Switching Frames

Truth and conflict resolution for mere mortals

While my 10-years-long marriage was breaking down, I was caught in a spiral of “how to make him understand.”

The books I read about communication in marriage gave these very prim and proper step-by-steps that did little more than mask our critiques of each other in therapy language.

We tried couples therapy, but this turned into a “rig the jury” situation which was about choosing the therapist that believed our version of reality. The first one didn’t sympathize with my ex, nor the second with me. The third was spotty, sometimes aloof; she scolded my pleas for structure in a kindergarten sing-song voice.

I sent him text messages. Sweet messages about our future children, angry and self-righteous messages speculating about his psychological condition, long bullet-pointed justifications, sad pleading messages to PLEASE JUST HEAR ME, THEN I’LL DO ANYTHING YOU WANT FOREVER.

Even after we separated, even after the divorce papers were filed, I couldn’t stop searching my mind for those magic words that would make him see. Make him care. Restore his love. Return me to wholeness.

I eventually regained sanity, channeled my despair into intellectual curiosity, and figured out a lot of stuff. The following is one of the most important pieces.

Objectivity

Truth is a virtue.

Seeking truth pays off in prediction power. The more accurately you can model the world, the more accurately you can predict it. This is the foundation of science and technology.

There’s a paper lying on my desk that’s 8.5” x 11”. That’s objectivity. It is true no matter who is measuring it. Our shared material world lends itself to scope, measurement, and replication.

But when you try to measure someone’s internal experience, you change it/them. An example is self-fulfilling prophecies: if you believe something, you then create it, making the original supposition look like truth. e.g. If I believe I am unwanted in a group, I will self-exclude or act cagey or aggressive, until I become an outsider.

What’s worse is language is the measuring tape we use to quantify our internal experience. This forces categorizations that never feel perfectly true or false (like I can say that an experience was “positive” and simultaneously feel like there were sad or regrettable parts).

And because words are just abstractions, their meanings fluctuate person-to-person. The constellation of meanings in your head that you’re trying to point to with a word or phrase are not universal. Like maybe when you said you wanted a “chill time,” you meant you didn’t want to plan ahead or stick to a schedule, but the other person heard something akin to, “They want to have a quiet, slow experience.”

I’m not saying we can’t observe patterns and probabilities related to people and their experiences, but there is error baked into our understanding of each other.

Subjectivity

Your brain is your interface to the world. Your brain is the apparatus you’re thinking with. You can’t out-think it; you *are* it.

Our brain employs many heuristics, and these give us the illusion of more objectivity and processing power than we have.

For example, your eyes are not cameras; what you see is largely made up. If you’re looking at a complicated cityscape, most of what you see isn’t real - it’s a patchwork of cached images you’ve seen before, inserted by your brain based on prediction. You only actually “see” the objects in your direct focus.

Your ears are not microphones. Your brain edits and interprets sound - like how the sound of your hair rustling against your ears is filtered out so you don’t hear it.

Your mind is not a computer that processes inputs uniformly. Your mind filters and interprets information based on threat and desire.

This affects your attention - what you notice, what you don’t. This is how ten people can go to the same parade and leave with wildly different impressions of it: one focused on the structural integrity of the floats, another the music and dancers, another the beauty queen waving from the car. You can leave feeling offended, inspired, connected - depending on what you focused on and the meaning you gave it.

Where we direct our focus determines what we see → which determines what we believe/the meaning we make → which determines what we predict → which determines what we see.

People express shock about social media algorithms manipulating reality through attention, but our brains naturally work like this.

Or like the old adage: we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

Finally. The real kicker (or at least it was for me):

Our working memory can only consciously hold around four chunks of information at a time.

Four! Chunks! Of! Information! At! A! Time!

Imagine that every decision ever made in human history was limited to such a tiny context window of conscious awareness.

And that’s at our best (healthy, well-rested, etc.). Tired, stressed, sick people make do with less.

Should I leave my partner? Well, I’m starting to feel really dissatisfied. I remember feeling this way three months ago, around the time we had that talk about time management. I don’t want to be this person who is jumping from relationship to relationship, but my friend said when it’s right you “just know.” Boom. Threshold reached. Just try to hold more concepts than this without dropping one. If you’re smart, you’ll start condensing them and writing them down, so instead of 4 “trees” you’ll be looking at 4 “forests.” But notice how your mind wobbles and seeks focus.

