Dave Cazeau, LCSW

In my experience, a problem is rarely just the thing itself. It's the thing plus everything wrapped around it: the story you tell yourself about what it means, the way it lands in your body, the people it touches, and the history it quietly stirs up. A missed deadline is just a missed deadline. But a missed deadline that confirms an old belief that you're never quite enough, that keeps you awake at 2 a.m., that makes you short with your kids the next morning—that's a problem. Most problems, I've found, are made up of three layers. There's the situation, which is real and deserves practical attention. There's the pattern, the way you've learned to respond to situations like this one, often long before you had a choice in the matter. And there's the meaning, the conclusion you've drawn about yourself or the world because of it. When people feel stuck, it's usually because they've been working hard on the first layer while the other two keep pulling them back. I don't think problems are signs that something is wrong with you. More often they're signs that something in you is trying to get your attention. Part of our work together is learning to listen to that, with curiosity instead of judgment, so that the problem becomes less of a verdict and more of a starting point.