In public health, they teach you to look up stream to find the source of a problem and they use this story: 

A man was fishing in the river when he noticed someone was drowning. He pulled them out and attempted to resuscitate them. Shortly afterwards, he noticed another person in the river and saved them too. He then noticed another, and another and another. Soon he was exhausted and realized he would not be able save all of the drowning people.

He went further upstream to find out why all these people were falling into the river. 

On arriving further upstream, he discovered a broken bridge was causing people to fall into the river and end up drowning where he had been fishing.  He decided he would fix the bridge to stop them falling in, instead of fishing them out after they were already drowning.

 

So whatever problem you're facing, there probably is something else that is causing the pain so look at different causes to see what is the source of the problem so you don't keep having the same problem over and over again. 

Journal Prompts

1. What is the source of the problem that you’re having now? What would looking upstream look like for this problem?
2. What is the thing you can do to fix that source problem?