Name It And Frame It is a system that I came up with a few years ago for dealing with stress and hard days.  I wrote a book about it but the second edition will be out soon so hold off on buying it.  Basically what you do is in a stressful situation you name the emotion you are feeling, or the general lies you are telling yourself about the situation, and you reframe it with the truth and another outlook on the situation.  I recently had a situation where it took me a couple of tries to reframe something correctly.

I had for some time been wishing that the kids would want to come hang out at our house.  I wanted to see more of my own kids and I like the kids they hang out with and wanted them to feel welcome in our house too.  One night Colin invited a bunch of his friends over and he wanted to spend a bunch of money on food.  That was my first hurdle.  I got over that one pretty easily.  The kids wanted to hang out so I would fork out the money for food and enjoy their presence.  Easy peasy.

Then came the challenge.  That night was a lot of fun.  It was fun to have the kids around.  Lena and I mostly stayed in the other room and let them have their fun.  At some point I came out and just observed them having fun playing a game.  After standing there for a few minutes one of the kids said “I wonder if we can get Cameron to play a round.”  I loved being invited into their fold and sat and played with them.  It was a good time.  I enjoyed having them there and the fact that they wanted me to participate.

A couple of days after the party Cailyn came to me and asked if I knew that one of my chess pieces had been knocked over and broken.  I didn’t know until that moment.  That was tough.  These are chess sets that I have collected from my travels around the world and couldn’t easily be replaced.  This set came from Thailand about 18 years earlier.  I wasn’t sure if I was mad that it got broken or that I knew that there was a high possibility that that would happen with that many kids in the house and I didn’t move the chess set.  Another piece from that same set had been broken a couple of months before so this was the second piece.  Cailyn had glued together the first piece together and tried to make it better this time by saying not to worry, she had all of the pieces and would put them back together.  That didn’t help much but I appreciated the effort.

So I set out to reframe the situation.  There were a few options like “it’s just stuff,” or “maybe I should just throw them away,” but none of my options really took hold.  I had some attachment to this stuff so just dismissing it didn’t work.  So I stopped all of that and decided to practice gratitude in the moment.  I thanked God that we had a house that we could invite these kids to and that they wanted to come to our house and hang out.  I thanked God that they didn’t see me as a lame parent but invited me into their group.  After practicing this gratitude the correct reframe arrived almost instantly.  That broken chess piece wasn’t a broken collectible anymore.  It was a symbol of joy and happiness being experienced in our house.  It was a symbol of our kids friends having fun.  It was a memory.  That’s what I see when I look at that chess piece now.  I no longer see a broken chess piece, but fun and positivity.  The best part is having started the reframe with gratitude, the new emotion isn’t forced.  I’m not pretending to feel that way just to get through it.  I really do feel that way.

The Japanese have an art called kintsugi, where they fix broken pottery by putting it back together and filling the cracks with gold.  I initially thought about doing that with the broken chess pieces, and maybe someday I will.  For now they are held together by the memories that were created in our home which is more than enough to fill in the empty space.