The antidote to aetiology—explaining things through their past causes—is teleology, explaining things through their present purpose.
For a long time, I believed the world and the psyche worked the way they do because of past events. For instance, you might lose your temper in a conversation because of some trauma in your psyche that triggers those feelings. But recently, my thinking has shifted.
Instead of asking, “What caused this to be the way it is?” I’ve begun asking, “What purpose does this serve today?” Maybe you lose your temper in conversations because there’s an (un)conscious goal driving that behavior, and losing your temper is the strategy you’ve learned to achieve it.
Once you stop looking for causes and start looking for purposes, you move from seeing the world as static and fixed to recognizing it as a hyper-optimized system dedicated to fulfilling countless aims.
If you want to change a behavior, the place to start is understanding what purpose that behavior fulfills right now.
I can’t think of a better book that explores this perspective than The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi. It’s based on Alfred Adler’s approach, reflecting his early conviction that trauma-based psychology often falls short and that we might gain more by shifting to a purpose-based way of understanding ourselves and others.