Reframing: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Memories
Reframing is like taking your house apart brick by brick, board by board, examining the material for termites or dry rot, revising your blueprint, and rebuilding.
The town where I live has a rule about remodeling your house: if the owner keeps a single wall of the original structure, the tax base doesn’t go up. The idea is that if you start over with the original foundation and at least a symbolic part of the frame, the reconstructed building still represents the old house.
Clients I work with frequently have to deconstruct a lot of their relationship in order to construct healthier habits and let go of sad, difficult memories. If your relationship is strong and you share mostly good memories and few resentments, you have probably managed your transitions well. As you have come to understand each other, you have probably cleared up most misunderstandings without the need for conversation. Still, if upon reviewing your relationship past, you find resentments that are causing you to harbor bad feelings, reframing any hurtful old memories can strengthen your foundation in a way that increases your skills and leaves you happier. Let’s do that now.
Reframing your history helps you build joint problem-solving skills and reduce the sensitivity of the issues that you may not have been able to handle the first time around. In a sense, you are defusing landmines in your history that have ended up triggering you repeatedly in the present.
The most effective way to handle difficult memories is to defuse them by returning to look at why the situation was so difficult then, and find out how, with new perspectives, you each might have handled it better. This process of reframing requires each of you to regulate your own emotionality and use the skills you have gained in previous steps and tools.
Calling up memories changes them, for better or worse. To reconstruct the old memories, you first need to deconstruct with a calmer emotional state and more constructive thoughts so they will be stored with new associations that reduce their reactivity. If, instead of feeling escalated every time you recall an upsetting incident, you learn to relax your body and slow your breathing, you can actually begin to lower your autonomic default response. This is why going back to re-experience difficult memories when you are in a safe environment can reduce the impact of trauma memories. Re-visiting them in a safe, loving environment connects the bad memories to comforting traces and helps you calm yourself.
Memories are basically brain traces, and some memories make a stronger impression on us than others. In the short term, we remember novel or recent events effectively, but over the long term, specific conditions make old memories stronger. Events that happen early in childhood and are repeated many times, for example, are generally stronger than some that happen only a few times. Painful and traumatic memories leave strong traces and are therefore remembered longer. Also, negative memories are remembered more easily than positive memories, and situations that go unresolved are maintained more actively. This is the neurological basis of why it is so important to treat your partner well from the start. It is also why defusing and reframing bad memories is important.
Part of healing difficult memories in your relationship involves both of you recognizing the behavior and situations that created them, thinking of new, more constructive solutions you might have used, and then practicing them mindfully and long enough that the improved responses become your new habits. (It takes 3 weeks to establish a new synapse and 4 months to solidify the behavior by connecting it to a neural network). This process helps you reconstruct your response to the memories. But if pulling up the bad memory in the first place also calls up the escalated feelings, how can you think of new solutions? It’s important to practice mindfulness and be curious, accepting, open, and loving; but if you still feel so wounded, hurt, and angry that your emotions swamp your ability to think, how can you get there?
Deconstruction
This is where the deconstruction comes in. Before you can construct an effective new solution, you’ll need to understand why your old approach didn’t work. You’ll need to understand how you got stuck—what created your faulty perception, escalated emotion, rigid thinking, limited skills, and behavioral choices. The steps and Tools you’ve learned so far will help you to build a virtual scaffold and find a new perspective. From this vantage point, you will be able to see that at the time of the unfortunate interaction, you were both actually trying to do the best you could; you just didn’t have an accurate picture of your relationship nor the skills to make better choices. Now that you can see from a scaffolded position, keeping your emotions regulated, you can combine your left brain (analysis) with your right brain (seeing in context), which will help you find new solutions. When you both can see how your old perspectives were limited and not in sync, you can forgive yourselves and each other for not finding a workable solution at the time. That lays the groundwork for working collaboratively to repair the problem and be a better team in the future.
Think of a time that you made a mistake on an important project. Did you pull the nails out mindfully, considering how you lost focus, or did you grab the crowbar and wrench the studs, swearing as you went and kicking the wrongly cut or set members aside? Have you ever gotten so frustrated that in order to find the plumbing leak you broke into the sheetrock before you checked the washer? Or if you’re not a builder, how do you manage yourself when you have to do a significant rewrite on a paper that is already overdue? Do you get up and forgive yourself and take a walk, or do your pound the desk and rend the papers?
How you manage your own mistakes makes a big difference when you employ this tool. What is your current style of dealing with mistakes—do you reflect upon what happened and why so you will reduce the problems you will run into in the future? If you are open to reviewing the past in a gentle and kind way that could reframe the conflict such that a more collaborative outcome might have been possible, you are ready to learn this tool.
