My approach leans on phenomenology and meaning exploration, which requires that I take the time to grasp my client’s way of understanding the world and attempting to identify their purpose, as driving factors for their thoughts and behaviours. To best open up this dialogue, I feel, requires a high degree of curiosity, compassion and acknowledgement/validation for their perspective, rather than a more prescriptive or outcome focused approach. To this end, open ended questions exploring how they have come to understand/explain the situations that they encounter and what they know about the world helps me to better understand their way of rationalization and interpretation for different situations. Clients, understandably, respond positively to being able to express themselves and being heard with accurately as opposed to others who may be looking to steer a conversation in a particular direction. This has the added benefit of normalizing their experience, as well as reducing stress and anxiety arising from potential incongruence and ambivalence.

Open ended questions can help to uncover some of the same answers as closed ended questions, but there’s so much more flavor and colour in the responses that you just wouldn’t get otherwise. Rationale, justifications, values, all exude from responses in open ended questions that don’t have a chance to shine through closed questions. Its really a big change to move from an interviewer to a counsellor in responding with carefully crafted open ended questions.