THE FUSE

In one consulting room, a patient is learning to notice a distressing thought, name it, and set it down—to stop rewarding it, so that the feeling has somewhere to go—while perhaps a few doors down, another patient is being told that the troubling thought is important to pay attention to, that growth is challenging, or perhaps even that pain in some way is good, and that avoiding such thoughts is how a person stays stuck. Another therapy provider might just wonder about the presence of such thoughts, or even ask, "What if you did, and what if you didn't?" Another might give a worksheet to take home on such thoughts. Another might recommend processing right then and there. Every one of them is competent, every one working from evidence, and each could give you a reasonable account of when one of the others would be the better choice. To boot, not all schools of therapy recognize the validity of some others.