Reframing

Reframing is a technique that evolved from Aaron T. Beck’s work with developing cognitive therapy. He talked about cognitive restructuring. It became a ‘handy’ tool for changing perceptions. In some sense, it was a trick to ‘fool’ the unconscious, and it often worked, or so it seemed. However, what lies unseen below the surface still has power. I think that there is a way to use reframing that has a very genuine quality to it and involves the nature of wholesome and sincere relationship between the therapist and patient. A key ‘ingredient’ in this is that the therapist has to actually believe in the reframe; that it is not just a technique, and that it is rather a legitimate and truer view of and/or for the patient. For the therapist to really see a truer vision of the patient, he has to have done whatever personal work that’s required to allow such visions to enter consciousness as she or he sits across from the patient and beholds that person. By this act of opening up the limiting worldview in which the patient is captured, the patient may be able momentarily to see themselves as capable of other, more expansive possibilities of being. This is the promise of depth therapy, and genuinely offers a way of seeing that has a wider and deeper vision: a way of knowing that comes from an expansive consciousness.