Re-framing

Re-framing

Re-framing is a technique that can be used to support ourselves in times of stress and anxiety. The skill of re-framing is a time-honored, psychotherapist-recommended method of looking at things or ‘re-framing’ certain issues or stressors in a way that supports us to practically reduce our stress and promote a greater sense of peace and control.

If you don't already use this stress relief strategy regularly, you may want to consider trying it and adding another skill to your self therapy tool kit.

Let's talk about re-framing

Re-framing is noticing how you react to certain situations or thoughts and gives us a way of noticing without judgement and offering ourselves a way of changing the way we look at the issues.

In this we are offering ourselves care and compassion to acknowledge our feelings, thoughts and experiences. Allowing yourself the time and space to change it, in this we can turn a stressful event into a challenge to be bravely overcome, or a moment of learning or even allowing ourselves to ask for help when we need it.

Whatever we do or choose not to do about it we can see it as a learning experience, either positive or negative. Even if we can see a negative event as a learning experience, we can look at it more objectively moving forward to make changes to better support our journey to well-being.

Let’s talk about Thinking patterns

The first step in learning how to use re-framing as a technique is to identify any negative thinking patterns you have, or that you have noticed about yourself. This is not an exercise to criticise yourself but just to wonder and reflect on the situations or patterns causing distress and just to wonder about some of these negative thinking patterns.

Noticing Your Thoughts

Next we want to notice or to catch ourselves when we are feeling stressed or have too many negative and hurtful thoughts.

Being aware of our patterns is an important step in learning to challenge and ultimately changing them.

As we have talked about before in the Blog, practicing mindfulness can be another helpful tool in noticing and becoming more aware of their thoughts and feelings as they are happening in the present. In becoming more mindful of our thoughts, as though we are an objective observer, we are better able to ‘catch’ or just simply observe negative thinking styles.

It can also be helpful to keep a journal and start recording what's happening in your life and your thoughts surrounding these events, and then examine these thoughts through your new frame. Worksheets to help organise your thoughts are available on the Self therapy pages of the MWordBlog.

Let’s talk about challenging your thoughts

So now you are getting better at noticing your negative thoughts and patterns. Or perhaps your journaling and notes taking has shown you something that has been sitting outside of your awareness.

The next step to effectively re-framing these experiences involves examining the truth and accuracy of your thoughts.

Ask yourself;

Are the things you're telling yourself even true?

Are there any other ways to interpret the same events?

Is this helpful for me?

You could also use the WWWWH Method to break down the issue further- Worksheet at the MWord Blog

Instead of seeing things the way you always have, challenge every negative thought, and see if you can adopt thoughts that fit your situation but reflect a more positive outlook.

Replacing negative with positive

Re-framing in action is the process of noticing stress, anxiety or negative self talk and seeing if you can make changes either to use less emotionally negative self talk or to look for a more positive outcome.

For example, When finding yourself in a potentially stressful or difficult situation, rather than focusing on the negative, can you ‘re-frame’ this as a challenge, new adventure or an interesting experiment.

But making small changes consistently, moving from a negative to more of a positive then we are able to make bigger changes to the way we look at the bigger picture, allowing ourselves to have a more positive outlook.