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Frame, Reframe
An employee of mine, my transcriptionist, was living in New Orleans until August 28, 2005. On that day, she and her boyfriend and their cats drove north to Tennessee to ride out the storm in a pet friendly hotel.
An employee of mine, my transcriptionist, was living in New Orleans until August 28, 2005. On that day, she and her boyfriend and their cats drove north to Tennessee to ride out the storm in a pet friendly hotel.
Eight weeks later they arrived in Portland after having gone back to New Orleans to pack up their belongings. For many months after they moved the reaction, when people would find out where they were from, was, ‘Wow, you’re a Katrina victim?’ Her response was always patient. ‘We weren’t really victims, like the people who couldn’t afford to leave, like the people who suffered in the aftermath. We had two cars, credit cards, cash and family support. We were inconvenienced, but hardly victims.’
She goes on to frame this even more positively, ‘It was an opportunity for a new life, a new profession and a new city where the values are more in line with my own.’
Not everyone was as fortunate and this employee of mine has anger and sadness where the hurricane and subsequent nightmare of New Orleans is concerned, but she turned the upheaval into a fresh start.
We can use framing as a tool for positive change and a potent instrument for persuasion. When we think about Holocaust “victims”, we see “survivors”.
The ability to reframe is used by social workers who work with gang members turning murder into something ugly no matter who the victim.
Advertising is all framing. Advertisers take over the rebellious or alternative youth culture by appealing to them with edgy and non-conformist advertising. They make a carton of eggs seem ‘radical’ suggesting that these eggs aren’t the old fashioned, outdated eggs that your grandpa used to eat.
Politicians use framing, ‘spin’, on issues all the time. Bush’s frame is that the war in Iraq is just. In nearly all of his speeches he suggests that ‘If you’re not with us, you’re against us.’ And ‘It’s better to fight them over there, than to fight them over here.’ This is a presupposition. Who’s to say we’d have to fight ‘them’ at all?
Now, the Democrats and a large percentage of the population of the U.S. have the frame that this was a war for oil, not a war to prevent them from fighting us over here.
Framing can be used to convince people in positive ways. Martin Luther King, Jr. framed segregation as an evil injustice changing the views of many people. Generations later, black and white students don’t know the blatant inequality as they’ve grown up in fully integrated schools.
Use reframing to turn a hardship into a challenge, a setback into a time for reflection, a victim into a survivor. Frame it all!