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There are periods of change that only look like growth when you look backwards. While you are living through them, they can feel like something else entirely. Things like confusion. Failure. Rejection. Exhaustion. Uncertainty. The uncomfortable feeling that something which used to work no longer does, coupled with having absolutely no idea what is supposed to replace it.
Sometimes there is grief involved. Sometimes anger. Sometimes the experience is genuinely traumatic, and the suggestion that we should immediately search for the “lesson” or the “opportunity” can feel less like encouragement and more like a refusal to acknowledge what has actually happened.
We always need to be careful with the language of “reframing” for precisely this reason, because reframing does not mean pretending that something painful was actually good. It does not mean deciding that everything happens for a reason. And it certainly doesn’t mean that experiencing something difficult obliges you to become wiser, stronger or more spiritually evolved because of it. Sometimes something hard is simply hard.
But there can come a point, perhaps while we are still living through it, or perhaps much later, when we begin to notice that the experience is changing us, and that is where “reframing” can become useful.
What is reframing?
Reframing is the practise of looking at an experience from another perspective so that we can notice meanings, choices or possibilities that may not have been visible before. It does not require us to deny what happened, minimise its impact or decide that a painful experience was somehow good for us.
How can you reframe a difficult experience?
Remember, reframing a difficult experience doesn’t mean pretending it was positive or denying its impact. It means exploring whether there are other ways to understand what is happening: what you need, what you are learning, what is changing in you and where you may have more choice or agency than you initially realised. Sometimes that meaning emerges during the experience; sometimes it only becomes visible much later.
When the old way of being no longer works
One of the strangest things about personal growth is that we tend to recognise it most easily once it is complete. That’s when we can look backwards and create a coherent story. For example, “that experience taught me to trust myself” or “that job made me realise what mattered” or “that relationship helped me understand my boundaries”
From the other side, the story can look almost inevitable but it rarely feels that way in the middle. In the middle, you may simply know that the person you were before cannot quite meet the situation you are facing now. Perhaps you have always been the person who keeps everybody else happy, and suddenly doing so is costing too much. Perhaps you built a business around what you thought you were supposed to offer and have begun to realise that it no longer resembles the work you actually want to do. Perhaps your career has rewarded you for being knowledgeable, dependable and able to solve problems and you have reached a level of leadership where problems don’t have a clear and simple right answer.
The difficulty is real but underneath it, something else may also be happening. You are being asked to relate to yourself differently.
Sometimes the challenge is that you haven’t been here before
There is a particular kind of uncertainty that comes from encountering something for which your existing experience has not prepared you. This can be the first time you set a boundary that somebody else doesn’t like. The first time your business has a quiet month and you don’t know whether it is a temporary dip or evidence that something needs to change. The first time you make a decision that affects an entire team rather than simply your own work. The first time people expect you to provide certainty when you don’t feel certain yourself.
It can be tempting to interpret the discomfort as evidence that you are not ready. What if sometimes it simply means that this is new? There is no memory to draw upon that says, I’ve been here before. I know I can handle this.
You are creating that evidence now. That doesn’t necessarily make the experience easier. But it can change the question.
Instead of asking, why am I finding this so difficult? we might eventually be able to ask what is this situation asking of me that I haven’t had to practise before? That is a very different kind of reframe.
Personal growth doesn’t always feel spiritual
If your personal development includes spiritual or magickal practise, difficult periods can create another uncomfortable tension. We often reach for spiritual practise because it helps us create meaning. For example, tarot, ritual, meditation, journalling, spellwork and other reflective practices can give us a language through which to explore experiences that rational analysis alone does not quite capture.
But there can also be pressure to make meaning too quickly. To find the message in the cards. To decide what the universe is trying to teach us. To manifest our way out of discomfort.
Sometimes the more compassionate spiritual practise is to stop demanding an explanation. A ritual might not be about changing the situation at all. It might mark an ending instead.
A tarot reading might help you articulate what you are frightened of rather than predict what happens next.
Meditation might simply create enough space to notice what you are feeling.
The magick may actually be about changing the relationship we have with ourselves while challenges are happening.
Growing a business can challenge the person behind it
There is a similar experience in business. Particularly when the business is personal.
If you are a coach, therapist, spiritual practitioner, healer, creative or somebody building work around something you deeply care about, it can be difficult to separate commercial feedback from personal judgement. For example, if something doesn’t sell, or a launch is quieter than expected, or somebody else appears to be doing extraordinarily well or a client leaves.
