Remembering and Reframing
These two verbs are often presented as diametric opposites. I’ve found that as you grow to be an adult, they are really two sides of the same coin. They’re both important to progressing towards a more authentic version of yourself.
I believe, as parents, there’s a natural inclination towards communicating things with your child that you find worthy of remembering. The image of a father grasping his son by the shoulders, leaning down, looking him in the eye, saying, “Son, promise me you’ll remember what I’m about to say to you,” is typically the image people associate with parenting and mentorship as a whole.
There’s no corollary in our media to show the same child in therapy twenty years later, speaking to that young boy, urging him to reframing an unhelpful belief. An unmanageable contract, written by a child doing their best to gain approval from their peers, none more important than the approval of their parents.
One must face the reality that we, as parents, are flawed humans. That we will say things to our child that are better off forgotten.
There’s a blow to the ego and a dose of humility I don’t think many, myself included, grapple with. It’s not until you become much older and wiser that you realize your parents bring their own unique set of experiences to the table, that they were doing the best they could with the tools they had available to them at the time.
To my unborn child, who will someday read this, I want to apologize in advance. There will be advice, things that I say to you, born from my own biases, that will be worthy of you reframing.
As you age, there’s so much pressure to acquire your way into the life that you want. Getting a new degree. Learning new skills. Acquiring new connections. So much emphasis is put on acquisition.
I found that sometimes the way to grow into the life you want is to release. To reframe beliefs that no longer serve you.
The art of reframing is a tricky one because the truth is that no matter how hard you try to overwrite a governing belief that no longer serves you, you never really forget it completely. It was useful to you once, and our brains have the remarkable tendency to file away things that were useful to us, even if they no longer retain any of the prior utility.
You do have the opportunity to recognize when these beliefs come up. I found it incredibly useful in my own life to sit with that little boy who once held a belief and examine where it came from. To reveal the inconsistencies. To highlight how different the environmental circumstances were when the belief was forged versus when it gets recalled in the present day.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but I think it makes sense that the brain has to clear out old memories to make space for new ones. It wasn’t until much later in my adult life that I discovered the power of journaling daily to help snapshot some of the things we feel, the experiences we go through. It’s incredibly hard to be vulnerable and write about your thoughts, feelings, and experience on a daily basis. There is nowhere to run or hide.
It’s a discipline I’d like to introduce to my child at a much younger age than when I discovered it. The practice helps you remember little details that make this life so rich. It also makes you aware of the background process of forgetting that all of our brains are doing around the clock. And it helps you notice longer-term thought patterns.
This last part is critically important. If you’re not aware of your long-term thought patterns, you will become a slave to them. You have to recognize the beliefs that are coming up for you before you’re able to make the choice:
Is this something I’d like to remember, or something I’d like to reframe?