Framing: Finding Solutions by Seeing Transitions in Context
Change is a natural part of life. You can’t avoid it, but you can learn to embrace it and grow from the experience. Facing changes you encounter directly, understanding their social and historical context, and discussing as a team how to respond to challenges builds skills as you lay down a positive history. History is important because your mental representation of your relationship is formed over time based on how you remember the events that occur in your lives. The better you respond to challenges, the more positive your memories.
When changes occur, partners need all the individual and interactional skills they can muster to meet the challenges. They also need an ability to see new challenges in the context of their changing social and historical context. For example, as lovers become marital partners, or partners become parents, their social roles, tasks and responsibilities change. If they can see these changes from a perspective outside of their own experience, they become more aware of how they can adapt as a couple and work collaboratively as a team. If they don’t take in a wider perspective, they may experience the changes more personally. They may begin to believe their partner is either checking out or expecting them to change in ways that feel unfair or uncomfortable.
This can lead to hurt and blame. If they are have a hard time adapting to the new life cycle stage or to another type of unexpected change, you can bet they seldom say, “We sure are having trouble with this transition!” Instead, they are more likely to comment:
“You abandoned me.”
“Your parents are controlling our lives.”
“You’re crowding me.”
In other words, they point to a symptom of the problem—the stressor that is actually a result of the situation, not what caused the problem in the first place. If they tried to make changes to their relationship based on their complaint about a symptom, they would likely make it worse. This is the reason that unless the problem is seen in its full complexity, attempted “solutions” can become new problems themselves. The most effective way to deal with problems is to understand the conditions that are creating the difficult feelings. In other words, put the conflict into context. When the complaints above are put into context, here is how they sound:
Instead of believing,
“You abandoned me.”
They will frame it as,
“Your job is requiring so much more of your time that I’m starting to feel abandoned. I know you don’t like it any better than I do. We need to get our schedules in sync.”
Stated this way, you can hear that the problem is the stressful work schedule, which will therefore suggest the solution will involve collaborating on scheduling.
Similarly, instead of believing,
“Your parents are controlling our lives.”
They may frame it as,
“Since your folks moved in to help us with the twins, I feel like they are the parents and we’re the kids. I know we couldn’t make it without them, but we’ve got to have some time for ourselves to be our own little family.”
The problem is not necessarily how the parents are acting, but that the couple need better boundaries between their folks and themselves.
And instead of casting blame,
“You’re crowding me.”
They will be more likely to frame the situation as,
“Now that you’re working at home, I’m beginning to think there isn’t room for us both, and I’m getting irritated. We gotta figure out a way to share the place better.”
By putting the problem in perspective, the messaging changes in a way that is more likely to lead to a solution.
If you can see that conflicts are connected to the change process you are caught up in, you will be less likely to personalize the conflict and more likely to be able to work together toward solutions.
Identifying problems as a part of a life cycle transition, or a challenging response to other less expected changes, brings you to the top of your scaffold to see the situation in context. (This actually involves a shift within your brain to “see” the situation in context using the right brain). You are then more likely to recognize stressful social conditions that accompany the change as issues to be dealt with and found support for, rather than irritating pressure from your partner.
From this point of view, you will likely see new solutions. If you have any trouble, use your Brainstorming Tool to help you think outside of the box. If you find these new roles and perspectives are hard for one or both of you to accept, try using your Collaborative Communication Tool to help you explore new challenging feelings.
