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Virginia was justly famous for her ability to change people's perceptions of events so that they saw things more positively. This made problems easier to resolve. A mother's nagging became evidence of how much she cared; a father's punishment for curfew violations became loving protectiveness.
Once she worked with a woman who had been abused by her father when she was young. He had beaten her severely with a bullwhip, then took her to her grandparents' house, dumped her, and never came back. Virginia's reframe was that abandoning her in this way was the father's ultimate gesture of love. He realized that he was out of control, so he left her at the grandparents' house and never saw her again to avoid any possibility of hurting her further.
Virginia's presumption of good intentions, elimination of blame, and focus on desired outcomes are also powerful and pervasive reframes. They change the meaning of behavior and perceptions in ways that result in more positive feelings and more constructive behavior. There are two basic types of reframing: context reframing and meaning reframing.
Context reframing places a “problem” behavior in a different context, so that it can be seen as having value there. For instance, a father may think of his daughter's “stubbornness” as bad—until he thinks of it in the context of a man with bad intentions trying to take advantage of her. Every behavior can be valuable in some context. Even killing someone may be necessary and useful in self-defense. Context reframing depends on the therapist's ability to think of contexts in which the client is likely to see a “problem” behavior as valuable.
A next step is to validate the behavior in those useful contexts and then search for alternative behaviors in the contexts in which the same behavior causes problems.
Often Virginia described a problem behavior as a perfectly understandable response to a past context in which a person had limited information and understanding.
Virginia: OK, now what you told me was that you had a beautiful experience in being parented by your father, and a pretty hellish one in being parented by your mother.
Margie: Right.
Virginia: Now I want to tell you, Margie, what that says to me... and maybe we can fill in the pieces. That you did not have a model for how a woman could mother.
Margie: Right.
Virginia: Okay, and that would say to me something else, that there are some pieces left out in your self feeling good as a woman.
Margie: True, true. (1983, p. 78)
After establishing that someone's responses belong to an earlier context, Virginia would go on to change and add to the person's perceptions and understandings, so that the person could have more positive and useful responses in the present context.
Meaning reframing changes the meaning of a behavior while keeping it in the same context. When a father yells at his son, the son may think that the father sees him as bad or unlovable. Perceiving that the father's intention is to make the son's life better, but that he is limited in his ability to communicate because his own father was abusive, transforms the meaning of the yelling into something more positive. This will change the son's response to it, which in turn will change the father's response. It is easy to yell at someone who is sneering and looking away; it is much harder to yell at someone who is smiling with appreciation.
Often Virginia would reframe simply by using different words to redescribe a problem behavior. The connotations of the new description would result in more positive perceptions. Virginia redescribed the father's angry behavior as “some way that he brings out his thoughts.” (1983, p. 34) When Casey's wife reaches out to touch him, and he describes his feeling as “strange,” Virginia redescribes it as “a new thing.” (1983, p. 110) Later in the session she redescribes criticism as an opportunity for learning: “So, when I ask you if you're criticizable, all I mean is, are you teachable?” (1983, p. 150)
I've heard that Virginia once said to a teenager who had gotten two of his classmates pregnant, “Well, at least we know you've got good seed.” Saying this didn't condone his behavior; rather it made it easier for her to bypass the blame, outrage, and attacks, and begin to ally herself with the teenager so they could begin to work together toward solutions.
Most of Bandler and Grinder's book, Reframing (1982), is a distillation of the reframing and negotiation patterns that Virginia used to bring family members into a shared and workable world. Reframing also describes procedures that make it easy to learn these essential therapeutic skills.
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