Two days ago, I saw an Instagram post from Reese Witherspoon about a word shift she heard from Steve Guttenberg (who you may remember from Three Men and a Baby) that was as follows: change the phrase “have to” to “get to” when you are narrating your own life. The example Reese quoted Steve as using was “I have to wait for the train,” to “I get to wait for the train,” and then she went on to list a few other daily situations in which the reframing works, “I get to wake up in the morning,” “I get to shower myself,” “I get to pick out my own clothes.”
The first example that came to mind for me was “I get to have a root canal,” which was actually the thought I had a couple of months ago while sitting in the endodontist’s chair, mouth wide open and numb—because I had been in excruciating pain for two days and was beyond grateful that the endodontist could fit me in. Same thing when the tooth cracked in half three days later (on a Sunday), and I got to go to the dentist on Monday for a temporary fix and got to go to the dentist again on Tuesday when he had time to start steps toward a permanent solution.
At the endodontist. (And yes, this was actually taken in her office. Yikes, I have officially become one of those people who documents everything with a photo.)
Waiting for the train might be considered a level one and a root canal, I don’t know, maybe a level two, but this approach can work for higher level life events as well—“I get to visit my mom in her nursing home,” may sound odd at first, until you think about all the people who can’t afford to pay for nursing care and have to be full-time caregivers on top of their jobs and other obligations (and all the people who lost their moms early in life who wish they could see them once more); “I get to have heart surgery,” may sound nuts, but there are millions of people who don’t have access to the excellent medical care we have here in the States—you get the idea (okay, not the right use of the technique, but I’m on a roll).
As I processed Reese’s advice while I got to walk my dog later that day, I realized I’ve been doing this “reframing as ‘get to’” with my kids for over a decade without identifying it as such. Back in the late aughts, I read a New York Times article about how anxiety and excitement evoke the same physiological reactions in the body—increased heart rate, butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms—and that you can train yourself to change your perspective on events by reframing anxiety into excitement.
I began to use this with my kids, who were teenagers at the time, employing reasoning like, “Think of it as not being nervous that you have to take a test but excited because you’ve been working hard and now you get to show what you have learned,” or “you aren’t anxious about the match tonight, you’re excited! You get to play with your teammates under the lights, putting all the energy you’ve put into camps and drills and practices into a match against another team.”
Years later, when I began a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) course, I learned that reframing was one of the basic tenets of the process. I still remember one of the examples used: you may feel sad or pitiful if you have to go to the movies by yourself, but a mom of three young kids would probably be thrilled at the prospect of “getting” to go to the movies alone.
Of course, CBT has a lot of other tools in the toolkit, many of which I find myself employing randomly (my personal favorite as a perfectionist is reassessing days when “I haven’t done enough,” by listing all of the things I did accomplish (and yeah, getting out of bed, taking a shower, getting dressed, walking the dog, and writing a substack post count).
So, here’s my advice: Try reframing just one “have to” to a “get to” or one bout of anxiety to an “I’m excited to…” See how it works, and if you want to share how it goes, leave a comment. I hope to hear from you. Until then, I get to go work on my next book.