A lot of people walk in with a version of the same question: "What's wrong with me?" It feels like the honest, brave, get-to-the-bottom-of-it thing to ask. But it's a quiet trap, and I gently steer people away from it.
"What's wrong with me" assumes there's a defect to locate and fix. It puts you on trial in your own session, with you as both the accused and the prosecutor. And in my experience it almost never leads anywhere useful — it just deepens the shame you walked in with.
A better question: what happened to me, and what did I learn from it?
Why the second question works
It moves you from judgment to understanding. It assumes you are not broken but shaped — that your patterns are adaptations that made sense in the context you developed them in, not symptoms of being fundamentally flawed. That single shift changes the entire emotional temperature of the work.
When the question is "what's wrong with me," we're hunting for a defect. When it's "what happened, and what did I learn," we're getting curious together about a person who responded the way people respond. One closes you down. The other opens you up.
Nothing is wrong with you. Something happened, and you adapted the way a person adapts. That's not a defect to fix — it's a story to understand.
What this changes in practice
It changes who's on your side. "What's wrong with me" makes therapy an interrogation. "What happened to me" makes it a collaboration — two people looking with compassion at how you came to be the way you are, and what you'd like to do differently now. We can absolutely work with that. We cannot work with a verdict.