My point is that humans reflexively assign meaning to things when there is none. Maybe you are right about which trauma caused you to be the way you are. But that would be a lucky guess. It is far more likely—given human nature—that you have a personal problem today and you also had some past traumas, so you picked one of them and imagined it as the cause of your current woes.
As a kid, I had an irrational fear of drowning. If you asked me why, I would tell you about a time in my childhood when I was walking across a bridge with my family and a barge was passing beneath. My father wanted me to see the barge, so he lifted my toddler body up to the railing to look over. For some reason, I interpreted that as him trying to throw me over the railing to my watery death, and it traumatized me. So is that the reason I had an irrational fear of water?
Probably not.
In hindsight, it seems more likely I was traumatized by the event because I was already afraid of drowning. It’s easy to get the causation backwards.
Humans can rationalize just about any current bad behavior as caused by past traumas. Are you overeating? It was because of that bad experience in your past. Are you promiscuous? It was that thing in your past. We can connect anything to anything and sell it to ourselves. Sometimes we might be right. But in no case does it matter if we’re right. What matters is that if you tether your current problems to the past, you limit your options for dealing with the problem. But if you untether your present problems from your past traumas, you can solve them faster and for good.
If you believe your present self is permanently nailed to your past self and you can’t change the past, you’re stuck in a negative mindset for solving your problems. That’s where these reframes help. They’re designed to decouple you from your anchoring belief that you are pinned to something in the past.
Usual Frame: You are the result of your traumas.
Reframe: You are a random bundle of loose wires.
If you are the result of your traumas, there isn’t much you can do about it in the short term except wait for the next trauma. But if you release the past and see your brain as having a bunch of loose wires for no reason, you know what to do—test each wire and reattach it if appropriate. But how do you do that with dangling brain-wires?
Here’s how.
Unexpected Superpowers
One of my superpowers is my terrible childhood. I’ll spare you the details, but I was in substantial physical pain from a health issue every day of it. I solved that problem by the time I went to college, but that hideous experience made me nearly invulnerable to discomfort if I needed to do something difficult to accomplish a goal. Work all weekend? No problem. Rent a windowless room with a shared bathroom until I could afford better? Easy. Work all day and take classes at night? Sure. Exercise even on days I feel bad? Let’s get started.
Once you REALLY know what a bad day feels like, everything else feels like a walk on the beach. For me, that feeling has never worn off. I can generally outwork and outlast anyone who had a better childhood. I might be wrong about that but note how good I feel about myself when I have that filter on life. And feeling good is what counts.
Perhaps you had an acceptable childhood but suffered some other trauma in your personal or professional life. I’m about to weaponize that trauma for you. I hope you use your new power for good.
Usual Frame: My trauma crippled me.
Reframe: My trauma is why I can kick your ass.
Whatever hurts you also makes you different from the people around you. You might be more alert to danger, less afraid of embarrassment, wiser, more mature, angrier (in a good way), more determined, more focused, and more willing to take smart risks. You might even discover that your trauma gives you a purpose in life, such as helping others avoid similar fates. Trauma takes much from us, but it never leaves without tipping. Find the power it has given you and focus it somewhere positive.
Planning Your Life
While it can be good for your mental health to live in the now, I suspect some people are locked in the now in a way that prevents them from planning for their own futures. That’s the group who needs this reframe.
Usual Frame: Live in the now.
Reframe: Imagine even your smallest actions influencing your future.
Earlier today, I took a leisurely three-mile walk to pick up my car from a tire shop. As I walked, I imagined what my body would look like if I kept up my current exercise habits. And I realized I do that sort of mental exercise with nearly everything I do, both big and smalclass="underline"
If I eat something, I imagine my future weight.
If I exercise, I imagine my future muscle structure.
If I learn something, I imagine the doors it will open.
If I walk across a parking lot during the day without wearing a hat, I imagine going to my dermatologist to deal with the sun damage.
You get the idea. All day long I’m judging my smallest actions for how they will influence my future, and I make that imagined future visual and specific, at least as much as my mind can conjure.
I have no idea if my planning reflex is a genetic propensity or if I learned it from my parents. I have memories of my mother talking about my need to make the right moves while young to set myself up for the future. I think I was about twelve when she took me along to drop off some documents with a lawyer. She wanted me to know what a high-paying job looked like so I could emulate it. Years later when I chose a college, I picked one that could support a pre-law career path.
Fortunately for me, I also imagined a future in which winning for my client usually meant someone on the other side lost. I didn’t want to dedicate my adult life to a profession in which nearly every client is unhappy and half of them end up more so depending on which side “wins.” So I changed my plans and decided to become a banker long enough to learn how to someday launch my own business. After I set that general direction for myself, every action I took from then on had to fit my path—or at least not detract from it. Every bite of food I ate, every step I ran for cardio, and every skill I acquired was in service of my entrepreneurial future either directly or indirectly.
I’m trying to be transparent about the fact that I might be a weirdo when it comes to how much I planned and visualized my future. Still, my hypnosis experience tells me anyone can build a habit of connecting their current actions to their future outcomes. It’s a Pavlov’s dog situation, meaning you can program any mammal’s brain to have a specific response to a specific stimulus. Works with dogs and works with humans.
Imagine you spend a few days setting random alarms on your phone to remind you to ask yourself how your current actions serve your future self. If the alarm goes off when you’re eating junk food, you imagine yourself less healthy in the future, and that triggers you to correct course. If the alarm goes off while you’re searching for classes to upgrade your talent stack in a clever way, that’s perfect. I speculate that you can teach yourself to mentally project into the future even your smallest decisions. If you repeat the process enough times, it should become automatic, just as Pavlov’s bell triggered the dogs to salivate before they saw food.
I don’t know if you need to set random alarms to build this kind of habit or if you can remember to ask yourself how all your actions create a path to your preferred future. Everyone is different, so experiment with a few systems of your own to remind yourself to imagine how your current actions will ripple into the future.
Irrational Fears
You probably know someone who is afraid of flying but not afraid of riding a bicycle. That’s an example of reading the risks wrong. Flying is far safer than biking. It just looks or feels as if it would be more dangerous.