So even if we are thinking “objective” thoughts (e.g. measuring a chemical in a lab), we can never shake that it is *us* thinking them - an animal whose brain filters for what will help it survive, seeing predictions in place of physical reality, orienting largely by feel, from our tiny conscious workspace.

This is subjectivity.

We don’t even see it, because we are fish and this is the water we’re swimming in.

Switching

I did this mental exercise that messed me up.

Until then, I thought I could train my mind to hold opposing views at once.

I had just seen the movie Bonhoeffer and was stewing on its moral message. After reading others’ takes about the film, I decided to sit for a while with my eyes closed, observing opposing arguments in the same moment, allowing for ways they could all be true at once.

There’s a popular metaphor about some blind men and an elephant. The blind men are all touching the elephant. One has its tail and declares, “an elephant is like a rope.” One had its tusk and says, “no, an elephant is like a spear.” One at its side argues, “no, an elephant is like a wall.” All of them are correct. It’s just that each man has a limited range of focus, and the elephant is so big. As with our tiny brains and big, complicated world.

So I thought, maybe my disagreement with the other people who saw Bonhoeffer isn’t actually a disagreement. Maybe it feels like we’re disagreeing, but we are all saying true things about a larger whole.

After all, you see it all the time. One person tweets something like, “Don’t think, just trust your body knows what’s right.” Another tweets, “Stop and consider whether the decisions you’re making today actually align with your values.” Are only one of these takes correct? No, they are probably both true - for different people or situations. It’s like they disagree at human scale but agree in the grand scheme.

So I sat there, eyes closed, trying to expand my conscious awareness enough to see how all of these opposing views on Bonhoeffer could be right - but it was uncomfortable. After a few minutes, I felt something really weird and remember thinking, “My brain is out of RAM. I’m powering down.” For the next couple days, I experienced what psychology calls “derealization.” I worried I’d seriously injured myself.

This was the last straw.

-

Post-divorce, my first research rabbithole was about empathy. Empathy means taking the point of view of another person, with both your heart (affective empathy) and mind (cognitive empathy).

I quickly learned that cognitive empathy is computationally expensive for our brain. What’s much easier - kind of an 80/20 for empathy - is emotional validation.

Emotional validation means expressing acceptance and compassion toward people’s emotional reactions, even if you disagree with what that person says or does. This calms people quite a lot, promoting cooperation, and is absolutely worth practicing in any and all situations.

But I noticed that, in more charged interactions, people still really, really, really wanted me to AGREE. Not just with how they were feeling, but with their logic, what they believed to be true, their model of the world.

But you can’t always agree. Sometimes someone wants you to agree with a thought or belief or decision that hurts you. In that case, agreeing with what they say feels dangerous. It is very difficult to move toward an idea as your body and mind shouts NO STOP DANGER AGHHHH.

Fortunately, I figured out the way to solve this problem:

“Agree” and “disagree” presume one shared reality. e.g. We are both standing in the same place, pointing at the same thing, making judgments about it. This is true for material reality, like the ever-8.5” x 11” sheet of paper. But when you’re talking about thoughts, beliefs, feelings - we are in two separate worlds, using an imperfect shared language to try to point at the structure of our experience, but often failing to see the same thing.

And so, our multiple perspectives are best conceptualized as frames. Frames are human-sized lenses through which to see. Like an actual picture frame, our frames can only encompass a small bit of the world at a time.

Up until my Bonhoeffer experiment, I thought it must be possible to create a super-frame big and complex enough to hold paradox. But now I know that the brain has hard limits on the amount of complexity it can hold at once, and that the answer instead is switching between frames.

Switching frames - back and forth, or cycling among many - is how we can safely relate to each other. That is, how we can relate to others without losing our own perspective or failing to protect ourselves.

-

There’s a concept called “the wisdom of the crowd.” Research says if you ask a lot of people a question, their answers in aggregate will out-perform even highly specialized individual experts’.

So like the blind men, we intellectually benefit from aggregating the views of other people to see the whole elephant.

Or, in the absence of others, we need to remember that truth and wisdom don’t come from standing in one place, looking in one direction.

