Reframing During Crisis

Reframing:

By my own definition it’s the skill of challenging one’s habitual or automatic reaction to a situation, person, or mindset with the intention of gaining a new and more useful outlook, then harnessing the energy that would be otherwise lost, to use for transformative purposes.

Most of the time, our minds are on automatic pilot, tossing our customary reactions out into the world like kids throw bread at ducks, with certainty that because it came to us so quickly it must be the right and true and “natural” reaction.

The thing about our “natural” reactions, is that they come into existence with no thought given to the consequences of adding the energy behind them (typically non-useful energy like dread, anxiety, abject terror, spite or judgement, am I right?) into the mix of what’s already going on.

Where human beings are now in the history of things, it is imperative - now - that we start recognizing that the state of our minds impacts the state of our world, individually and on a larger scale.  We can start in our own heads.

Once upon a time I challenged a group of students to spend an entire day examining their customary thoughts, and endeavoring to “reframe” the ones that were not useful or productive.  The most frequent objection, was that sometimes truly horrible things happen and that denying that reality was just adding layers of fluff to an already unbearable scene.  This is not what I am talking about here; denial is a whole other useless mind-trick and though it is sometimes cleverly disguised, it is not the same as reframing.  Ask me sometime about the day I returned from two weeks in a foreign town, where I’d gone to retrieve my partner who herniated a cervical disc while traveling and who was then bedbound for the next several months, to have a friend enquire about the ordeal by asking: “how was your mini vacation?”, and I’ll tell you about burying real things in fluff.  This is So Not what I’m after.  Let me demonstrate:

I have a “stepmom” who is at the top of the “short list” of people most dear to me.  She married my dad and me as a family deal in a Unitarian Church when I was 15, and while  my dad left the marriage about three years later, she and I are still related.  She is the core of my experience of “family”.

Three weeks ago she and her husband travelled to a major city about 6 hours from where they live, for her to have a minimally invasive heart surgery.  The procedure involves running fiberoptic-size threads through a major artery from the top of the leg into the heart, so the incision is only an inch or so.  I was advised the surgery could take from 5-6 hours, so when my phone rang at 5 hours 15 minutes I anticipated news that she was on her way to recovery.

Instead, her husband informed me that there had been a complication resulting in uncontrollable bleeding, and that they were going to have to expose the heart directly in order to get to the bleed- this means separating the sternum.  When they say “open heart surgery”, it doesn’t mean that the heart is open- it means they have to open the chest cavity to get to the heart.

He had other family to alert and his own feelings to deal with, so our call was brief.  I stood on the spot, stunned for a moment by the enormity of what was taking place and the fact that I was thousands of miles away.

First in line was grief.  As if I’d already lost her, the grief came in and sat right on my heart, insisting that I empty myself and give in to the spinning vortex of loss.  Next in line, and impatient, was fear.  Fear and grief were actually struggling in line, trying to trip one another up in order to gain my attention.  As my breath stalled in my chest and tears were wending their way to where they make my nose sting, I remembered that none of this was helping her a bit.

She was lying somewhere in a sterile room thousands of miles away while doctors scrambled to save her life by cutting her dear chest open.  My drama would not serve her one bit!  The only thing I could do, was decide how I was going to spend my energy in reacting to the news.  It was mighty energy, it was powerful!  I could waste it playing pinball inside my own body, bouncing anxiety and fear off my organs like I was going for the high-score, or I could bundle it all up and send it off where it could do some good.

You don’t have to be someone who prays to get this: emotions are energy, and they can travel.  I made a choice to change the direction of the energy I was feeling in the form of panicky emotions. I chose to challenge my assumption that the doctors were “scrambling”.  Scrambling is disorganized, panicky, and unclear- like I was feeling.
I decided to convert my scrambled emotions to clarity, steadiness, and swift action - the kind you feel when you’re totally “in the zone” of doing something you’re really good at- and send it to the doctors in that room with the dearest of stepmoms anyone’s ever known.  I steadied my breath and practiced the sensation of calm certainty, and I sent it to the surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other professionals into whose hands her life had been delivered.  I pictured them thanking eachother for a job well done.

Not every instance of reframing needs to be this dramatic or difficult.  But it bears pointing out that, if we start with the small stuff, we develop our skills so that eventually we have the moxie for when the stakes are high.

...and yes, she made it.  She’s home having a cuddle with her critters and resting up for the next round in her recovery.

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