Questioning in Therapy

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Permalink Reply by Franis Engel on September 23, 2010 at 2:09pm

The answer in one word: tact. Everything depends on how open-ended these questions actually are.

Reading this over, you would use this machine in situations where the person was so depressed that they have guarded every reaction to everything... and so do not know what they are upset about?

Frankly, it sort of horrifies me to have someone be hooked to a machine that measures reaction level to questions. What counts in the world is not your initial reactions, but your ability to respond out of choice.

But I guess it would give the therapist a clue about how upset a person was about a subject. As a therapist, I would not leave the person hooked to such a device for long periods of time, because I would consider it unnecessarily invasive and almost as if the person was being interrogated with "leading questions." Questioning can be confrontational or exploratory or opening which may or may not be constructive at the time the question is asked.

You're familiar with "leading questions"? These are questions that indicate the answer the questioner wants to hear. The person being questioned learns to merely agree with what they figure out the questioner seems to want them to do or be. A "juicy question" will become a virtual question - one that results in many, many answers over a period of time as you witness the factors that influence the possible results of that question.

For instance, in victim crimes or true accidents such as natural disasters, etc. , therapists have found it is not constructive to take the person repeatedly back to this situation. Granted they will be upset by this experience if they remember it again. But, what is gained by attributing the speculative "cause" of the accident/assault to the victim? NOTHING! The point is to get over it and leave the bad experience in the dust, not to re-open the wound again and again with the mistaken idea that by doing so you are "expressing" and "freeing" what is buried. To heal, you must let the wound alone so it can do that!

I've listed some conditions where I would object to its' use, but that doesn't mean it's not a useful therapy in other situations. Under what conditions was it found to be useful to people?

Permalink Reply by Elke Loepthien on September 24, 2010 at 2:14am

Hi Franis,

thanks for sharing all your concerns about this, I think they are very valuable!

What intrigued me the most is that "therapists have found it is not constructive to take the person repeatedly back to this situation". Until now I have always heard quite the opposite about that: That a situation - no matter how horrifying it is - only gets "stuck" in your system as a trauma, when there isn't the chance to fully discharge all the fear, anger, distress it brought up for you. The therapeutic approaches of Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling and many indigenous traditions that I encountered, is therefore to bring those traumata back up and go through all the grieving.
I would be interested in hearing more about the approach that you were referring to.

The experience of my friend with that method was not one of interrogation, but of great support. There were no leading questions being asked, as I hope is mostly the case in therapy and counseling. The two most frequently asked questions were: How does/did that feel? and What else do you see?, just to give you an idea.

I hear your concerns about creating inappropriate pressure and I totally agree that this would be a very harmful thing to do. It might however be more dependent on the intention of the therapist or counselor than on the actual method that is being used.

Greetings,

Elke

Permalink Reply by Franis Engel on September 24, 2010 at 3:55am

Yes, thanks for replying and saying more.

This is a new approach to those people who have been a victim of an experience they had no part in participating in or asking for, other than to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The logic is that it is possible to use the coping mechanisms of the body to leave the bad thing that happened in the past and forget about it.

When you think about it, before the advent of popular psychology as we know it, historically people identified which direction was positive and what was destructive. Then they made a move to go where they wanted and left what belonged in the negative past. So this treatment strategy was a nod towards the way people in history had been dealing with their problems before psychology - to allow denial to do the work it was designed to do.

This approach is an acknowledgment towards the appropriateness of denial. The tricky part was recognizing that denial is only effective in dealing with certain situations. The "discharge" you would refer to is more like a kind of physical shaking that animals do when traumatized - usually released with bodywork rather than talking therapies, and then it is over completely and time for using denial to move on.

In most situations, of course, there are many techniques used to deal with uncovering unresolved patterns which are the foundation of now traditional treatments. But this psychological model doesn't deal with all situations - and being an "uninvolved" victim is one of them.