Tyler Cowen argues in a TED talk (~15 min) that stories pervade our mental lives. He thinks they are a major source of cognitive biases and, on the margin, we should be more suspicious of them - especially simple stories. Here's an interesting quote about the meta-level:
What story do you take away from Tyler Cowen? ...Another possibility is you might tell a story of rebirth. You might say, "I used to think too much in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen, and now I think less in terms of stories". ...You could also tell a story of deep tragedy. "This guy Tyler Cowen came and he told us not to think in terms of stories, but all he could do was tell us stories about how other people think too much in terms of stories."
'Helpful' and 'harmful' are words that describe the effect of an action or circumstance on a person(+their stuff)'s ability to achieve a goal.
This question doesn't make sense to me - 'help and harm' and 'goals' are two very different kinds of things, and I don't see how they could be lumped together into one concept.
This area of thought is complex, and my way of approaching it does view a lot of that complexity as goal-related, but the point of that isn't to handwave the complexity, it's to put it where I can see it and deal with it.
Suffering is experiencing pain that the experiencer wanted to avoid - pain that's addressed by their personal 'avoid pain' goal. We don't disagree about those instances of experienced pain being harmful. Not all experiences of pain are suffering, though.
Also, people with CIPA are unable to experience the qualia of pain just as people who are blind are unable to experience the qualia of color. If you're considering the injuries they sustain as a result painful, we're not defining the word in the same way.
It's only bizarre if you're considering the owned thing and the owner as separate entities. Considering them the same for some purposes (basically anything involving the concept of ownership as our society uses it) is the only way of looking at it that I've found that adds back up to normality.
Does your body share your goals?
It's a function of discussing owned things, not of discussing decision-making. Un-owned things that aren't alive don't have goals. (Or they may in a few cases retain the relevant goal of the person who last owned them - a machine will generally keep working when its owner dies or looses it or disowns it.)
The difference between those concepts may be relevant elsewhere, but I don't think it's relevant in this case.
I'll put it on my to-do list.
It depends what you mean by 'better', and for the most part I choose not to define or use the word except in situations with sufficient context to use it in phrases like 'better for' or 'better at'.