Journal of Financial Planning: October 2001
There were a number of reasons that I decided to leave my psychotherapy practice after 17 years. I loved the work but I was tired of hearing about problems and discussing them. I often wondered if there were more effective ways to help people make sense of their lives that didn’t begin with, "Tell me more about this particular problem." I had been trained, like most therapists, to use a problem-solving approach, which encouraged the client to tell me what was wrong with him or her. I would then focus my expert knowledge on the problem and help the client fix it. Aside from the arrogance of assuming I could fix the problem, there is another difficulty with this approach: The more you ask about problems, the more problems you find. Fundamentally, whatever we focus on expands.
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