Reframe Your Life: Transforming Your Pain Into Purpose (Hardback)

Chapter One

"I was framed." It is a very common statement in fiction, movies, and even true stories about people accused of committing a crime. I imagine the innocent and the guilty are speaking that phrase at this very moment in thousands of prisons across the world. Most everyone knows what it means. When someone says, "I was framed!" you don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the person's picture was found hanging on the wall or that someone nailed pieces of wood around his neck. To actually be "framed" means someone took some pieces of reality, combined them with some half-truths, and wove them together in such a way that made an innocent person look guilty of something he or she did not do. Whether in real life or in the movies, when someone is framed, the plot begins to thicken.

In some of the more interesting plot twists I have read, the person being framed is often guilty of something and then the "framer" uses that to make them look guilty of something even worse. The man who is having an adulterous affair is made to look as if he murdered his mistress after her husband discovers her unfaithfulness and kills her. The drug user is framed to look like a drug dealer and goes to prison, leaving the real dealer free to continue his illegal trade. You see the framing plots throughout the writings of history and fiction alike.

Who Framed You?

There are other places where this concept comes into play, far more important than anything you will ever read about. It is in your own life. Yes, amazingly, you have been "framed." Someone, and I think you already know who, has taken pieces of reality and combined them with some half-truths and fabrications and "framed" you in a way that is not exactly accurate. Because of the lies that have been circulating in your head, you have "framed" yourself and made yourself look guilty and feel guilty about things that were not your fault. You have been viewing some of your strengths as weaknesses and allowed yourself to be defined by your weaknesses. If this is true, you are walking around with a very distorted view of yourself, exaggerating all that is not right, crowding out all that is good and strong and capable within you.

The opposite kind of framing is just as common. You have not made yourself look guilty for things you did do. Instead, you have "framed" someone else to look responsible for something that is clearly your own doing. You may be married to a fairly normal person with fairly normal problems, but you have "framed" your spouse to take the rap for all of your difficulties. You make your husband or wife look worse than he or she is to your friends and colleagues while you make yourself look much, much better. You play the role of victim and frame all of your life as a result of someone else's problems. Those you frame to take the rap for your stuff are actually guilty of many things, but they are not guilty of all the things that have gone wrong in your life. But every day becomes a new day to "frame" another person to be the sole cause of your own discontentment.

You might be reading this and thinking already, "This book is not for me because I really am being abused" or "This is not for me because the horror of my childhood is not something I just made up, it happened." If those are your thoughts, or anything close, I hope you will continue because I am very aware of real abuse in the past and living with impossible people in the present. I do not discount your pain for one second. Life for many is a living hell.

But I would not be writing this to you and for you if I did not believe the worst of situations could be helped by the use of reframing. Even if you were living within the worst possible abusive situation or the most neglectful and disconnected relationship, you may have "framed" yourself or someone in a way that keeps you stuck in a dark reality. You are not responsible for the abuse, but you are responsible for how you respond to it. Once you take that responsibility, you will find new hope and insight as you reframe your life and your relationships.

Framed and Reframed

There are several ways to look at the need to reframe all or parts of your life. One is using the metaphor of a picture frame. The context of the frame and the lighting of the picture have a lot to do with what we observe. Change the frame, and we can either make the picture look much worse or much, much better. Just as we frame a picture, we put a frame around our reality, and we view all that happens to us through that frame or that perspective. And as I have explained, we can interpret the facts so inaccurately that we make ourselves look guilty or we can frame others in the same way.

There is another way to look at the process of framing and reframing. It is with the metaphor of a building. Each of us is born with an internal frame of genetic strengths, weaknesses, and predispositions. Some have pretty good frames, and others are pretty messed up from the start. A person could inherit a disorder that could lead to distorted thinking or be born with an abnormality that caused others to relate destructively to him or her. Add to this neglect or abuse, and you find a person building a life attached to a very sick and sad frame. Everything is off-kilter because the building that represents his life is so badly constructed.

Amazingly, some are able to construct lives even with weak, crooked, or broken frames. The survival instinct keeps many people moving forward with great difficulty, but they keep moving. Often they believe life will always be the way it is. But if those people can go in and straighten up some beams in the frame, realign the foundation, and remove walls and the roof, the sky becomes the limit on the kind of quality life they can live.

In the remaining chapters of this book, we will change the frame from which we view life. We will reframe all the facts in the light of truth rather than assumption. If we can do this together, your life will never be the same.

(Continues...)