Reframing a Negative Experience Is Simple

Instruction to Your Better Life

Use it carefully and be aware of the responsibility you care. People may find you just amazing, so be careful with reframing your bad experience not to make others feel depressive because of how strong and great you are.

Step 1: Tell Your Story

Tell it honestly without hiding something. The first time it will be okay if you just tell a story to yourself. But later it’s better if you share it with someone. Try being as honest as you can. If you were raped, your parents or children were killed by some drunk man or if you lost someone important to you — just share it. People won’t be laughing at you and thinking you’re weak. Try and you will see — they will start admiring your courage. Because sharing such stories requires a lot of courage in fact.

Why you should do it? While telling the story, you re-think events, that happened from another time point. Since these events happened some time has passed and you have become another person (you know we change daily), so while telling you’re putting yourself into the position of spectacular, who comes back to this “crime scene” of your life and can find more objective clues.

The second reason is the way our brain works: telling the story more and more you remember less. Every time real memories of the events vanish away and new memories come instead. Which ones? Those you make while telling the story. Well, after telling the story 8 times you will not remember real events at all — everything that will be left in your memory will be the script you are repeating again and again to different people.

Step 2: Find Key Points (Facts)

After the story is told and probably memory started replacing real awful things with new (less emotional — because you can’t be the same emotions every time you tell the story) memories, you are getting ready to select facts. Sometimes it takes like 6 times of storytelling to become able to watch events from the “cold” side. Take as many attempts as you need.

But what you should do it: think over the chronology of events. Make a timeline in your head with the main actions that happened. For example: “I was raped by the man. Then I got pregnant. Gave birth to the baby with HIV. My baby was taken to the childcare because I had no money to feed my baby” — this is the story we worked on with one of my Tanzanian mamas, who actually lived this nightmare.

After selecting the facts, you will be able to create a new, powerful story, where you will no longer be a victim in these events, but a new, better person. Moreover, you will be able to look at the situation with a colder heart and calm down a bit.

Step 3: Build Your Brand Based on Facts

Once the facts are selected and the timeline is made, think of the pain points you can use to build a new brand of yourself. Taking the example above, we can think of this woman in the modern world from another point:

she was betrayed by the awful man, who made her suffer and feel a lot of pain, but despite it, she still gave birth to the baby, because she wanted this small life to have at least a chance to live a better life. Then, she had to give the baby away because she knew she would not be able to feed it — she may be poor, but how strong she is to give her baby away and hope for it to get a better family and life. Still, she is visiting that daycare centre in Arusha (Tanzania) to check on the health and wealth of her baby. It has another family and parents, but she is still watching her daughter make sure she is alright.

This is not the story of the victim. This is a story of the woman, who shows not how painful it was to go through this event and starts losing tears telling it. She shows that she overcame pain (even if it is not true). And while telling this story from the position of power she will be treating herself over and over until she will realize that she is powerful to be gone through all of that.

This is how to reframe works. You take anything bad that happened to you — pick facts — and build a new you (someone you could only imagine) based on those facts. This method is perfect because it may be used not only for your own stories but for everything: the way you see people and life. Even some small events or your friends lives. Just make yourself strong and happy — you see how simple it is.

Step 4: Use and Manipulate to Promote Yourself

Using this method you can easily manipulate people. For example, many marketing specialists use it to build the right political campaign and turn the disadvantages of the candidate into the strong side. Moreover, numerous coaches and psychologists use the same method to build their own brand.

For example, a woman whose situation I described above was making soap to make some money. We used this story for her marketing campaign. Yes, she was making soap thinking of her lost child. But after telling the story from the position of power and making the right ad she started earning and could even pay her rent herself (what was a real victory for us in fact).

With this method you can do anything: start selling things better, treat your soul and even make other people think of you as someone you are actually not (but always wanted to be). This is one of the simplest ways to make your life even a bit easier — since I know how hard it can be. You’re not alone, always remember that.

Kseniya with love

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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