The Art of Reframing

Changing your mindset about a person to change the outcome of a conversation 

A friend of mine revealed to me that he and his wife fight quite a bit, and the fighting sometimes gets heated past a point he’s comfortable with. He expressed concern that it was a cycle they couldn’t break out of.

Knowing that he is an excellent salesman in his day job, I told him to reframe the situation, and treat his wife the way he would treat a customer.

He paused and considered it, then thanked me for the advice. The next day, he texted me to say that reframing worked like a charm,”almost unfair”.

Reframing is my favorite way to solve interpersonal problems (to the point that my close friends often make fun of me for it). It’s also extremely hard to do, tantamount to breaking a longstanding habit, and involves changing your mindset in ways that many people are unwilling to do.

Frames and conversations

Put simply, in sociolinguistics, a “frame” is the preconceived role a person sets another person into when engaging in a conversation. A frame dictates how two people interact, and works insofar as both people agree and understand which frame they have for each other.

So, for instance, you give your boss the “boss” frame, and she gives you the “subordinate” frame. You speak to your boss and understand your boss’s speech based on that frame, and she does the same for you. This boss frame could include “deserves respect; knows what she’s talking about; has my best interest at heart; is higher than me on the hierarchy; is someone worth following”. When your boss tells you to do something at your job, you are willing to complete the task and don’t find it strange that she’s asked you to do it. “Please type up these notes,” she says, and you say, “Yes, right away.”

However, if someone who does not fall into your boss frame, like a coworker, asks you to do the same thing, even in the exact tone of voice or with the exact same expression, how would you feel?

Perhaps this coworker has a frame that includes “lower on the totem pole than I; a mooch; someone I don’t like; not very smart”. You would not expect them to ask you to do work, and if they did, you would resent them for it.

“Please type up these notes,” your coworker says, and you say, “Oh, hell no! Do it yourself!”

Or, say, if your boss talked to you in a more friendly manner than usual, perhaps bantering about personal experiences or issues, you would probably respond in a more reserved fashion than you would to someone whom you considered to be a close friend. You would not (I hope) describe your latest drunken adventure to your boss the same way you would to your bestie, if at all.

Changing your expectations of responsibility

Framing is an important aspect of social interactions, but it can also be a great pitfall, especially in our most intimate relationships. We often frame our family members into certain roles, and don’t realize that we jump to conclusions about what they mean without looking at what they are actually trying to express. Our family members often get under our skin in a way that no one else can, and we feel helpless to change it.

Most of the time, when we have problems with other people, we see it as their fault. “My mom is annoying,” we say. But the fact is, we have much more control over our reactions to people than we think. And we certainly have more control over our own reactions than we have over someone else’s actions. While you can ask your mom to change her actions, perhaps to quit asking so many questions about your personal life, she probably won’t, especially if her frame is “I need to ask my child what she is doing with her life”.

Reframing means taking responsibility for how the conversation goes, and changing your understanding of the conversation from the other person’s actions to your own reactions. It changes from “my mom is annoying” to “I have an annoyed reaction to my mother; I am going to change that to a different reaction”.

The trick is to find a person whose frame would instill a positive reaction in you, rather than the negative one of the current frame. If your trusted, beloved roommate asked you the same questions your mother asked you, how would you feel or respond? Would you be more willing to see the inquisition as loving care instead of as annoying meddling?

First steps

Treating your mother like your roommate or best friend is a big, hard change to make, especially if you’ve got years of habitual conversational reactions behind you. If you expect your mother to be annoying and meddlesome, it can be very hard to start to expect her to be caring and interested.

Because conversations are organic, it can be difficult to pull yourself out of one and realize that you have control over your reactions. It takes mindfulness and work. If I had my way, I would have a tape recorder on hand to analyze any conversation that doesn’t seem to be going well for me, and come back to it later to see what I could have changed. This is, of course, rather impractical, and takes too much time. You have to learn to change a conversation on the fly, when it’s not going well already — not two hours later when you’ve transcribed the conversation and analyzed it in detail.

The easiest way to change the tone of a conversation immediately is to change the tone of your voice. If you usually respond to your mother in an angry, sarcastic tone, try using a quiet, friendly tone, even if you use the same words. It takes a lot of conscious effort, and you’ll probably be surprised with what your tone of voice actually sounds like when you take a step back from a conversation.

Reframing until you get the reaction you want

Of course, there is no way to tell how someone will take your reframing a conversation. Treating your mom in the jocular fashion you treat your roommate will probably throw her off. She may be pleasantly surprised, or she may be angry and assume you are being cheeky.

Again, the only reaction over which you have any control is your own. If your mother’s reactions are angry ones, you can change how you act again to get a different reaction out of her. She may, however, be too entrenched in her frame with you to give you a positive reaction, especially right at the beginning. Just remember that it takes work and time to change the dynamics of an intimate relationship that has fallen into certain habits.

Is reframing manipulative? I don’t think so, anymore than any conversation is manipulative. It is indirect, certainly, but sometimes that is the best way to change a situation for the better.

While it may sound counter intuitive or difficult, I have found that reframing is often the best way to solve interpersonal conflicts. It’s also useful for situations (such as hating your job or being bored in a social activity), and can be fun to do to strangers or friends, just to gauge their reaction. (See Garfinkeling, or the Breaching Experiment.)