Mine, Yours,
Ours, System.
Not every psychological response begins inside the individual. This is a working tool for asking, deliberately, where a piece of distress actually sits — before deciding what kind of response it needs.
More than one quadrant can be true at once — the diagram is a prompt for checking all four, not a box to tick.
The problem it solves
Psychotherapy has a powerful, well-trained tendency to translate experience into intrapsychic meaning. That’s often exactly right. But it isn’t always right, and disability makes the cost of getting it wrong unusually visible. Sometimes “I feel powerless” genuinely does trace back to childhood. Sometimes it means: the lift is broken again and nobody cares. A disability-informed formulation needs the capacity to tell these apart — not by defaulting to whichever explanation the therapist’s training reaches for first, but by actually checking.
The four categories
Ask, in order, whether each one is doing real work in what’s being described — not which single one is correct.
Mine
Personal history, an individual psychological pattern, a genuinely intrapsychic response — grief for a real loss, an old fear reactivated, a defence built for good reason.
Calls forPsychological work: exploring, understanding, and working through, in the ordinary sense of therapy.
Yours
Something coming from the other person in the room, or in the client’s life — a therapist’s own countertransference, a family member’s grief projected onto the disabled person, an assumption the client has absorbed from someone else’s discomfort.
Calls forRelational repair: naming it, owning it if it’s the therapist’s own material, or helping the client separate their own feeling from someone else’s.
Ours
Ordinary, shared human difficulty that isn’t specific to disability at all — the universal weight of change, loss, uncertainty, or simply being human in relationship with other humans.
Calls forNormalising, ordinary therapeutic presence — sometimes the most respectful response is not treating it as a disability issue at all.
System
Distress produced by something structural — an inaccessible building, a disbelieving clinician, a hostile benefits process, a genuinely broken lift.
Calls forEnvironmental adaptation or advocacy: the correct response may have nothing to do with psychological exploration at all.
Sometimes several of these are true in the same sentence. The tool isn’t for picking one. It’s for not defaulting to Mine when the weight actually sits somewhere else.
Using it in session
A simple sequence, not a script.
Notice the pull. Which category does this instinctively feel like to you, right now, as the therapist? That instinct is worth noticing precisely because it’s often wrong in a specific, patterned way — many trainings pull hard toward Mine by default.
Ask, don’t assume. Check the read against the client’s own account. “Is this about something old for you, or is it mainly about how you were treated in that room today?” is a real, answerable question.
Allow more than one answer. Grief for a real loss (Mine) and anger at a system that made the loss harder than it needed to be (System) can both be true in the same breath. Don’t resolve the tension by picking a side.
Let the category shape the response. If the weight is mostly System, the most therapeutic thing available might be practical: information about a complaints process, validation that the anger is proportionate, or simply refusing to turn a structural failure into a growth opportunity.
A worked example
A client says: “I hate needing my PA to shower me.”
Mine: Possibly grief for a private, unwitnessed body — a real, personal loss worth exploring gently.
Yours: Possibly a PA’s own visible discomfort, absorbed by the client as if it were their own shame to carry.
Ours: Possibly just the ordinary, universal discomfort most people feel being physically vulnerable in front of another adult — not a disability-specific issue at all.
System: Possibly a rushed, poorly trained care agency that hasn’t given this PA the skills or manner to do the task with real dignity — in which case the fix is a better-trained PA, not a better-adjusted client.
The therapist’s job isn’t to decide which one is correct in advance. It’s to ask enough, carefully, to find out which is actually carrying the weight — and to stay open to more than one answer.
Formulation sheet — for therapists
Print this and fill it in during supervision, case notes, or straight after a session, whenever a formulation feels like it’s forming too quickly.
Your own reflection sheet
Not just for therapists — this works as a private journalling tool for anyone trying to untangle where a difficult feeling is actually coming from.
What this isn’t
It isn’t a diagnostic instrument with a correct answer to find. It isn’t a way to prove that “it’s really the system” and therefore avoid genuine psychological work. And it isn’t a way to prove “it’s really personal” and therefore avoid the harder, less comfortable conclusion that a system genuinely needs to change. It’s a discipline for staying honest about which is which, especially when more than one is true.
Where it’s already applied
This framework is used directly on Grieving the Life You Expected, where it helps separate genuine loss from projected grief, from ordinary human difficulty, from structural failure misfiled as personal sorrow.