Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you.

Their essential gift is receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. This is not a passive skill. The wise person is not just keeping her ears open. She is creating an atmosphere of hospitality, an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to set aside their fear of showing weakness, their fear of confronting themselves. She is creati

surface problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconcilin

The really good confidants—the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem un

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is

Where’s home? What’s the place you spiritually never leave? How do the dead show up in your life? How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? How do I see you transmitting your culture? How do I see you rebelling against your culture? How do I see you caught between cultures?

Frequently the goal of therapy is to help the patient tell a more accurate story, a story in which the patient is seen to have power over their own life. They craft a new story in which they can see themselves exercising control.

Therapists are essentially story editors. People come to therapy because their stories are not working, often because they get causation wrong.

McAdams asked a group of college students to list the ten key scenes in their life.