Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in Auschwitz when he made the fundamental discovery for which he later became famous as part of his work as a psychotherapist. What gave people the will to live, was the belief that there was a task for them to perform, a mission for them to accomplish that they had not yet completed and that was waiting for them to do in the future. Frankl discovered that “it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
The mental shift this involved came to be known, especially in cognitive behavioral therapy, as reframing. Just as a painting can look different when placed in a different frame, so can a life. The facts don’t change, but the way we perceive them does. Frankl writes that he was able to survive Auschwitz by daily seeing himself as if he were in a university, giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp. Everything that was happening to him was transformed by this one act of the mind into a series of illustrations of the points he was making in the lecture. He later wrote:
“By this method, I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past.”
Reframing tells us that though we cannot always change the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can change the way we see them, and this itself changes the way we feel.
Yet this modern discovery is really a re-discovery, because the first great re-framer in history was Yosef, as we will see in this week’s parsha and the next.
Let’s recap: He had been sold into slavery by his brothers. He had lost his freedom for thirteen years, and been separated from his father and his family for twenty-two years. It would be understandable if he felt resentment toward his brothers, and a desire for revenge. Yet he rose above such feelings, and did so precisely by shifting his experiences into a different frame.
Yosef reframed his entire past. He no longer saw himself as a man wronged by his brothers. He had come to see himself as a man charged with a life-saving mission by God. Everything that had happened to him was necessary so that he could achieve his purpose in life: to save an entire population from starvation during a famine, and to provide a safe haven for his family.
This single act of reframing allowed Joseph to live without a burning sense of anger and injustice. It enabled him to forgive his brothers and be reconciled with them. It transformed the negative energies of feelings about the past into focused attention to the future. Yosef, without knowing it, had become the forerunner of one of the great movements in psychotherapy in the modern world. He showed the power of reframing. We cannot change the past. But by changing the way we think about the past, we can change the future.
Whatever situation we are in, by reframing it we can change our entire response, giving us the strength to survive, the courage to persist, and the resilience to emerge on the far side of darkness, into the light of a new and better day.
