Reframing: re-viewing & re-labelling

A personal view of reframing

We all experience suffering in our lives - like death and taxes it seems to be a universal constant.

In fact life seems to go out of its way to provide you with some exquisite forms of suffering, whether it be rejection from a someone you find attractive, an embarrassing failure at work, or simply the fact that everyone else seems to have more (money, happiness, sex, etc.) than you.

Suffering is also something we usually don’t like to think about. If you had a choice would you selectively delete those moments of pain? What would your life be like then?

We all seem to deal with suffering in our own unique way. Some people become very upset and then move on as if it never happened. Others withdraw, become more cautious or even paralysed by the events. And others seem to thrive on what we would call suffering, seeing each pain as a challenge or someone to fight.

Think about it for a moment… Just how do you deal with suffering? Do you like your friends to console you? Furiously throw yourself into some activity? ‘Not think of it’ – by shutting out any thoughts about it?

And how did you evolve your way of handling emotional pain? Most of us have a preferred way of coping with pain – one that evolved in an ad-hoc manner.

NLP has become some important tools for who experience emotional pain - by studying or ‘modelling’ those who have learned cope with life particularly well.

My preferred technique is to change the labels on the suffering. Generally, we tend to put our memories into the broad categories of pain or pleasure.

We can diffuse a lot of our past pain by honestly looking at our categories and seeing can they be re-labelled.

For example, let’s say you are working with a computer and it crashes, destroying your day’s work. How do you label the pain? Do you give it a destructive label like ’m no good with computers? Or a constructive one like Wow, I never thought of that, I will save my work more often?.

The pain your have experienced in the past can be re-labelled or re-viewed or ‘reframed’ as a valuable lesson or opportunity to grow and extend yourself. It can endow us with the nicest qualities of caring and compassion of our fellow suffers.

In addition to the re-labelling process there are a range of other NLP techniques that you can use to ‘reprogram’ (or change how you are affected by) your past. And to design a better future, since our past can determine our future unless we are careful.

Unlike may other learning systems, NLP does not provided a rigid recipe of steps that will only work under rigid conditions. Instead it provides a sort of Swiss army knife of tools that help keep you on course, positive, successful and happy.

Richard Donovan