The Power of Reframing
A young white man with short dark hair and a short beard wears a white button-up shirt and blue jeans. He is leaning against the trunk of a tree with a smile on his face.
This is Mike. He’s awesome. He has a similar illness to mine and therefore deals with many of the same challenges I face.
The way he approaches his work life, and his life in general, is something to live by. I’ve learned so much from him in the short time I’ve known him. I’m thrilled to showcase some of his writing here and I believe his reframing technique can be useful for those of us that live with chronic conditions.
Mike is a 31-year-old who has very bendy joints and an immune system that attacks his super tiny nerves (or in medical-speak, Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder and autoimmune autonomic small-fiber neuropathy), among other conditions.
On a day-to-day level, sitting or standing or using hands/arms for an extended time is painful, so he set up a laying desk and controls his computer via voice. To quote one of his coworkers, "I think all of us should work like that."
He devours books, loves making connections between different kinds of ideas, and then explains them to people, precisely what he's doing here writing this. He has written several articles, which can be found by following @mikeantonacci writings for The Mighty.
I like order, structure, predictability, and while I can’t always have all of those things with my illness, there’s a certain amount that I do expect during the workday. But that day, suddenly, it was the opposite of all of those things, now I had a choice: sit here and complain about it or implement a technique I’d been learning in a professional development course. I already knew the first one wasn’t going to work, so I might as well try the second. What I didn’t expect was how amazingly effective it was going to be.
I figure, let’s try this reframe technique and see what happens. I reminded myself that workdays like this aren’t the norm, I don’t like them, and I don’t have to like them. But, at some point in the future, I will have another workday like this and I want to be better at handling it. There might come a time when I will need to be good at quickly pivoting and handling the unexpected, whether at work, home, or during a family crisis or anything like that. So, I began reframing and telling myself that if I can put myself fully into this day, I can grow in my ability to handle days like this, and I want to be the kind of person who can take days like this.
A young white man with short dark hair, a short beard and glasses. He is lying down on a bed with a specialized setup for his workday, including a headset with a microphone.
Within 30 seconds, I found myself excited for the day that I was previously dreading. I also was surprised and confused at how quickly my emotions changed. I was not expecting that. So why am I telling you this on a chronic illness blog?
Since that workday, and since I saw how effective reframing could be, I’ve been thinking a lot about how it applies to the rest of my life, particularly my illnesses. Do I view my illnesses as something external imposed on me, or can I see how to embrace them to grow and develop as a person? Of course, I still don’t have to like my diagnoses, but I get to choose how to respond.
I have conditions that aren’t the same day-to-day. Sometimes the pain is higher than other days, or one body part is worse than the others. I will have a bad pain day sometime in the future, and while I don’t like it, I want to be better at the bad days. I want to be more skilled at handling bad days. That’s my way to reframe.
I also realized that I need to get better at the good days. I tend to overdo things, figuring that if it’s a good day, I might as well catch up on all the stuff that I couldn’t do on the bad days, but that creates more bad days. So I want to work on this other aspect of the reframing technique.
If I have a bad day, I can get better at having bad days. If I have a good day, I can get better at having good days. Even if I don’t handle either of those days perfectly, I can learn and try something new next time.
What about you? What reframe technique do you want to use? What’s one aspect of your illness or situation that you could view as a way to become more of the person you want to be? How could a situation you didn’t choose become a challenge you embrace or an opportunity to transform into a life skill?
In one day, I saw how powerful reframing could be, and I’m super excited to start the journey of using that technique again and again in the future. I hope you’ll join me on this adventure.