Thoughts on Reinterpretation of Causal Incidents

When the patient already knew it was wrong / bad – but did it anyway

Mary Ratcliffe, 2024

Many of the treatments I’ve conducted over the years have involved a patient where they did something wrong or bad innocently, inadvertently, accidentally and an adult or older sibling called them stupid, ignorant, bad, clumsy, naughty etc because the adult had wrongly assumed ill-intent or incompetence. It was the adult’s mistake accepted misguidedly by a young, trusting, compliant child.

There are also plenty of examples of that kind of scenario in the Transcripts (links below) and there is a well-established pattern of questions and ideas to help those kinds of misunderstandings get corrected.

What I find more challenging, and sometimes more intriguing, is where the patient did know it was wrong / bad and chose or decided to do it anyway. These are the ones that can be more varied and where we might need to understand more in order to generate a reinterpretation.