per movie, know that the entire structure could be applied to each film.
The Ordinary World: Where our hero begins, often dissatisfied or unfulfilled
The Call to Adventure: A challenge or opportunity that disrupts the ordinary
Refusal of the Call: Initial reluctance or fear to accept the challenge
Meeting the Mentor: Encountering guidance or wisdom
Crossing the Threshold: Taking the first step into the unknown
Tests, Allies, and Enemies: Facing challenges and building relationships
Approach to the Innermost Cave: Preparing for the major challenge
The Ordeal: Facing the greatest fear or challenge
The Reward: Achieving victory or gaining new understanding
The Road Back: Beginning the return journey
Resurrection: A final test or transformation
Return with the Elixir: Bringing wisdom or change back to the ordinary world
All of these movies are truly excellent. But when every story we encounter follows the same basic structure – a chosen one facing trials, achieving victory, and returning transformed – it creates a narrow template for how we view personal growth and healing. It can generate unrealistic expectations:
That our struggles must be epic in scale
That we must face our battles alone
That there must be a clear victory condition
That transformation follows a linear path
That we must return "home" changed
These expectations can be particularly harmful in therapeutic contexts, where healing rarely follows such a neat arc. Our stories are not always told in perfect chronological order. And real growth often involves cycles, community support, and learning to live with ongoing challenges rather than definitively conquering them.
After the End
While Western media often embraces a framework of individual heroic triumph, other cultural traditions offer different approaches to storytelling. Japanese media, in particular, consistently provides counterpoints to the Hero's Journey, especially in how it processes collective trauma and renewal.
Consider how Japan's post-war experience shaped its storytelling. Godzilla emerged as a direct response to atomic devastation - the monster itself powered by nuclear energy, forcing audiences to confront their fears through metaphor. Works like Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion don't shy away from showing civilization's collapse, instead exploring how communities face and survive catastrophic change.
This theme of processing collective trauma through apocalyptic narratives extends into gaming. NieR: Automata, Elden Ring, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all begin long after their respective apocalypses. There's no chosen one preventing disaster - that failure already occurred.
Final Fantasy VI famously allows its villain to actually succeed in destroying the world halfway through the game, transforming the story from one of prevention to one of adaptation and resilience.
These alternative narrative frameworks offer valuable perspectives for mental health treatment. Yes, you could apply the Hero’s Journey framework to these stories - it can be applied anywhere. However rather than focusing solely on 'defeating' depression or 'overcoming' trauma, these stories suggest the possibility of learning to exist within changed circumstances.
Consider how Attack on Titan's characters must constantly adapt their understanding of their world - each revelation doesn't lead to a victory, but to a deeper appreciation of complexity. This mirrors how many people experience therapy - not as a journey to a definitive 'cure', but as an ongoing process of understanding, adaptation, and growth. When working with clients processing grief or managing chronic conditions, these non-linear narratives often resonate more deeply than traditional triumph-focused stories.
Balance in the Force
It’s intriguing that Narrative Therapy emerged around the same time Lucas was bringing Campbell's Hero's Journey to the mainstream. Rather than imposing a predetermined structure, Narrative Therapy helps people deconstruct and reconstruct their life stories in ways that serve their healing and growth.
This approach was profoundly influenced by Viktor Frankl's work. As a survivor of Auschwitz, Frankl observed that those who maintained hope – who could construct meaning from their suffering – were more likely to survive. But critically, the stories told weren't always heroic narratives of triumph. Sometimes they were simple stories of connection, of bearing witness, of finding small moments of humanity in inhumane conditions. Our stories don't have to be grand triumphs.
It’s Dangerous to go Alone, Take This.
The Hero's Journey's influence runs deep, creating expectations that healing should be linear, decisive, individualistic, and complete. In real life, sometimes strength means allowing ourselves to be supported by others rather than going it alone. Sometimes victory looks like getting out of bed in the morning or sending a difficult email - small acts of courage that would never make it into a Hollywood script.
When we expand our understanding of what stories can look like, we give ourselves permission to heal in ways that feel authentic. Anxiety doesn't need to “grow” into “anxiety-free” to be "successful". Learning to coexist with anxiety, understanding its rhythms and patterns, and developing a relationship with it that's more manageable can be just as (if not more) healing.
Which is what makes Narrative Therapy so powerful. Instead of imposing a structure of how healing "should" look, it helps people recognize themselves as the authors of their own stories. Some might find empowerment in framing their journey in heroic terms. Others might find more resonance in quieter narratives of persistence, or in stories of community and connection. There's no single "right" way to tell the story of your life.
And still, our ability to understand and tell our own stories is limited by the narrative frameworks we know. Like learning a new language opens up new ways of thinking, exposure to different storytelling traditions expands our ability to make sense of our experiences.
So expose yourself to diverse storytelling! Watch critically panned films. Play games that experiment with narrative structure. Listen to complex music. The more frameworks we encounter, the more tools we have for understanding and sharing our own experiences.
Your story doesn't need to follow a template. It doesn't need to end in triumph. It doesn't need to be epic in scale. It just needs to be authentically yours.
Best,
Will Ard
LMSW, MBA