The biggest hurdle seemed to be to regain enough trust to get a chance to discover the reason of the behaviour. There was a window in the beginning when she st

The biggest hurdle seemed to be to regain enough trust to get a chance to discover the reason of the behaviour. There was a window in the beginning when she still had the kid's trust and could have dug deeper, but if/once you are not a trusted party, understanding the reason because exponentially difficult. To your point, it applies to everyone. I remember social courses at the uni about how some classes of workers would obfuscate key parts of their jobs to protect themselves from having client/managers get their nose into it. In that sense getting to understand the core reason might often be the biggest chalenge. A bit like how finding why a bug occurs is more than half of the solution already.