The Question Beneath the Question

There is a question most people have been asked so often that they no longer hear it as a question. What is wrong with you? It arrives in consulting rooms, in relationships, in the private hours of the night. It presumes a fault, and it invites a search for one.

A different question changes the whole geometry of a life. What happened to you? It presumes a history rather than a defect. It assumes that whatever you are doing now once made perfect sense, and that it may still be making sense to some part of you that has not yet been told the danger has passed.

The shift is not merely kinder. It is more accurate. Symptoms rarely appear at random; they appear where a life has been under pressure, and they persist where that pressure has never been fully acknowledged.

To ask what happened is to accept that a person is not a collection of malfunctioning parts but a coherent response to a set of circumstances. Once that is accepted, the work becomes clearer. Not correction. Return.