Once you have noted your observations from the questions above, you will be able to begin to ask your data some more questions. As you ask these questions, you will need more information from your counselee. Specifically, what you will be looking for now is themes or patterns that stand out in your counselee’s life. What you are looking for is behaviour, emotional responses, thinking, attitudes, interpretations, desires, values, expectations, motivations, that come forward regularly in response to different life situations. Look for patterns that show that the person responds habitually in a wrong way whenever he faces a particular difficulty. To help you identify these themes or patterns, Dr. Mack has suggested you make your data answer the following questions:

• Does the data indicate that there is a particular time of day/place when or where the problem is most likely to occur?
• Does the data indicate that there are typical emotional responses in certain situations or when certain things occur? (anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, hostility, hurt, discouragement, worry, discontentment, passion, etc.)
• Does the data indicate that there are typical behavioural responses in certain situations or when certain things occur? (manipulation, lack of self-control, sexual immorality, drugs, deceitfulness, silence, argumentativeness, stubbornness, attention-getting behaviour, defensiveness, criticism, procrastination, etc.)
• Does the data indicate that there are typical thoughts, attitudes or interpretations that the person has when certain situations or when certain things occur? (victim theme, rejection theme, helpless theme, superiority theme, etc.)
• Does the data indicate that there are typical expectations, desires, longings, demands that the person has of certain people or in certain situations or when certain things occur? (comfort, control, approval, lust of flesh, lust of eyes, pride of life, etc.)

It is remarkable, how in counselling, things that leap out at you as a counsellor, remain largely hidden to counselees until you point them out to them. Some of these pattern even escape the counsellor for a long time if he doesn’t know how to extract them from his data. As I said before, if you can find the contrast between your counselee’s wrong behaviour and the right behaviour (including not only behaviour but all of the things mentioned above) taught in Scripture, you can give your counselee hope.