Frame cultivation: Helping new meanings take root in families

Abstract

Abstract An aspect of reframing interventions that is crucial in facilitating family members' acceptance of new frames, but which is often neglected in clinical case reports, is frame cultivation. This paper describes frame cultivation as a focused interactional process during which therapists systematically punctuate data that is consistent with a new frame of meaning before explicitly labeling it with the family. Focused questions, metaphors, and behavioral enactments are described as useful tactics in cultivating these new frames. The emphasis on frame cultivation is based on notions borrowed from both cognitive and interactional literatures regarding the organization of meaning and how social information is processed.