You can’t expand your brain’s tiny context window to see the whole world at one time, but you can pick up a frame that shows the elephant’s tail, then swap it for one that shows the elephant’s tusk…

At any given time, someone needs to be told to be more yin or more yang, to explore or to exploit, to give or to take. You can only do one at a time, but you need both - at different times, in different situations.

By switching back and forth between opposing frames, or cycling through many varied ones, we become savvy to nuance and complexity.

Are we capable of pure objectivity on subjective topics like philosophy, morality, or justice? No. But intersubjectivity - seeing things from many sides - is the closest we can hope to get. This is wisdom.

Lies

Even lies can be useful frames.

A lie meant to obscure someone’s true thoughts or feelings can still help you understand them better. And you can hold it lightly, because it’s just a frame after all!

Sometimes people have squished themselves so long into one frame that they need an especially aggressive counter-frame to crack them back into alignment - like switching from “the lower the number on the scale, the higher my worth” to “fatter is more beautiful” to settle the nervous system for a while.

Threat, Desire, and Resolution

I mentioned before that the mind naturally filters what it sees based on threat or desire.

Arguments are all about threat.

Arguments happen when what you’re saying is perceived as threatening to each other’s safety, self-concept, or deep desires. (I say “each other’s” because it’s never just one person alone, or else the thing would quickly fizzle out. It’s the threat-against-threat that escalates a disagreement.)

Some threat is very real! e.g. There’s likely someone on this planet who would chop you into little pieces if given the chance. There are many more whose closely-held desires would bump against your own in the context of a friendship or marriage or business partnership.

But if expressing care for someone’s emotions (emotional validation) takes you like 80% of the way from a would-be fiery argument to a kind conversation or calm collaborative problem-solving…

I’d say that the ability to hold someone’s frame, see the concerns in it (or ask questions until you do), and express care for those concerns will get you virtually as far as agreeing would.

And you can keep yourself safe by knowing you will soon be putting down their frame and returning to your own, where your own threat or desire is accounted for.

I’m not saying that every situation calls for this or that you necessarily owe everyone your time and attention, but these are incredibly powerful tools. And when used reciprocally, they will strengthen any type of relationship.

All you need to remember is that the truth in front of you is never complete… there’s always more than you can presently see.

*

FAQ

Q: Tactically, how does “switching frames” deescalate conflict? Do you have a toy example?

A: It’ll look different if you’re just trying to deescalate a one-off interaction vs. in the context of a relationship.

If you’re in an argument with someone at a party, you can calm yourself with the knowledge that you don’t have to compromise your own perspective for theirs. You can even jot down a few quick notes to yourself, so you remember your own frame later. Then turn your curiosity towards their frame - either by pondering to yourself or by asking them gentle questions. You’re not trying to understand their logic as much as their underlying concerns. Just like, in their anti-polyamory frame, what are they afraid of, what do they want? Are they concerned they’ll never feel special? That their partner will find someone they love more? Acknowledging those fears will calm the person down, so you can maintain civility. And you’ll come to understand their patterns of thinking better.

In a relationship, this can be a spoken, agreed-upon thing. You can take turns applying curiosity to each other’s frames, knowing you’ll both have a chance to be heard. That it’s not a contest about who is right - both frames get to exist. The important part is acknowledging each other’s underlying fears and desires.

Q: “Switching frames” comes across as intentional and conscious. How do you see the subconscious factoring into it?

A: I think of it as a conscious thing - especially in conflict but even day-to-day. Like I keep a collection of frames (in a text doc) I can cycle through to help me make a decision. Often, these frames are opposites. Like I can give my mind the frame of: what’s the absolute worst that can happen, and if I’m assuming that it will, how will I recover? Then I can switch to a frame of: what evidence do I have that everything is fine actually, or the things I’m worried about aren’t real? It wouldn’t be possible to think through both of these at the same time, but by taking turns with them I can cover an enormous amount of ground. Talking to other people can also naturally do this, because they’ll surface frames that aren’t top of mind for you.

It seems to me that the brain prefers simplicity/stasis by default, so it takes effort to redirect your attention from one frame to another.

However, you’re always training the subconscious. So your conscious thoughts get filed away and become your future intuition. And whatever you do repetitively eventually becomes automatic. So when a new frame is presented me, I find that I naturally “test” it (by flipping it to an opposite statement) to gauge how truth-y it is or to look for edge cases. When you can train this into your subconscious, it takes less of your working memory, so your powers compound.