How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 246

C: I don’t know. I guess a lot of things: bad and good.
T: Could you describe for me some of the good things?
Deframing can be especially useful in the preceding example because it avoids a possible confrontation with a
person who is firmly entrenched in an opposing belief system. It also avoids a certain kind of preachiness that
can easily deteriorate the immediate relationship with the client. Deframing, as a deconstructive tool,
effectively calls into question the validity of a client’s beliefs and motivations. In most cases, employing logic,
for instance, a direct common-sense approach exhorting the teenager to stay in school and not have children,
could easily prove to be ineffectual. Dealing with beliefs or belief systems head-on, in this case with an
adolescent mindset, not always grounded in long-range perspectives, is usually doomed to failure. Deframing,
instead, seems to offer a greater opportunity for success at penetrating a deeply embedded belief by inserting
doubt into the client’s mindset.
Deframing is achieved by calling into doubt the client’s beliefs or belief system. Another strategy related to
deframing deals with the entire area of what a client may have intended but was not subsequently realized, or
was manifested in strange and not easily recognizable v