Questioning skills in counselling

but we start off with those very important foundations where today we're looking at the skill of questioning can i ask you a question rory uh go ahead what do you know about the skill of questioning why do you ask [Laughter] i guess all the questions going backwards and forwards yes well i think i think it's interesting and i'd like to pick up um what you said at the top of the piece about it being appropriate questioning you know we both taught ken and um we both have very fond memories maybe at level two of watching um you know foundation students new students um use questioning and sometimes it looks more like a police interview than it does a counselling session and the key thing here is appropriate um and i think what it's what i'd also observe is that different modalities of therapy have different questioning strategies so in person-centered therapy it's generally accepted and there may be there may be people who have differing opinions on this so i'll acknowledge this but we only use questions to clarify our understanding in other words when when we're not sure of what a client is saying so for instance someone might say well she said that and you may say i hear you say she said that but i just wonder who she is so i couldn't understand that um it's clarified so that you're in pace you're in step with the clients as opposed to using something maybe called socratic questioning where you're you're asking the client questions to readjust their thinking and i think it's a bit of a skill because i guess in our society we are used to questioning in everyday life aren't we kim we are it it is an interesting one here and i think uh as as many therapists as there are there are that many ways of of looking at how appropriate questions are used so i think that and i'm going to speak from a person-centered perspective here you know you mentioned rory that that the questions are only used within person-centered therapy to i guess align our frame of reference so the whole concept here is that in person-centered therapy you kind of going to step in as best you can to the client's frame of reference and see through their eyes what they're experiencing it and then communicate that back and it's only when we kind of become misaligned that we might ask a question to realign ourselves but i still think even with that definition it is misused and misunderstood often and i'm talking about from my perspective of how i view them so i'll give you an example you mentioned um at the top rory and then she said so it may be a conversation i i went to the market with my mum and my sister and then she really made me angry because she said blah blah blah well who made you angry the mum or the sister so you may then go in and say you know i hear you say that she made you really angry in this context who is the she and then my mother made me really angry okay now my frame of reference is aligned with you i know we're talking about the mother yes so there i guess it it it kind of makes sense but there's another area and and again it's about us clarifying our perception maybe the client would make a noise maybe we'd say something and the client would go ah [Music] we can ask a question about that to clarify our understanding because what does um all mean so you might step in and say now i hear when you're making that kind of sighing noise something might be coming up for you i wonder what that might be that's a question but it's a question that aligns you with the frame of reference of the client because they brought it in and i think where it becomes inappropriate in person-centered therapy from from the model itself is when we are satisfying our own need or want to know something so i went to the the market with my mum and my sister and she made me really angry and it was my mum who made me really angry that's interesting you said how have you been getting on with your mum lately yes is an inappropriate question because it's not from the frame of reference of that person even though it may be in context it's me wanting to know that bit of info yes and and i think that brings us to the the to the element that we've always discussed when we train together ken who is the question for is it is it for for you to be able to better understand the client's frame of reference better understand you know the direction that they're they're looking at if you if you want if you want to use a more visual cue or is it to satisfy our own curiosity and if it's to satisfy our own curiosity we're going down the rabbit hole of kind of entertaining ourselves i think you know client work is not you know us he's not a soap opera or you know um a kind of tabloid headline and i think sometimes we can be faced with clients whose stories um you probably wouldn't even hear on a soap opera because they are so difficult so complicated and sometimes um you know i've heard stories and i've said to my supervisor you know i just don't believe that kind of thing happens i'm not disbelieving the client but it's just so new to me and i think that when you become overly curious in the in the service of yourself then what what you're really doing is you're you're using the client to entertain you and to educate you and i don't think that's what therapy is for therapy is about being the best for your client being able to facilitate the client and the in the direction they want but you make up you make a very good point we should only use questions to clarify our frame of reference and understand where the client's coming from from a person-centered model and of course as you mentioned at the top of this raw if you're working with a different model there may be a requirement to ask questions you know if you're working with cbt for instance you're going to be asking probing questions to understand and to get the person to think and describe what's going on for them um so it is model specific and and i i look back to my time when i worked in drugs and alcohol and and when doing work in drugs and alcohol certainly with the the modality that i was practicing at that time there were directive informing questions where i as the therapist needed information i needed to know have you been drinking this week how much have you been drinking this week how did that affect you this week how did what impact did that have on your family that's very directive and very probing which is kind of uh contradicts what we've just said from the person because it was 100 for my frame of reference but there was there was a need to know from a a risk evaluation perspective and i think as soon as it comes to hidden risk or when we're looking at risk there are times where we'll need to ask directive questions uh well here we go ken because what's happening is is that when you're assessing risk you're stepping out of the modality yeah what you're doing is you're doing a different piece of work and you know so somebody might come to you and say i'm thinking of taking my own life um you know good practice would be to to ask them