The quote above appeared in an article in theChicago Tribune, as part of an imagined commencement speech. From what I’ve seen in my professional life, it’s true: worrying about the future is indeed ineffective. But the writer, journalist Mary Schmich, also added: ‘The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.’ And that, too, is true.

Over the last decade or so, people have been coming to talk with me about the problems in their lives. In the setting I work in this usually takes the form of anxiety or worry, but occasionally it can be depression, and sometimes it’s about how they interact with other people (or usually, to be more accurate, it’s about how people interact with them). And on the surface this seems completely reasonable. These things are hard and problematic, and make being in the world difficult. And pretty much everyone I meet wants these things gone and out of their lives forever.

But when people arrive for a session we don’t talk about fixing. Instead, most of my sessions start with a version of ‘This thing that you are feeling — we aren’t going to get rid of it, and it isn’t fixable’. You might assume that, at that time, most people would get up and walk out. Why else would you go to see someone but to fix something or to make it better? But the thing about where they are — usually with cancer in their lives — is that they understand that the anxiety, sadness, anger, despair or distress that is showing up isn’t the driver. It’s just the thing we see.

Health professionals, especially when thinking about people’s mental health, usually aim the treatment at what the person sitting in front of them says is the problem. So, if someone tells their doctor they are anxious, then it would make sense to treat anxiety. And there are heaps and heaps of treatments for this — everything from medication to therapy to meditation (and a bunch of other things way too numerous to mention). Some of these things will work for one person and not for another, and if the treatment doesn’t ‘fix the problem’ then the person will likely try something else.

But I want us to take a step back and think about this differently.

All the things we treat — anxiety, depression or other things that turn up — are just symptoms of something much bigger. In the same way that, if we have a problem with our knee it swells and p