Reframing

Reframing means either changing the content of what is at stake or changing the context of what is at stake in such a way that people’s subjective experience of the situation is more positive. Because reframing is too much associated with the as-if frame modern NLP stopped using reframing. Instead it used Complex Equivalence which is a much more powerful tool than reframing and achieve the same if not better results.

On the alleviation of life. – A principal means of alleviating one’s life is to idealize everything that occurs in it; but first, however, one has to make clear to oneself from the art of painting what idealizing means. The painter desires that the viewer shall not observe too precisely, too sharply, he compels him to retreat a certain distance and view the painting from there; he is obliged to presuppose that the viewer will be some quite definite distance from the picture; he must, indeed, even assume an equally definite degree of sharpness of eyesight in his viewer! He must be in no way irresolute in such matters. Everyone who wants to idealize his life must therefore not desire to see it too precisely, he must always banish his view of it back to a certain distance away. This artifice was understood by, for example, Goethe.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 279