As you become more aware that you each have inadvertently made mistakes, and you are increasingly willing to reflect with more perspective on your past interactions without blaming yourself or your partner, you will begin to feel calmer and more trusting of each other, and more hopeful that you can deconstruct your past. This positive expectation creates the conditions necessary for seeing the situation from both sides, analyzing where you went wrong, taking responsibility for your behavior, and apologizing for your limitations. As you both understand that the other person didn’t mean to create hurt, you will feel more empathy for each other and forgive the mistakes. This is how you begin to reframe the situation and permanently alter the memory. Once you’ve fully understood and deconstructed the memory, then you are ready for the next step.
Reconstruction
Reconstructing the past requires an open and creative mind. The bottom line is you can’t undo what has been done, but you can act “as if” you might have done something differently.
After my clients have deconstructed their old interactions, and I help them reconstruct sad or hurtful memories, I start out by asking, “Now that you can see the situation from a different point of view, what would you have done differently?”
Sometimes they will say, “Oh I should have stayed calm and asked what you meant…I should have shown I was hurt and not just walked out…I wish we had taken some time to think the situation through…” They get it. They can see how they could have changed their actions.
But more often, what I hear is, “I couldn’t have done anything else, I didn’t know what to do, I thought you…,” In other words, imagining that the past could have been different is too hard to grasp.
Sometimes it takes a little time to help them get the emotional distance to think creatively. But once they get that allowing themselves to see the situation differently would have helped them make a different choice years ago, they can feel the relief – “Oh, I see, it didn’t have to be that way!”
This reconstruction completes the reframing process. Let’s try it now.
If you’re not ready for this step or if you are encountering other stressful situations that make this a difficult time, it might be better to wait until you have more support and less strain. If the resentments you have built up are so painful that you can’t maintain a calm equilibrium, you may even want to seek out a professional to help you two navigate the issues with care when the time comes to work on this.
Instructions:
1. Identify any unresolved issues or resentments.
Reflect upon whether either or both of you have any “not so great” memories that you feel you need to defuse before you can let go of them. After learning some new tools here, you may already see some of these situations from a different point of view. If you feel you want to apologize and state how you wish you had handled the situation differently, go for it.
2. Deconstruct the situation
If you find you are still emotionally stuck on an interaction that didn’t go well, use your Collaborative Communication tool to listen to each other’s perception of the situation as they recall it and empathize with each other. Though you may begin this process thinking you were right, once you hear your partner’s point of view and feelings, and empathize with them, you will likely find your “position” softening.
A few years ago, a new neighbor moved in across the road from me in the rural area where I live. She hadn’t lived there more than a few weeks when some guests attending a party at my home told me that my neighbor was upset they had parked on her property. Though I wasn’t sure why parking off the shoulder was a problem, I went over the next day to see if I could help. She was pretty upset, and told me how she saw the situation as an intrusion and a boundary violation, she said how she felt, what she needed and expected, and ended with: “That’s my position.”
It was clear to me that we had very different ways of looking at the situation. Parking off road seemed to me a typical pattern in the area, but clearly she didn’t see it that way. I didn’t know her well enough to know why at the time she felt this way, but I thanked her for telling me her point of view and said, “You are my neighbor, and my position is that I want you to be happy, so I’ll make sure no one parks on your property.” The following day, with her permission, I brought over some large sections of wood from a tree we had cut down and placed them along her property. Over the years we have become friends. Knowing her history, I now understand how we each developed such different perspectives.
Though this situation was, in some ways, quite small, it exemplifies how important it is to keep a history positive.
When you have completed your “Collaborative Communication,” you should each have a broader perception of the situation, feel more empathic with your partner’s emotional experience, have a better understanding of your different points of view (thinking), and are therefore able to accept each other’s behaviors at that time.
3. Apologize
From this new perspective, you will likely find it easier to apologize for not understanding the whole situation and therefore choosing a behavior that your partner found hurtful. Expressing your mutual remorse opens the way to forgiveness and reconnection. Your part in the misunderstanding may not have been large, but letting your partner know you understand you might have handled the situation in a more gracious way allows you to lay the burden down together.
4. Reconstruct
Once you feel calmly connected with each other, hopefully, each of you can find something you can take responsibility for and even think of another action you wish you had chosen. If you need help, try using your “Brainstorming” Tool to think of a new approach you might have taken.
5. Forgive
At this point, hopefully you are both ready to forgive each other. Be sure to look into each other’s eyes and speak with sincerity. You may want to touch or hug your partner to reestablish the bond that the resentment had been blocking.
“It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.”
Once you learn to do this with small misunderstandings, when you do run into slightly larger issues, you can use this same tool to defuse those memories too.
If you find you have any resentments you are unable to deconstruct and reconstruct successfully, you may want to talk to an elder or a wise friend you both trust, or consult a professional as the issue may be more complicated than it seems. As you learned previously, problems that seem to defy solution usually indicate you may not be seeing the whole context. Sometimes an outside perspective can quickly help you understand what is, at first, invisible to you. See “Resources” how to choose a professional to consult with.