High fit

Cognitive Restructuring captures the shift Dia experienced when her mother spoke in the doctor's office. Dia had held a long-standing interpretation — that her Ama's instruction to 'act like a boy' was a rejection of her identity — and that belief had operated as fact for decades. When her Ama said 'I always knew that, doctor. She's always been my daughter,' the meaning of the original instruction was replaced: protection, not denial. Dia's internal framing moved from 'my mother never saw me' to 'my mother saw me and was afraid for me,' without the underlying facts of childhood changing at all.