From the author: A short note about why we so want to understand ourselves. “— When you are in trouble, you can do two things: Firstly, try to understand why you are in trouble. you are in it. Secondly, get out of there. The mistake of individuals and entire nations is that they think that these two actions are somehow connected. But this is not so. And getting out of your ass is much easier than understanding why you are in it. - Why? “You only have to get out of your ass once, and after that you can forget about it.” And to understand why you are in it, you need your whole life. Which you will spend in it.” The Sacred Book of the Werewolf This is the dialogue I found in Pelevin. The word “ass” is not usually used in psychology texts, and now, I will try to do without it. Let's replace the word “ass” with the phrase “difficult situation” or “problem”. But let’s not forget that a “difficult situation” in everyday speech is exactly what is called - “ass,” sometimes “complete ass,” which indicates a high degree of difficulty and a complete discrepancy between reality and expectations. This dialogue made me laugh, precisely because that it accurately describes the essence of my problem when I meet a person who wants to “understand himself.” It is clear that if a person comes to a psychologist, then he is going through a difficult situation psychologically. Now I’m not talking about his question, but about my problem. How to talk to a person if he does not want to get out of this situation, but wants to understand himself, that is, to look for the answer to the question: “why and how did he end up there, in this most... difficult situation”? These are amazingly connected in our heads two things - understanding the reasons for what is happening and solving the problem. We think that by understanding the cause of the problem, we will eliminate it. And this is true when we are looking for the cause of an event and ways to eliminate the consequences in one class of phenomena. But when it comes to issues of psychology, these two things, two actions - finding the cause and finding ways to eliminate unwanted consequences - are often related to each other something like this , like a stormy determination of what kind of virus and under what circumstances spilled coffee on the keyboard and a trip to the nearest store for a new dry keyboard. The first action will lead to reproaches and maybe even a scandal with tears if you try, and the second will lead to the ability to use a computer. Of course, I’m being a little disingenuous when I say that it’s a problem for me to conduct a dialogue with a person who wants to understand himself . When a person wants to understand himself, he has in mind not only the question of what and why this is happening to him, but also what decision to make and how to proceed. But the truth is that just a few years ago I was disheartened by this question. The idea of ​​trying to understand myself seemed absolutely pointless to me. Understanding yourself can take a long, passionate and painful time. For what? If we don’t like a problematic situation, let’s define a goal that we like and ways to achieve it, based on reality and our capabilities. That is, we won’t cry over spilled coffee, but we’ll buy a new keyboard at the nearest store, or we’ll dry the wet one with a hairdryer in the hope that it will come to life when it dries, or we’ll radically switch to a laptop. And life will get better again! Now I see that many people really like to understand themselves. The desire to look for the reasons for your condition, your situation, your problems arises at some stage of life. We are not always in the mood for self-examination. We are drawn to understand precisely those moments when we find ourselves in a life crisis. This means that we are faced with unjustified expectations and, as a result, the attractiveness of past goals is lost and their meaning is lost. It is very easy to declare all characters except yourself guilty and bad. But we are smart, we take the next step, asking ourselves the question: “Or maybe I’m doing something and understanding it wrong, let’s figure out why this is happening to me.” And then there is a cognitive error - we associate the answer to the question “why” with the decision.