THE FIFTH DISTINCTION FRAME / FEELING

Distinction #5: DISTINGUISHING FRAME AND FEELING As the sensory / evaluative distinction occurs inside your mind and differs at different levels of experience, so does this next distinction— the frame / feeling distinction. And precisely because both of these distinctions are difficult to catch, almost everyone needs specific training and practice to become competent so that it eventually becomes intuitive. Further, because they occur within, and because you can jump the levels in a nana second, catching the frame / feeling distinction is a most challenging aspect of communication. Let’s begin with some definitions.

A frame refers to your internal context of evaluative judgments, understandings, beliefs, decisions, history, values, criteria, and so on. As an inner filter, a frame governs how you interpret things. Your frames are your perceptual filters which you have learned over your lifetime. To understand anything requires a frame. Without a frame, you don’t know how to interpret anything. When you set a frame, you set a classification or category and then you can use that category to understand what is before you.

An emotion (or feeling) refers to a response in your lower brain (amgydala, hippocampus) and higher levels (motor cortex) which activates your neurology. The motion generated by an emotion reflects the difference between your mapping of the world and your experience of the world. You feel movement and motion in your body given the ideas, beliefs, and understandings in your mind in relation to how well do the ideas work in the outside world and/or fit your values and criteria.

So what’s the difference? A frame establishes a way to categorize things and as you categorize something, so you feel about it. Put a statement into the category of “insult,” and lo and behold, you feel upset and insulted, maybe angry, maybe rejected. Put the same statement into the category of “words,” and you may feel neural, curious, and/or interested.

Frame and feelings also relate systemically. Primarily, frames create emotions. Where there is an emotion—there is a frame. It is being generated by some meaning. Yet the circular nature of a system with many interactive elements means that your emotions also influence your frames. While feelings are primarily expressions of your frames, feelings can also trigger frames. That’s why just because you feel something that, in itself, is no reason to act on it. The frame may be toxic, distorted, or wrong— and that would make the emotion also toxic.

As mostly symptoms of your frames, emotions indicate that you may need to update the frame or enhance your skills in relating to the world. That gives you two ways to change what you feel. And while symptoms are important as information, they differ from the cause (i.e., the frame).

Here’s something surprising. Because emotions reflect the difference between your mapping and experiencing of the territory, all of them are right. They rightly weigh the difference between the two. That makes them relative. They are relative to the mapping and the experiencing. Yet because your mapping may be off and your neurology (health, skills, competencies, environment, etc.) may be off, emotions invite you to discover the factors creating how things are off and what to do to set them right.

One danger is the belief frame that says you have to “be true to your emotions.” That was the big mistake of the emotive therapies during the 1960s. They made emotion primary rather than secondary. An even bigger mistake is to assume that “if you feel something, then it is real.” Believe that and you will become a slave to your emotions. You will then semantically load every emotional experience.

As a professional communicator, suspend meaning when you get responses that you don’t want or understand. Doing that give you a chance to explore your feelings and their source. Sometimes this requires that you suspend being emotionally reactive. Recognize that while your emotions are always right, they are not always useful, accurate, or enhancing. Sometimes you have to acknowledge the feeling and act against it. Sometimes you have to rise up and operate from your highest intentions and understandings rather than your immediate reactive emotion. Sometimes you have to refuse to “take counsel” from your emotions.

Doing this enables you to become more professional as a communicator. If you don’t, kiss it goodbye! You will personalize things, emotionalize, minimize, maximize, exaggerate, and tormented by other cognitive distortions. Conversely, recognizing the frame / feeling distinction empowers you to tell the difference between your framing and your consequential feelings. And that, in turn, allow you to manage your emotions intelligently. Now you can bring awareness, monitoring, and regulating to your emotions— the activities that define emotional intelligence.

[For more, see Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999) and the training program, APG. Also the training program, Emotional Mastery.]