Latest / Internal Insights / The Words We Tell Ourselves: How Reframing Changes What We See
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Hey, I'm Ted Thao This is Internal Insights. I'm a licensed professional counselor, which means I spend most of my weeks listening closely to people work through the hardest parts of being alive. This podcast is where I take what I'm hearing without any names or identifying details and open it up into a conversation for anyone willing to think a little harder about themselves and the world around them. Picture two people who spilled coffee down their shirts on the same Monday morning, and one of them mutters, Great, the whole day is ruined. While the other one shrugs and says, Well, that's a story for later. The strain is identical. And I bet you anything, those two people are about to have two completely different days. All because of a handful of words. There's this idea in therapy called reframing. And it sounds a lot fancier than it is. Reframing just means looking at the same situation through a different lens. And very often that lens is made out of words. Think of a photo hanging on your wall. Put it in a heavy black frame and your eyes go straight to the shadows. While the same photo in a light wooden frame. Suddenly shows you all of its warmth and color. The picture never changed. The frame did. Our minds work in a similar way. Because all day long there's these little voices in our heads describing what's happening to us. And that voice has a lot of influence. When it says, I'm so behind on everything, your shoulders tighten and your body braces for a scolding. And when it says I'm in the middle of a busy season, your body has a little bit more room to breathe, even though your list of tasks is exactly as long as it was a second ago. Here's an example. Picture someone stuck in traffic on loop four ten at five o'clock, thinking this always happens to me. I can never get anywhere on time. By the time they get home, they're irritated. A little short with whoever greets them at the door, and the whole evening has a gray cloud over it. Now pictures the same person in the same traffic thinking, Well, this is annoying. And I guess I've got an extra twenty minutes with this podcast. Same cars, same brake lights, very different evening. Words don't just describe our experience. They shape what we notice and how our body responds. Words like always, never, should, and ruin tend to shrink the picture down to its worst corner, while gentler and more precise words give the whole picture some room. A few swaps or reframes I love to do is turning I failed into that didn't go how I hoped. Turning what's wrong with me into what's going on with me and turning I'm so anxious into my body's working really hard to keep me safe. None of these are magic spells. Saying them once won't change anything overnight. What they do though, slowly, is teaching your inner voice a different way of talking and the way we talk to ourselves. gradually becomes the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Right about here, there's a fair bit o of skepticism that tends to show up in my office. It usually sounds something like isn't reframing just lying to myself, Ted? Isn't it pretending things are fine when they're not? And I really appreciate that question because it comes from a healthy instinct Not to fake your way through life. Lying to yourself would be sitting in traffic saying, I love this traffic. This is the best part of my day when you don't believe it, when your body doesn't believe it. And usually leaves you feeling worse. Reframing doesn't touch the facts. So the traffic is still there, the frustration is still real, and you're completely allowed to feel it. What framing does is gently question whether the first description was actually accurate. And more often than not, the harsher version is the one stretching truth. I can never get anywhere on time. Probably isn't true. And I mess everything up. That definitely is not true. So a good reframe isn't a nicer life, it's a more honest sentence. A simple test to ask yourself are two things. Is the new way of saying something still true? And is it a little kinder? Notice I'm saying kinder and if it's still true. And if the answer to both is yes, you're not pretending. You're just telling the story more fairly. So here's something small to try this week. Next time you spill something on you a little. Catch the first sentence your mind reaches for and see if there's a version of that that is true and a little bit kinder. Sometimes the world starts to look differently simply because we've started describing it in a gentler voice. That's where I'll leave it for today. You don't have to agree with everything I said, but I'd invite you to sit with it a little longer before you move on to whatever is next. I'm Ted Thao this has been Internal Insights. And if you want to learn more about my work, you can find me at internal insights therapy dot com. Take care, and I'll talk to you next time.