When Cognitive Reframes Don’t Work

The past few weeks I’ve posted about a few cognitive reframes I’ve found helpful. From discussing what to turn to instead of asking yourself what is right and wrong, how to gain freedom from your to-do lists, and a practical mindset to set and maintain boundaries these have been several reframes I’ve found really beneficial to implement.

But, I feel it’s important to share a disclaimer.

These reframes would not have done much for me several years ago. I may have thought that they sounded nice, but I would have had minimal luck implementing them.

Why?

Because I had deeper work that needed to be done first, I needed to engage in deeper processing to heal my childhood wounds, I needed to engage in rewiring incorrect core narratives that I had come to believe about myself. And it was only after working on the foundation of who I am that fixing how my thought patterns flow has been effective.

Had I tried to do these a few years ago, these thought patterns would have been met with far too much resistance. And the trickiest part of all of this is much of that resistance was outside of my conscious awareness. I would have known that they weren’t working, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why.

It was only through psychodynamic psychotherapy (the theory that I practice) that I was able to gain awareness of core narratives that all of my thoughts, behaviors, and emotions stemmed from. After gaining awareness of these narratives and working hard to transition them to truer and more beautiful narratives, I was then able to have more control over my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

From this place of knowing, these cognitive reframes are now much more effective. So, if you have tried some of these cognitive reframes and they haven’t worked. It’s okay, you are not necessarily doing anything wrong. There may just be some deeper work that needs to be done first in order for you to experience the full effect of reframing your cognitions.