reasons

This week I saw members of two different families in which the mother clearly traded in the father for the son as her primary support person. This is not a good thing for any and all concerned. It tends to create anger, stress, acting out and general weirdness.

But, I began to think about something I read this week in a chapter that was discussing, of all things, Hegel. The sentence was that "There is a profound difference between explanations based on causes and explanations based on reasons."

A long time ago, when I was entering into this field, it was philosophy that formed much of the basis for underlying interventions in therapy. The best therapy had to do with a quest for a "good life" and a quest for a "truth." I spend years talking about reasons. I wanted to know not just what made things happen, the cause, but why things happened -- the reason.

I do not feel that as strongly now. I have come to feel that reasons, if there are any, seem to be made-up post hoc. When you sit down to figure something out, it is more often you are just making it up. It could be anything, it could be nothing; it doesn't matter.

Yes, there is a cause. In these cases it will prove to be that something was missing in these women's lives, and they didn't get it from their husbands, or maybe they had gotten it too much from their husbands, but that may or may not matter now.

It is romantic and fulfilling to think, as many of my clients do, that "everything happens for a reason." But I have found that if that is so, then the reason is beyond my ken, and that my looking for it is just a work of fantasy. That level of reasoning won't help solve the problem.

A more mundane, hopefully more empirical, causal explanation sometimes will help.