What Is Cognitive Reappraisal

Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?

Find a therapist near me.

Good teaching does not end questions; it multiplies them. Enter with three, leave with 10.

Reappraisal never calls abuse or neglect "wonderful." What can become wonderful is having endured and grown.

Reframing a painful past is a choice survivors make in their own time—never a demand others may place on them.

It was my first day as a Ph.D. student—and my first day, ever, of teaching. I had prepared the lecture carefully, printed handouts, and rehearsed my opening lines. As I left my office and walked toward the elevator, my mentor passed by and asked where I was headed. "I'm teaching," I said.

He replied, casually, without slowing down: "Don't teach them. Confuse them."

It took me perhaps 10 years to understand what he meant. My job as a teacher, he was telling me, is not to answer questions and deliver certainty. It is to trigger questions and wondering. I eventually turned his advice into my measure of a good class: If students enter with three questions and leave with 10, I have done my job.

And so, in his honor, let me try to confuse you.

The Most Confusing Sentence I Know

There is a sentence I share with my students—a cousin of an old line often attributed to the novelist Tom Robbins, sharpened for my purposes—that reliably confuses every classroom it enters:

It is never too late to decide that you have had a wonderful childhood.

It is never too late to decide that you have had a wonderful childhood.

The first objection arrives immediately: Childhood is fixed. It was what it was. How can an adult retroactively change it and conclude it was wonderful?

Then comes the harder objection, and my students are right to raise it: What about the person who endured sexual abuse as a child? Psychological neglect? Physical violence? All three? How could anyone—why should anyone—call........

© Psychology Today