It is easy for “this offer hasn’t worked” to quietly become “I’m not good at this” and then perhaps “I was foolish to think I could do this at all”.
Sometimes the offer genuinely does need changing. Sometimes the price is wrong. Sometimes the audience isn’t there. Sometimes the numbers are telling you something important. Reframing doesn’t mean pretending the business problem isn’t real, and the opportunity for growth is not in ignoring that information, but there is an opportunity in learning to look at it without making every result a referendum on your worth.
Over time, you may become someone who can remain curious for longer, someone who can distinguish disappointment from failure, someone who can change direction without interpreting the change as evidence that the original decision was stupid.
When someone who can say, “that didn’t work so what have I learned?” That is growth too.
Leadership eventually takes us beyond expertise
Something similar happens as our responsibility grows inside organisations. Many people reach a leadership position because they have demonstrated that they are good at something. They know their field. They solve problems. They make things happen. People trust their judgement.
Then the nature of the problems changes. There may no longer be one singular correct answer. Different stakeholders want incompatible things or the information is incomplete. A decision that is right for one part of the organisation creates difficulty somewhere else.
People may be looking to you for reassurance at precisely the moment when you are trying to make sense of the situation yourself, and that can feel surprisingly exposing (particularly if much of your professional identity has been built around being the person who knows). The temptation is to become more certain. To act more quickly. To hold the problem more tightly.
But perhaps the growth being asked of you is different. Perhaps it is learning that leadership can include uncertainty. That saying I don’t know yet is different from having nothing to contribute. That asking a better question can sometimes be more useful than producing an immediate answer. That your role may be shifting from being the person who solves the problem to being the person who creates the conditions in which other people can think about it instead.
Again, that transition rarely feels like development while you are inside it. It can feel like losing something you used to be very good at.
Reframing isn’t about finding the positive
This is why we sometimes misunderstand reframing. We imagine replacing a negative thought with a positive one, but meaningful reframing can be much quieter than that.
“I’m failing” might become “I’m learning something I haven’t had to learn before”. “I should know what to do” might become “there isn’t enough information yet”. “I’ve changed my mind” might become “I know something now that I didn’t know when I made the original decision”. “I can’t cope with this” might become “this is asking a great deal of me”.
None of those statements makes the situation disappear. They simply create a little more room around it, and sometimes that room is enough for choice to return.
Finding agency before finding meaning
This is an important distinction within humanistic magick. The aim is to help us notice the relationship we are developing with ourselves through our difficult experiences because there is a stage in change where we have recognised that something cannot continue as it was, but haven’t yet integrated whatever comes next.
We believe this is one of the hardest places to inhabit. You know enough to recognise the old pattern but you don’t yet have enough experience of the new one for it to feel natural.
So you practise. You notice. You experiment. You get it wrong. You discover that something you thought was a boundary was actually a wall, or something you thought was compassion was actually avoiding conflict, or something you thought was decisive leadership was actually discomfort with uncertainty.
And then you notice something else. Perhaps you respond differently to something that would once have overwhelmed you. Perhaps you recover more quickly. Perhaps you ask for help. Perhaps you say no. Perhaps you sit with a difficult question for another day instead of rushing to make the discomfort disappear.
These changes can be so small that we overlook them, but they are evidence you are becoming someone with a different range of choices.
You don’t have to know what this will mean yet
If you are in the middle of something difficult, you don’t have to turn it into a growth opportunity today. You don’t have to be grateful for it. You don’t have to find the spiritual meaning, the business lesson or the leadership insight.
And if what you have experienced is traumatic, healing and appropriate support matter far more than constructing a positive story about what happened.
But you might gently notice what is changing. What feels less tolerable than it once did? What are you questioning? What are you learning to ask for? Where are your old ways of coping no longer enough? What response are you practising now that you couldn’t have imagined yourself choosing a year ago?
Because sometimes ‘purpose’ comes later, sometimes ‘strength’ is only visible retrospectively and sometimes the most useful reframe available to us in the middle of difficulty is simply “I don’t know what this will mean yet”.
There is something wonderfully human about leaving the story unfinished because growth is not always the moment when everything finally makes sense. Sometimes growth is learning that you can remain with yourself while it doesn’t.
References
About Humanistic Magick
Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. You can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/
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