Have you ever asked a teenager why he or she did something only to be greeted with a shrug or a half-hearted “I don’t know”? During my time in youth ministry, it was a regular occurrence, but as I moved into other ministry fields, I saw it happen more and more. Questions beginning with “why” tended to stump people and halt conversations. Even in my personal reflections, I would find myself asking questions I couldn’t answer:

Why did I do that?
Why did I react that way?
Why didn’t my plan come together?

Finally, my spiritual director put these questions in their proper context by saying something I’ve treasured ever since: “Why” questions tend to be pretty useless. They’re often unanswerable, and even if you could answer them, there’s very little you could do about them. From here, she offered me a helpful strategy: When you find yourself asking a “why” question, try to reframe it with “how” or “what.”

For example, instead of asking “Why did you do that?”
consider asking, “What was happening in your life when you did that?”
or “What was the result when you did that?”
or “How did the people around you respond when you were making that decision?”
Any of these questions could help someone begin to peel apart a “why” without being paralyzed by that intimidating, unanswerable question. You see, “why” questions often look to deeper reasons that may be beyond what we can grasp in the moment. Answering them may require hindsight; our immediate emotions may prevent us from seeing them clearly; or, sometimes, “why” questions simply have no answer.

We have entire systems of philosophy and theology built on big “why” questions.
We write books about them.
We teach classes on them.
They keep us awake at night.
But when someone is trying to understand a situation in the here and now that may require an immediate decision, a “why” question can swiftly and brutally derail a person’s thought process.

When you’re tempted to ask “why” in a situation where you’re helping someone process a decision or experience, take a moment, reframe the question in your mind.
We can answer “what.”
“What” questions can help us.
We can answer “how.”
“How” questions can help us.
But “why”—
“why” may elude us for a long time,
and that makes it surprisingly unhelpful.

Addendum:
Jessi recently suggested another great reason to avoid asking “why” questions: they tend to put people on the defensive. “Why” questions make people feel like they have to explain themselves, creating a combative dynamic that will be toxic to any caregiving situation. Nurses are actually trained not to ask “why” questions of their patients, instead using a similar technique to what we’ve discussed here: rephrasing everything as “what” or “how.”