you know you know do they have a plan and if they say no and you may then say if you have you ever attempted to take your own life before and you say no you can pretty much say that there's no plan in place and the risk is lower there's not no risk but it's lower than you've asked the same question to a client and they say yes i've i've got a plan i've got some pills that i'm going to take when i get home and i've and i've i've i've attempted suicide i've attempted to take my own life before that ramps the risk up so there are certain times where we have to use questions and you know what i think this is i think this is this is being part of a contemporary clinical practice i think in the times when personal sense of therapy was invented and evolving it was a different era it was a completely different era and i i just i just don't think they have that kind of mindset in place we now have you know we're now accountable for our clinical work so sometimes we have to step out of the of the the modality we're in to be able to assess and manage risk definitely so where risk is concerned questions the appropriateness of questions would change um and then i guess that there's thinking that suggests that when we are working at depth with a client and i think it was just last podcast when we were speaking about relational depth and what that is uh so if you're interested in that counseling tutor that's our website uh go to the podcast tab today's episode is two one four and if you go to last week that was two one three and you'll see uh all about relational depth there when we are at depth with a client when the client is in the process they're in the zone as it were where they're right in the emotions of what they're presenting they're refeeling it and and bringing it into the here and now they're using emotional words when we ask a question it can take the person away from that feeling into a thinking it can move from i'm feeling to a cognitive process oh hold on let me think about that and it can pull somebody out of the depth of the emotion of the presentation so that's one of the things we need to be mindful of if we are using any kind of questions and and the questions that for me which are are inappropriate are things like have you tried insert whatever you like here have you thought about blah blah blah have they ever could you not have those are the kind of questions that don't serve other than to get the person to think about something and come away from the emotion that they're experiencing at that moment and we're not there to rescue specifically not if you're working from a person-centered model you're not there to rescue so we're not there to say have you tried yes absolutely ken and i i think we talked a lot about person-centered therapy and and we have to acknowledge those other therapies and certainly in cognitive behavioral therapy there's a tradition of what's called socratic questions which i believe comes from the philosopher's socrates who basically said i know nothing he said i know nothing and the way i find out is by asking questions and um i think interestingly we in in cbt um it's a deliberate the questioning strategy is is built into it and one of the reasons is that with with socratic questioning there is an amount of discomfort in the response to the question because as you say ken when you said to your client when you worked in in alcohol services you know how much you've been drinking this week that brings to the forward to the mind of the person exactly how much they've had to drink and and it brings it into sharp relief and i'm sure that when you ask that question for the right reasons there was an amount of discomfort there as people are faced with the reality of what's going on for them and it's and in certain in certain treatment pathways it's only when people grasp the reality that they can make changes so you know i i think we have to be thoughtful that the questioning itself is fairly benign it's how it's applied within the modality and cbt is all about changing our thoughts it's it's basically classic cbt uh you know i know this third wave cbt that integrates the emotional aspects and i know a lot of cbt therapists would work on an emotional level you know they're not um interrogators but it does go to prove doesn't it that just the skill that just just using questioning is so different within two specific modalities yes and of course there are other modalities that are question based and it's about the appropriateness of that if you're practicing within those modalities you will be asking those questions for a very specific reason linked to theory that underpins why those questions are important and i think that's the importance here you know and it's about what is your training um and and what is the reason for the question and and we're not the experts at all we're two colleagues we're here discussing it having a chat about topics that interest up us things that come up on our facebook group and we encourage you to to ask these questions about questioning to yourself as well what does questioning mean for you do you find that there are certain questions that might be quite directive that there are effective i don't know have the conversations it's a it's definitely a topic worth thinking about and if you want to delve a little deeper rory has created what we call the super duper handout i always call your handout super duper thank you very much reading they're so concise rory has a a a a special skill of taking lots of theory and just condensing it down into just the stuff you really need and the handout is called appropriate use of questions it's available free of charge from counsellingtutor.com click on the podcasts tab go to today's episode episode 214 214 there it is in the page you can download appropriate use of questions handout maybe use it with your peers if you're training stimulate a conversation about questioning absolutely and talking about peers you've alluded to of course our facebook page you want to join our facebook community if you go to facebook type in counseling tutor um you'll find this with a closed group knock on the door in our caring lovely moderation team we'll let you in and join the party of with hundreds and thousands of like-minded people uh students there are qualified colleagues supervisors and also a lot of counselling lecturers in there all talking about the world the word the world not the word the world of counselling and psych and psychotherapy so put yourself in there and uh why don't you ask some questions in the group you see what i did there okay i do i tell you this is like uh a laugh a minute rory anyway

Channel: CounsellingTutor

Views: 19,104

Keywords: Counselling questions, counselling questions to ask client, importance of open-ended questions in counseling, questioning skills in counselling pdf, psychotherapist (profession), counselling tutor podcast, counselling skills, closed questions, open questions

Id: xoSCZI-uIdU

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022