Behind this question there is usually a picture — the cartoon of analysis, a couch, years of excavating childhood while the actual life waits outside. Let me replace the cartoon with how it works in practice.

We start where you are. The present situation, the current pattern, the thing that brought you. No archaeological programme is imposed on that.

But here is what tends to happen, and it is worth being honest about: the present quotes the past. A conflict with your manager runs on a script that feels older than the job. A panic that arrives in intimate moments has a history longer than the relationship. When we follow a present pattern attentively, it often walks us back to where it was learned — not because a method demands it, but because that is where the pattern's logic lives. Understanding where a reflex was reasonable once is often what finally makes it optional now.

So: we go there when the material leads there, at a pace you can stand, and with a purpose — never as a tour of old pain for its own sake. Revisiting is not reliving. And you always retain the right to say not this, not yet. That boundary will be respected, and — this is the interesting part — even the boundary tells us something useful, in its own time.