3 key rules of reframing

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3 vital principles of reframing damaging perspectives
– by Mark Tyrrell

A man gives a woman a wonderful looking engagement ring. She says, "Gosh, that's beautiful! Is that a real diamond?" and he says, "Well, if it's not, I've just been conned out of three dollars!"

We see things one way - then along comes something (like a punch line) that completely reframes our perspective.

A determining factor in your clients' happiness is not just what happens to them but how they 'frame' their reality. All effective therapy (and humour!) involves re-framing; because events and situations are only 'good' or 'bad' if we see them that way.

We all know people who make the best of the worst and the worst of the best. And strong emotion skews how we frame reality.

If we're angry, we frame events through the lens of rage; when in love, we frame everything as 'wonderful'; and when we're depressed, neutral or good events will be interpreted negatively.

People come to therapy because they want to feel and think in new ways that help them live happier and healthier lives.

Here are three mind altering tips to help you reframe your clients' damaging perspectives effectively.

1) Don't argue (please)

Delivering reframes isn't about 'putting them right!' Direct advice giving seldom works because people need to feel:

• competent
• persuaded
• not bamboozled - even with the best of intentions

It is much more effective to present reframes as innocent questions, observations, misunderstandings or even truisms.

Yes, I see a lot of clients for vomiting phobia

is an undeniable truism - but also subtly reframes the vomit phobic's conviction that they are 'the only one' who feels like this.

2) Remember that reframes are more than just 'cognitive'

You might be forgiven for thinking that a 'cognitive reframe' only works on the level of thinking. But it's actually easier, by far, to change our feelings in order to change our thoughts than the other way round - and that is why we use hypnosis with our clients.

A reframe needs to be felt. It needs to have an emotional impact beyond its appeal to the 'thinking mind'. This is because the new frame needs to be more emotionally compelling than the old one if it is to be accepted. We do need to calm our clients, of course, but we also need to know how to sometimes raise their emotional pitch in order to embed a new more productive way of seeing.

By discovering what's important to your client, you will find out what raises their 'emotional temperature' and you can utilise what motivates them to help them view things differently.

For example, a businessman and landlord who needed to stop cigarettes choking the life out of him was given the following analogy:

Imagine a tenant whom you had to pay to live in your house. Imagine that you paid them to be there while they soiled your furniture, wrecked your carpets, damaged the walls and roof... Would you call that a good deal for you?

After this reframe the man said he just couldn't continue smoking. This reframe worked for him because of his business mind, the nature of his own business, and the importance to him of 'good deals'. He could no longer think of smoking in any other terms than 'a terrible deal' for him.

3) Open the 'attention gates' before you deliver a reframe

Once a reframe has done its work, it should be difficult - even impossible - to go back to the old way of thinking and feeling about something.

But we need to ensure that our client is in the right state of mind to be receptive to the inculcation of a new, more therapeutic take on things.

We need to know not only how to construct a reframe but also how to open our client's 'attention gates' so that they can become receptive enough to actually take in and absorb the reframes we offer them. No matter how elegant your reframe, if the client blocks it out, it will be useless.

This is why all psychotherapists need to understand how people can become 'hypnotically receptive' in so many other ways than just through being formally 'hypnotized'.

Milton Erickson was a master of the art of 'prepping' a client so that reframes would take hold. He would regularly use, singly or in many artful combinations,

• surprise
• shock
• humour
• curiosity
• hypnosis and
• practical demonstration and instruction

to get people's full attention, loosen them up and get them into the right frame of mind for his reframes to take root. He would then deliver a carefully crafted and individually targeted 'new perspective' that would completely alter the troubling and limiting ideas that were causing them unnecessary difficulty in life.

'Cognitive therapy' can work very well - as long as the therapist understands this business of receptivity in the mind of their clients and the need to 'open the attention gates' before they try to deliver 'cognitive reframes'. (1)

So, in short, learn to deliver ideas compellingly so that new perspectives will be effectively fuelled not just by the arguments of reason but by the emotional response that is essential for any new idea to be 'taken to heart'.

There are many ways to deliver reframes but when you keep these three principles in mind your clients may just find themselves leaving your office with powerful new ways of seeing which transform how they live.

Note

(1) We teach ways to do this in more depth on the Uncommon Knowledge Precision Hypnosis Online training course.

You can learn How to Stop Anyone Smoking with Mark Tyrrell on our Smoking Cessation Training Course (online).

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