by Morticia Alexander

Created on: July 18, 2009

Open-ended questions are, quite frankly, one of a therapist's best tools to aid them in conducting psychotherapy. An open-ended question is one that requires more thought or depth than a simple yes or no question. The kinds of questions are often used to help clients push beyond the surface, and offer deeper insight to the issues at hand.

The absence of open-ended questions in therapy is not effective in productive therapy. If you and a therapist were discussing a trauma, and he or she asked you was that experience traumatizing, you would say yes or no...now what? That kind of a question does not lead anywhere...it leaves you and your therapist at a dead end. If he or she rephrased it and asked instead during that moment of trauma, what were you feeling? That leaves room for a detailed explanation on the client's part, and based on how he or she responds, that could lead the therapist into another open-ended question for his or her client to consider.

On a more subconscious level, open-ended questions are unbiased and empowering. If a therapist asks you a simple yes or no question, subconsciously it may feel like your therapist thinks that he or she already knows the answer. Like in the situation above, if the therapist automatically assumes that you found the situation traumatizing, then that may feel like he or she is passing judgment. However, if they utilize open-ended questions, it eradicates the feeling of a biased question, and it allows you to more accurately say what you are thinking.

Open-ended questions are an absolute necessity for productive psychotherapy. Psychotherapy, by definition, is all about a client and a therapist working together to allow the client to dig below the surface and recognize his or her own feelings. The therapist is not there to give a client all of the answers...he or she is merely there to aid in self-discovery on the client's part. If a client answers a simple yes or no question, what kind of work is really done? How much thought is really put into responding to a question with a single syllable? However, if open-ended questions are used, that makes it necessary for the client to push past the surface, thus providing a more profound response, which in turn will provide the therapist with material for more productive questioning. If used correctly, open-ended questions can provide a nice, flowing cycle of productive psychotherapy.

Learn more about this author, Morticia Alexander.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.