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Changing Narratives

"Reframing" is a technique commonly used in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to replace problematic or unhelpful narratives with more useful or adaptive ones. Here's a fun online tool to help reframe your own narratives: https://reframe.thnk.org/tool/step/1/  My trial result is shown above.

CBT is an evidence-based counseling technique, supported by a large number of high-quality studies. Furthermore, CBT has demonstrated efficacy for a wide range of conditions including mental health conditions, chronic pain, fatigue, substance use, insomnia, eating disorders, self-management of chronic medical conditions, and even reduction of criminal behaviors. Central to CBT is the idea that "dysfunctional thinking (which influences the patient's mood and behavior) is common to all psychological disturbances" and that "when people learn to evaluate their thinking in a more realistic and adaptive way, they experience improvement in their emotional state and in their behavior" (J. S. Beck, 2011, p. 3). In "dismantling" studies that look at the specific components of CBT in isolation, the method of teaching people to question and reframe their automatic thoughts has indeed proven to be an active ingredient (as have the other more "behavioral" ingredients).

The evidence on CBT supports the concept that when people truly believe "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2), they can feel empowered to try new things and make major changes in their lives. But they inevitably have the experience of behaving in ways that aren't in line with their stated intentions -- this is the human condition. The idea that our thoughts determine our actions has taken hold in popular culture over the last 30 years, and one of its most pernicious forms is the so-called law of attraction that "what you think about, you bring about." People who believe this and yet fail to change their behavior just by thinking differently can feel like they have failed on multiple levels: by not being able to control their behaviors, and perhaps also for not having appropriately controlled their thoughts!

From the perspective of Two Minds Theory, the idea that our conscious thoughts produce our behaviors and experiences is simply false. Conscious thoughts are part of the Narrative System, which operates too slowly to produce behaviors or to affect the way we perceive our environment. In our original article on TMT, we used the analogy of a sports commentator for the Narrative System -- it produces a continuous dialogue about what is happening on the field, but it in no way affects the action of the game or the final score.

Reframing is a standard CBT technique that produces new narratives, so from the perspective of TMT it should have no direct effect on behavior. And yet, I feel that the reframe shown above is potentially helpful in managing my day-to-day work. How can this be? TMT proposes that narratives don't have any effect on behavior in the moment, but they do become part of the background that the Intuitive System will consider the next time a similar situation comes up. This view is not incompatible with Beck's definition of CBT, which says only that thinking influences mood and behavior and is different from the strong form that says our thinking determines what we get in life.

Narratives don't affect our future behaviors just because we want them to, however. A narrative that feels false to us will never succeed in overcoming the Intuitive System's innate risk-aversion when selecting one possible behavior from among many alternatives. New narratives affect behaviors only when they seem true to us: In other words, when they fit the facts, when they feel emotionally satisfying, and when they integrate seamlessly with other elements of how we view the world. Truth is something perceived by the whole person (p. 65-67) -- a narrative at its heart, but one that must be accepted by the Intuitive System as correct before it can have any effect on one's future behavior.

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