It now appears that it is a misguided assumption to think that if we know what has gone wrong in a person’s life, we will also know how to help that person resolve their difficulties. For example, we now know that when we focus on dysfunction, we risk reinforcing that dysfunction: if we focus on deficiency and pain, we are likely to get better at feeling deficiency and pain. Similarly, when we focus primarily on an individual’s past, we build skills at reflecting on the past, sometimes making personal history seem more important than present experience.
