Are we asking the right questions?
Reframed: What happened to you?
What if the question wasn’t if you have generalized anxiety disorder, but what happened to you?
What if the question was reframed, not how to treat your life-long depression, but what happened to you?
What if the questions wasn’t how to manage your IBS and fibromyalgia or Crohns’ disease, but what happened to you?
What if your OCD or your avoidant or your attachment style was reframed—what happened to you?
What you looked at your family line of mental illness from a wide lens camera? What if you zoomed out? What happened to them? To then happen to you?
I’m not saying that the above aren’t serious conditions that needed to be treated. We need to help people manage their pain and not suffer, to be able to live.
They are legitimate conditions.
However, the pathologizing/diagnosing and treatment of them are also often regarded as the be-all, the end all. Treatment is the best we can hope for, the end goal. The inevitable. In other words, you’ll always have them.
What if—we tried to tackle or consider treatments or therapies of the root cause, treating the origins rather than symptoms?
What if we took more seriously that claim that it didn’t start with you. That so often the root cause of what we face in life—in physical or mental conditions can be traced back to the foundational cause of trauma, the answer to the question, by simply considering:
“What happened to you?”
