Reframe to Focus on What Matters
Conflict detoxing.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, now more than ever, judges are looking for parties to work out their differences amongst themselves, as courts are now hearing only the most essential matters, such as issues surrounding domestic violence. That means courts are not hearing non-essential matters, including those that stem from hot-button issues like differences in parenting style and financial priorities. While these are highly important to people going through a divorce, they have to be put on “pause” until the courts resume normal functioning.
Till then, defusing conflict with your spouse or ex will be an essential survival skill, especially given the new levels of stress all of us are facing today in everyday life.
For this month’s newsletter then, I want to help you use one of the tools I find most effective in defusing conflict: Reframing. Whether you’re new to this skill or already familiar with it, there’s never been a better time to commit to using it.
What it is:
Reframing is a step-by-step process in which you “detox” from unproductive conflict and respond to disagreements by:
Giving yourself space to get calm and connect with the best side of yourself.
Shifting your focus from the argument to the common values you share with your spouse.
Leading your spouse out of the argument in a neutral, strategic way, emphasizing those shared values.
In essence, what you’ll be doing is changing your behavior, so you can respond in a way that doesn’t set off fight-or-flight default responses in either of you. By doing this, you give yourself the best chance to end pointless arguments over polarizing positions so you can wait for a neutral party to make a decision and help you move on with your life. The even better possibility that opens up is that both you and your spouse can think more wisely, empathetically, and creatively about how best to resolve your problems which can be settled without the need for the court to resume at all.
This is such a game-changing skill that even in “ordinary” times, my first step with new clients is to help them use reframing to shift their thinking.
Let me give you some basics and then walk you through the process.
How reframing works:
Divorcing couples in serious conflict generally try to resolve their differences while they’re in a high-adrenaline state that activates the self-protective, reactive side of their brain. That can make every disagreement feel like a matter of life or death, which generally leads to protracted arguments.
The situations you face may provide plenty of fuel for panic, anger, and reactiveness.
In my clients’ divorces, I see everything from mild acting out—in which one spouse may close joint bank accounts, cancel credit cards or file separate tax returns, which only triggers fear in the other spouse, especially if they are financially dependent—to more aggressive acting out, such as taking a child’s passport and canceling previously agreed upon international travel based on the allegations that the traveling spouse hopes to abscond with the child. It’s also not uncommon for one parent to report the other to child protective services for past treatment of a child, which was never objected to previously, or even lock the other spouse out of the home.
Spouses tend to respond to all this behavior tit for tat, which only adds fuel to the fire and leads to two spouses looking to “win” at all costs, with ever-escalating threats and a bank-breaking divorce budget.
But reframing helps break the cycle. It allows you to become calm enough to activate the more thinking side of your brain, which lets you gain perspective and be strategic. That generally leads spouses to de-escalate or neutralize arguments. As you reframe the situation, your goal is to shift the focus to a constructive outcome using as few of your resources as possible. At its heart, reframing is a deflection technique that will help you influence your spouse to use the thinking part of their brain to resolve your differences instead of automatically going into a reactive, self-protective mode.
As you work with reframing, both you and your spouse will learn there are many “battles” in your divorce, and you do not need to “fight” them head-on all the time to achieve what is important to you. It will become easier to use good judgment when emotions run hot. Then, instead of wasting your time, energy, and attention on never-ending arguments over surface-level positions, you can focus on achieving your important divorce goals.
Here’s how to do it in three simple (but not always easy) steps. I’ve laid them out as “blazes,” markers on the trail that will lead you through the reframing process.
1. Red Blaze: Pausing your response.
Anytime you interact with your spouse, whether you’re receiving a request, demand, insult, email, or text, pause before you respond. The more triggered you feel, the more you will need to give yourself space to calm down and connect with the best side of yourself.
It takes a lot of energy not to act immediately when you’re feeling negative reactions, especially if you have been reacting to them instantly for decades. But fortunately, you do not have to learn to pause your response when you are triggered in real-time with your spouse anymore, since most of your communication with them in the divorce and in your post-divorce life will be done electronically, through email and text.
