The Disco Ball Has a Thousand Mirrors (And You Know Six)
Most of what feels automatic isn't. A reframe from group therapy, a disco ball metaphor, and the gap between a person and their behavior.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: most of what feels automatic isn’t.
Something happens.
It doesn’t match what you expected.
And boom! Feeling, reaction, outcome, done.
Half the time you didn’t choose any of it.
It just ran.
And then somebody shrugs and says,
“That’s life,” as if the sequence were carved in stone before you were born.
It’s not. There’s a gap in there.
A real one.
A space between the thing that happened and what you do about it.
You just can’t see it most of the time because you’re asleep to it, not lazy, not broken, just running on autopilot like the rest of us.
I know this because I’ve got ten thousand hamsters on ten thousand wheels running laps in my skull at any given moment, and even I can sit down, get still, and find a minute, a full minute, with no thought in it.
Not counting breaths to stay “focused.” Just space. Nothing.
If I can find that gap, it’s there for you too.
I’m not telling you it’s easy.
The first few times you try, it’ll feel next to impossible.
But “hard” and “impossible” are not the same word, no matter how much they want to be.
What I actually mean by reframing
Reframing isn’t positive thinking.
It’s not “look on the bright side.”
It’s not pretending the bad thing didn’t happen.
It’s this: whatever lands in your lap, you’ve got a default way of seeing it.
A groove your mind drops into automatically.
Reframing is pausing, just pausing, long enough to ask if there’s another groove available.
There usually is.
You just haven’t looked.
Because the first one got there first and felt like the truth.
I think about it like a disco ball.
There are as many ways to see that ball as there are mirrors on it.
Hundreds.
Maybe thousands, depending on the ball.
And the only completely clear view you ever get is your own reflection, bouncing back at you from one particular mirror.
That’s not nothing; that’s real, it’s yours, and it counts.
But it’s one mirror.
Most people know two or three.
Maybe half a dozen if they’ve done some work on themselves.
And somewhere along the way they convince themselves that’s every mirror on the whole ball.
It’s not arrogance, exactly.
It’s just how perspective works.
It feels complete from the inside even when it’s a sliver.
I’ve got things I’ve believed my whole life.
I still won’t tell you I’ve got them fully figured out.
I’m unsure if anyone can.
Things change. You either keep learning or you calcify.
There’s no third option.
The story that taught me this works
I learned most of what I know about reframing in group therapy, and one session in particular still sits with me.
A woman was talking about her divorce.
Specifically, about a pattern in her ex-husband’s behavior that she’d never been able to tolerate, never been able to shake, even years out from the marriage.
She was still dragging it around like a bag of wet sand.
I wasn’t married to the guy.
I didn’t have her history, her hurt, her years of context.
What I had was distance, and distance, when you point it the right way, is useful.
I could hear the shape of her story without all the weight stapled to it.
Not because I didn’t care.
Because I cared enough to actually look at the mechanism instead of just nodding along with the pain.
And what came out of me, almost before I’d thought it through, was the phrase “suspend your belief.”
The way you do at a movie, you set aside what you know to be true for two hours so you can let something new in.
I said something like, “What if you suspended your belief about who he is, just long enough to look at what he does?”
Something clicked.
I watched it happen in real time.
She separated, right there, the person from the pattern.
She wasn’t upset with her ex-husband as a human being; she was upset with a specific behavior he kept producing.
The behavior was the problem.
The person and the problem had been fused in her mind for years, and the second they came apart, she could see both of them clearly for the first time.
That’s a reframe.
Not “feel better about it.” Not “let it go.”
Just: Here’s a true thing you’ve been missing because two true things got welded together in your head.
I felt something close to amazing after that.
Not because I was clever.
Because I’d watched someone carry a weight for years and then, in one sentence, set part of it down.
How it actually works, mechanically.
Here’s the part that sounds cold but isn’t.
To find a reframe for someone, you have to momentarily strip the emotion out.
I can be with someone with full empathy. Open heart, open energy, fully in someone’s feelings with them; no problem. And they have no idea.
But the actual reframe doesn’t come from that place.
It comes from going abstract.
Spock mode.
Stripping the story down to its mechanics so you can actually see what’s jammed.
The catch is you can’t hand it back that way.
Nobody wants Spock’s diagnosis read to them in a monotone.
Say it without warmth, and people hear.
“You don’t understand me,” even if you understood them perfectly.
So the real skill isn’t the analysis; anybody reasonably sharp can do the analysis.
The skill is doing the cold, clear thinking privately, then handing it back warmly.
Translating Spock into something a person can actually receive.
That’s the whole job.
Not just seeing the other mirrors on the ball.
Helping someone else see one of theirs in a way that doesn’t feel like getting handed a diagnosis.
The hokey pokey of it
People get stuck.
Foot in, foot out, shake it all about, never actually turn yourself around.
You can know a thing intellectually and still be wearing it like a coat you forgot you put on.
The reframe isn’t a trick, and it isn’t therapy-speak.
It’s just the plain fact that there’s a gap between what happens to you and what you do with it, and that gap is bigger and more available than your autopilot wants you to believe.
You don’t need to see the whole disco ball.
You just need to remember it has more than one mirror on it.
Be well.
Bert 🙏