Coping questions are really useful thing to know about, especially when you encounter clients who are particularly hopeless and helpless. You know, these are generally people who have had severe problems, maybe physically abused in childhood, medical problems they're struggling with or they're in situations that really seem pretty catastrophic. And, they may see themselves as really powerless and helpless in their situation. And, that's where coping questions come in. They can really help empower you to help empower the client to start working on things that might be useful to them in some way.
So, coping questions basically ask people how they keep going in spite of all the adversity that they face. So, for example, how did you get up this morning and how did you make it here? How do you keep going day after day when there seems to be no hope? How is it that things are not worse? How did you learn to cope with such an awful situation when you were still so young?
Did you have to do it all by yourself? What you're doing here is dealing with an underlying assumption that is correct, which is that somehow they have managed to get through this. Somehow, they have managed to deal with things even in great adversity. Asking this series of questions actually helps people to become aware of the strengths, resources, and abilities that they bring to the situation even though they're really struggling. And, then, of course once you have that, then of course you need to expand on it and get them to talk more about their responses to the initial coping questions.
What did you do to get up this morning? What would it take for you to keep doing what you've been doing? Where did you learn to do that? Or, did you figure it out by yourself? The more curious you are, the more you actually build up their self-confidence and their ability to see that they actually have done something to make their situation either better or at least not worse. And, that that in and of itself is worth celebrating. Using coping questions, we've been able to actually entirely flip the script from them seeing themselves as completely hopeless and helpless to actually having agency, understanding that they actually are doing things to manage these really difficult situations and where they see themselves as having a role in making things better for themselves.
And, this is a great starting point to then develop some goals with the client about their preferred future once you've established that they have coped with these incredibly difficult situations in ways that they perceive themselves as having agency.