Be sure to create clear physical boundaries so you do not engage with your spouse over triggering issues, and when you do engage in person, use a neutral third party such as a parenting coordinator to help you transition to co-parenting or parallel parenting.
In any other communications, you have only to pause your response for at least 24 hours, more if one of your spouse’s missives sets you off. Why? In the heat of the moment, with the thinking side of your brain hijacked by emotional overload, the odds are high that your response will pour on more negative emotion, adding fuel to the fire and escalating the conflict.
When you’re feeling centered (for instance, right now) ask these questions to make sure you are staying on the red blaze:
Am I responding when I am emotionally triggered? What is the reason?
Am I giving myself enough time to calm down before I respond? If not, why not?
Have I engaged in email or text exchanges with my spouse, which only continued the conflict? If so, is this a productive use of my time, attention, energy?
When I wait 24 hours to respond, how much different do I feel than when I wait 24 minutes to respond?
Do I need to be respected by my spouse? Is this need not being fulfilled by the way my spouse is communicating with me? How else can I fill this need for consideration? Who or what besides my spouse can give me the respect and affirmation I’m looking for?
2. Yellow Blaze: Gaining empathy by shifting focus to common values.
Even when you have followed the red blaze and paused your reactions for at least 24 hours, you may still be pulled to mirror the tone of your spouse’s communication to you. They insult, you insult. They accuse, you double down. I agree with you that a tit-for-tat response may be justified. But if you’re serious about achieving your long-term divorce goals, you’ll need to shift your focus from your differences to the underlying values you share.
That’s what the yellow blaze will help you do. It will lead you to a new vantage point that will let you end the kind of arguments with your spouse that usually devolve into squabbling.
The process starts with waiting out the emotional hijack, which you have already accomplished. Now you’ll need to open your mind to understand the reasons your spouse takes extreme positions that leave you feeling overwhelmed and triggered.
For instance, say that one spouse wants to take a child outside more to play during this pandemic, but the other parent does not want the child outside of the house at all if it can be helped only unless the child is wearing a mask, which neither parent has access to.
If you can look past the attempts by your spouse to make you feel like a bad parent [what I call noise] and shift your focus from the surface-level position they are taking (play more outside without a mask) to common values that both of you may share, you may find it easier to understand why your spouse is taking the position they are taking.
In this example, it seems that both parents care for the child’s health and safety. One parent believes it is safe enough to go outside and play without a mask on, and the other parent disagrees. In other words, both parents agree that it’s important to keep the child healthy and safe, but each has a different position on what to risk or consider risking.
Please note that just because you understand more clearly the underlying reasons (safe enough) for your spouse to take their position (outside play without a mask), it does not mean you agree with their position. It means you acknowledge your common ground.
You understand now that butting heads over your different positions will not lead either of you to change your mind about how you feel about the issue. If anything, it will make both of you more entrenched in your positions as both of you feel attacked and resort to self-protection mode.
So, how do you move forward?
By understanding that since you will not change their position, you have to change your thinking. You’ve already done that simply by understanding more clearly the values that underlie your spouse’s position. That allows you to think empathetically about your spouse and puts you in the right state of mind to respond to them strategically in the ways I’ll show you next.
If you’re struggling to find empathy for your spouse’s positions by looking for the values you share, despite your disagreement, consider these questions:
Am I focusing on what we do not agree on? How does this make me feel? Does it give me a sense of accomplishment?
Have I thought about what is important to my spouse? Why are they taking this position? If I look at this position most positively through the lens of common universal values, what values is my spouse expressing in taking this position?
Does seeing that we agree on the common values but disagree on the strategies we both are using to achieve those values make me more curious or less curious about my spouse’s intentions?
Am I using the thinking side of my brain to help both of us achieve our long-term divorce goals?
