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Five Useful Questions in Couples Therapy
Author(s) -
Madden Michael
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/j.1467-8438.2005.tb00642.x
Subject(s) - session (web analytics) , context (archaeology) , psychological intervention , tone (literature) , intervention (counseling) , psychology , mood , focus (optics) , psychotherapist , project commissioning , publishing , engineering ethics , social psychology , computer science , political science , engineering , world wide web , history , psychiatry , art , physics , literature , archaeology , law , optics
This article describes an approach to couples counseling in which the use of questioning is the major therapeutic intervention. It describes my journey from using questions to gather information to employing questions as clinical interventions in their own right. It notes that small questions can change the tone, mood and direction of the session, while bigger questions open up the social and moral context of couple life. Five examples of these ‘bigger’ questions are described. I conclude that successful questions open up new areas for discussion, avoid a narrow ‘problem’ focus, and stimulate yet more questions.