Far too often in therapy with at risk youth—prompted by clients, caregivers, or even sometimes therapists—terrible weeks are merely re-hashed. The client’s unstable mood or erratic behavior steals the show, a caricature of the forgotten person hiding beneath the masks worn day after day, masks stubbornly affixed as a concealment and a false comfort, and that possible person underneath the monstrous mood or the harrowing history is forgotten again. In working with at-risk youth in therapy, I have found myself periodically stuck in vicious cycles of re-hashing. Even in clinical staffing of cases, I have become stuck in these vicious cycles. Multidisciplinary consult teams commonly become stuck in what I call “case gossip,” a perversion of good, constructive case staffing in which small talk, generalised curiosity, and telling-everything-you know takes the place of careful case conceptualisation…