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.
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 gathers anxious narratives about capacity and control: the sense that difficulty itself signals failure, or that not coping perfectly means something has gone wrong. Practitioners may notice it surface as urgency, self-monitoring, or a fear of falling apart.
“I'm not good enough.”
Adequacy
This theme gathers anxious narratives about worth and performance: the sense that value must be earned through achievement, or that mistakes confirm an underlying inadequacy. It often sits alongside perfectionism, comparison, and harsh self-evaluation.
“I'm unlovable, unwanted, or I don't belong.”
Belonging
This theme gathers anxious narratives about connection and acceptance: the fear of being fundamentally unwelcome, unlovable, or on the outside looking in. It can show up as people-pleasing, withdrawal, or a hypervigilance to rejection.
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.
Clinical positioning: complementary, not hierarchical. Use within competence, supervision and evidence-informed practice.
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.
Register interest for CPD training and future resources →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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