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An open notebook and pen, symbolising reflective clinical formulation
The Framework

A New Framework for Understanding Anxiety

A simple, collaborative way of exploring whether anxiety-related narratives about coping, adequacy, or belonging may be shaping a client's experience. It does not aim to replace your existing formulation approach.

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In clinical work, certain anxious narratives tend to return (in different words, in different lives) but they often produce a familiar effect. The Three Lies™ Framework gathers some of these clinically recognisable anxiety-related narratives into three broad, proposed formulation themes, presented below.

“I can’t cope.”

Coping

This theme concerns the meaning ‘I can’t cope’ or ‘I can’t manage’. We explore what the person believes they cannot manage, what anxiety anticipates, and how protective responses and practical support affect their experience.

“I’m not good enough.”

Adequacy

This theme concerns the meaning ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’m not enough’. We explore how a limitation, mistake or unmet standard becomes a conclusion about being inadequate, and how Guardian™ responses may protect against that conclusion.

“I have no value / I have no worth.”

Belonging

This theme concerns the meaning ‘I have no value’ or ‘I have no worth’. We explore how a person may feel compelled to prove their value to remain connected and avoid rejection or abandonment, and how Guardian™ responses may seek to preserve relational safety.

In Context

How The Three Lies™ Framework Compares

The Three Lies™ Framework respectfully holds its own alongside established therapy models by offering a distinct formulation lens for anxiety-related meaning, protective responses and client-led language.
It is a professional formulation framework that helps therapists make better sense of anxiety across modalities.

Approach
Core Organising Question
Primary Clinical Focus
Typical Therapeutic Movement
How It Relates to The Three Lies™ Framework
The Three Lies™ Framework
What meaning is anxiety protecting, how did that meaning become compelling, and what would support greater choice now?
Coping, Adequacy and Belonging meanings experienced as truth; their possible developmental purpose; and the Guardian™ responses that may continue to protect them.
Collaboratively connect past experience, present meaning and anticipated future; explore protection, relief, cost and context; then prepare an agreed action and review what happens.
A developing formulation and intervention framework linking protected meaning with client-owned action and review, used alongside comprehensive assessment and professional judgement.
CBT
How do thoughts and behaviours maintain distress?
Cognitions, behaviours, emotions and avoidance cycles.
Monitoring, behavioural experiments, cognitive restructuring and practice between sessions.
Can be used alongside CBT: the Framework may help explore the meaning a pattern protects, while CBT offers established methods for working with thoughts, behaviours and avoidance.
ACT
How is avoidance reducing psychological flexibility?
Acceptance, defusion, values, committed action and willingness.
Loosen fusion with anxious stories and support values-based movement.
May complement ACT: the Framework explores the meaning that avoidance protects, alongside ACT's work on flexibility and values-consistent action.
Schema Therapy
Which longstanding schemas, modes and unmet emotional needs are active?
Early maladaptive schemas, coping styles, modes and developmental needs.
Mode work, experiential rescripting, limited reparenting and pattern change.
Shares an interest in developmental origins and protective patterns. The Framework centres on Coping, Adequacy and Belonging meanings; Schema Therapy offers a broader map of schemas, modes and unmet needs. The two may be used together.
Internal Family Systems
Which protective or wounded parts are involved, and how can Self leadership emerge?
Inner parts, protectors, exiles and relationships within the internal system.
Unblend, build compassion, negotiate with protectors and heal wounded parts.
Three Lies™ does not map parts. It tracks anxiety-protective meanings and client language.
DBT
Which skills reduce crisis behaviour and build emotion regulation?
Emotion regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness and interpersonal effectiveness.
Validation, chain analysis, skills practice and behaviour change.
May complement DBT: the Framework can help explore the meaning threat underneath dysregulation, alongside DBT's skills-based work.
Psychodynamic / Attachment-informed
What relational patterns, defences or attachment threats are being repeated?
Unconscious meaning, developmental context, defences and relational templates.
Explore attachment meanings, transference, defences and emotional experience.
Three Lies™ can translate broad relational threat into three anxiety meanings for collaborative formulation.

Clinical positioning: complementary, not hierarchical. Use within competence, supervision and evidence-informed practice.

A wooden puppet figure, used here to illustrate the concept of a 'lie' in the framework's name
Why "The Three Lies"?

Why "lies"?

The word deserves an explanation. It refers to anxiety-related narratives that can feel entirely true in the moment. It does not refer to deliberate dishonesty, and it never implies a judgement of the person holding them.

The framework invites careful, compassionate exploration of these narratives — but only where they are relevant and acceptable to the client. If the word does not fit, practitioners can simply set it aside.

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Guidance Notes

Holding the framework well

A framework is only as good as the care with which it is used. If you take one thing from this page, let it be this: the framework serves the client. The client is never expected to fit the framework.

  • Use it tentatively and collaboratively, with informed consent, and within your competence and scope of practice.
  • Let the client's language lead. Where "lies" doesn't fit, try anxiety narratives, threat stories, self-beliefs, protective beliefs, or simply coping, adequacy, and belonging concerns.
  • Hold cultural, relational, social, and structural context in mind, and work in a trauma-informed way.
  • Never use the framework to dismiss real danger, discrimination, rejection, or harm — some fears are warranted, and deserve to be treated as such.
  • Step back, adapt, or set it aside if it increases shame or self-blame, if it doesn't fit the formulation, or if the client simply doesn't want it.
  • Bring it to supervision or consultation where helpful, and refer on where appropriate.
  • Responsibility for comprehensive assessment, risk assessment, safeguarding, consent, and documentation always remains with you as the practitioner.
  • Treat TLAQ™ responses as descriptive starting points for conversation, never as scores that settle anything.
  • Treat these introductory materials as exactly that: introductory.

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