Socratic Questioning

Name: Socratic Questioning
Uploaded: 2025-10-26T00:06:36.000Z
Description: See how Socratic questioning helps a client examine and challenge beliefs about their perceived responsibility for a traumatic event.

See how Socratic questioning helps a client examine and challenge beliefs about their perceived responsibility for a traumatic event.

From the course

CBT for Trauma

In the cognitive therapies for PTSD, the use of Socratic dialogue is the therapist's main tool for creating change and for improving PTSD. That's the use of these questions to help the client learn to challenge their own beliefs about what happened and to create beliefs for themselves that are a better fit and are more accurate and are more kind. When I think about Socratic dialogue, I almost think about it as teaching mental yoga. What we're doing first is identifying the thoughts that are too rigid, too inflexible, and then we're using those questions as the tool to help the person stretch, to help the person get better range of motion, and eventually to gain more functional use of the beliefs and therefore to reduce the intensity of the emotions and to reduce the symptoms. So at the point where you, you missed that call. Mhmm. What is it that you think you should have done differently? Answered. Okay, and did you have a reason to think that on this particular occasion this particular missed call meant that you needed to answer? No, because I've missed his calls before. Okay, and when you've missed his calls before had something terrible been happening? No. Okay. Because he, he, like, with him? Yeah. No. I just missed a call because I, you know, I maybe, getting out the car and I can't I have my hands full and I... you know? But I will call him right back. Okay. So it was nothing in particular, you just call, and then that was it, it wasn't anything like traumatic happening. And in the past when you did miss a call from your dad, had you ever had one where you didn't call him immediately right back? Maybe, maybe once. Okay. Maybe like once, and it wouldn't be that long, like how I waited that long. So like I said I missed it, and then I didn't call him that evening, he didn't call me either. And by that evening was your dad already dead? Yeah. Okay, so at the point where it rang alarm bells for you, it was already too late. Yeah. Okay. So based on the information you had at the time, how would you have known that this time was different?