How adversity impacts on identity is important for understanding mental health and designing interventions. This research aims to record the narratives of people who have experienced adversity, to describe factors that are important to the individual dealing with adversity and to analyse the influence of adversity on identity through self-narratives. Using McAdam’s (2006) self-defining stories as a methodology this research asked participants who had experienced adversity with ill-health, work, relationships and migration to talk about how the experience affected their sense of themselves.

Two important aspects of methodology of life narratives were used in this research: 1) the cultural context of the study was approached by comparing the themes in the top ten popular Australian fiction novels with the themes in the self-defining stories; and 2) the validity of the analysis was tested by asking the participants to comment on the analysis.

Analysis of the stories revealed that the participants engaged with the problems that were presented with the adversity, changed their actions and behaviours and negotiated varied relationships at many levels. In this process they evolved a new identity better suited to future challenges. According to their self-assessment these participants successfully survived adversity. Revenge and anger did not appear significantly in these self-defining stories. The participants used their inner personal resources to move their lives forward constructively.

From a theoretical point of view this research builds on resilience, life events, and post-traumatic stress/growth literature in three ways, self-defining stories expand the contextual environment for life events’ studies, research with adversity captures accumulation factors that are part of real life experience, conducting research years after adversity allows the long term impact to be demonstrated. Additionally, the self-defining stories of Australians were shown to have similarities with popular Australian cultural themes from fiction and the process of validation of the analysis of the self-defining stories contributed to the self-healing reflective process for the participants.