Eight weeks later they arrived in Portland after having gone back to New Orleans to pack up their belongings. For many months after they moved the reaction, when people would find out where they were from, was, 'Wow, you're a Katrina victim?' Her response was always patient. 'We weren't really victims, like the people who couldn't afford to leave, like the people who suffered in the aftermath. We had two cars, credit cards, cash and family support. We were inconvenienced, but hardly victims.'



She goes on to frame this in even more of a positive way, 'I'm happy with my new life in Portland. It was time for a change even if that change was unexpected.'

She has anger and sadness for the city and the loss of friends, but has turned the upheaval into a new beginning.

Framing is a powerful tool for positive change. It can be an unbelievably potent instrument for persuasion. Look at the frame that we now put on the Holocaust "victims": Survivors.

Thousands of social workers use framing each day. Gang members consider killing an opposing gang member honorable, but social workers and parole officers use framing to show how ugly murder is no matter who is the victim.

Advertising is all about framing. To appeal to younger audiences, advertisers usurp "rebellious" or "indie" mentalities in order to sell their products to the "alternative" youth culture. So now even a carton of eggs seems "edgy" and cool when advertisements imply that these aren't your daddy's old-fashioned, lame, square outdated eggs, these are cool eggs and only the truly awesome are eating our eggs.

Politicians use framing, 'spin', on issues all the time. Bush's frame is that the war in Iraq is just. In nearly all of his speeches he suggests that 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' And 'It's better to fight them over there, than to fight them over here.' This is a presupposition. Who's to say we'd have to fight 'them' at all?

The Democrats and an overwhelming percentage of U.S. citizens now have the frame that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism, but has everything to do with oil and no bid contracts.

Framing can be used to convince people in positive ways. Martin Luther King, Jr. framed segregation as an evil injustice changing the views of many people. Generations later, black and white students don't know the blatant inequality as they've grown up in fully integrated schools.

Use reframing to turn a hardship into a challenge, a setback into a time for reflection, a victim into a survivor. Frame it all!