Is my need for respectful communication by my spouse more important than having a satisfactory resolution of my divorce? Is that why I find it so hard to think empathetically about shared common values?
3. Green Blaze: Responding strategically in a neutral way.
Once you learn to think empathetically about the shared values underlying your competing positions, you’re ready to respond strategically so it calms and neutralizes the situation instead of pouring gasoline on the flames. This does not mean that your spouse will not continue to bait you back into your default self-protective mode. Your spouse probably has deep-seated fears and may view anything you do as negative, so do not expect a resolution of your issues, but do expect a de-escalation of the conflict you two are living under.
The secret sauce of the green blaze, the final de-escalation, is that you need to respond more from a place of curiosity than a place of judgment and criticism. This is not about being right or wrong. This is about reasonable people disagreeing. If you can make that shift, you can lead your spouse out of their rigid thinking.
To do this effectively, it is helpful to tread lightly with your spouse and to limit what you say to objectively true statements they cannot disagree with.
The first step is to open your statement in a very neutral way with a soft opener such as: “it seems” or “I heard.”
The second step is to list facts they cannot disagree with. In our “play outside” example, you might open by saying something like: “It seems like a scary time now with this virus.”
The third step is to have them solve your common issues by asking an open-ended question.
That might look something like this:
“It seems we disagree about how best to care for our child during this pandemic (underlying issue). Since they have no vaccine (true statement) and we do not know how any of us will react to the virus if we contract it (also true), how can we make sure our child is safe during these times if we let her out to play considering the risks involved? (open-ended question).”
It doesn’t matter if a note like this is nothing more than an argument-ender at this point rather than a tool for resolution. Your spouse may not respond directly to your open ended-question because they may still be in the throes of an emotional hijack, which leaves them unable to hear you. If that’s the case, they may continually attack you as they respond to your email. But you made your point, and now you can move on with your life knowing the argument is over unless you react to their attempts which were made to push your buttons.
When and if they respond, their text or email is likely to be filled with attacks against you that will make you react emotionally. Once more, you’ll have the chance to use this formula like you did the first time, gently re-stating the underlying issues, making true statements, and closing with a version of the original open-ended question, something like, “How should we ensure that our child is 100% safe during this pandemic?
If they are not communicating with you, giving you the silent treatment, you can still use this technique, but walk in expecting no response. Remember that you’ll have to resist the urge to follow up more than once (after waiting at least a week) or else the other side may claim harassment.
Whether or not you get a response, what you’ve put on the table is the open-ended question that helps them solve both of your concerns in a mutually satisfactory way. You’ve shifted their perspective, and now they are probably thinking more concretely about keeping the child safe—or whatever issue that is being argued about. It may not seem like much. But because you’ve begun to shift them into problem-solving mode—thinking instead of reacting—you have powerfully reframed the conflict.
KEY POINTS
Reframing is a step-by-step process in which you “detox” from unproductive conflict and respond to disagreements by:
Giving yourself space to get calm and connect with the best side of yourself.
Shifting your focus from the argument to the common values you share with your spouse.
Leading your spouse out of the argument in a neutral, strategic way, emphasizing those shared values.
In any triggering communications, you have only to pause your response for at least 24 hours, more if one of your spouse’s missives sets you off. Why? In the heat of the moment, with the thinking side of your brain hijacked by emotional overload, the odds are high that your response will pour on more negative emotion, adding fuel to the fire and escalating the conflict.
After your thinking side of your brain has regained control, you’ll need to shift your focus from your differences to the underlying values you share. By doing this, it will lead you to a new vantage point that will let you end the kind of arguments with your spouse that usually devolve into squabbling.
When you do respond, you need to respond more from a place of curiosity rather than a place of judgment and criticism. This is not about being right or wrong. This is about reasonable people disagreeing. If you can make that shift, you can lead your spouse out of their rigid thinking. To do this effectively, it is helpful to tread lightly with your spouse and to limit what you say to objectively true statements which they cannot disagree with and have them solve your common issues by asking them an open-ended question.