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Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 51, No. 5, May 2003 (°

C 2003)

Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening

and Open-Ended Questions
Glenn E. Boyd1

This article suggests that the most important thing a pastoral counselor does is to
listen carefully to the client. It emphasizes the will to listen and a more relational
understanding of listening as a natural outcome of the evolutionary history of psy-
chotherapy. It highlights the importance of the work of Goolishian and Anderson
(1992) and Anderson (1997) for this more relational view of therapeutic conversa-
tion. The article further suggests that one of the implications of a new conception
of listening is an innovative understanding of open-ended questions for facilitating
an inherently creative therapy conversation more than information gathering.
KEY WORDS: listening; relational; open-ended questions.

It is no accident that we speak of the art of understanding and of making- oneself-understood,

since the ability to interpret meaning, which every language-user possesses, can be stylized
and developed into an artistic skill.
Jurgen Habermas

The most important thing pastoral counselors do is listen carefully to their

clients. That formula may sound simplistic, but everything else we do as profes-
sional helpers depends on the value placed on listening. Unless we learn to value
listening, we will not learn to value those with whom we work or ourselves, for
that matter. Listening comprises a number of related attitudes and behaviors and,
in fact, probably requires some degree of natural giftedness for empathy that can
be learned but cannot be taught. I tell my practicum students that they should spend
a lot of time talking about what the client wants to talk about, an impossible task
without attending carefully to the client’s words.

1 Glenn E. Boyd, D.Min., LPC, LMFT, is in private practice in Stafford, TX. He also serves on the
faculties of the Houston Galveston Institute and Our Lady of the Lake University – Houston. Address
correspondence to 10701 Corporate Dr., Ste 220, Stafford, TX 77477; e-mail: geboyd@mail.esc4.com.

345

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C 2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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346 Boyd

Almost every theoretical perspective in the history of psychotherapy places a

premium on careful listening, from Freud’s psychodynamic technique to Buber’s
(1958) “I-Thou” to Rogers’ (1951) client-centered therapy to narrative therapy’s
(Freedman & Combs, 1996) urging to hear the story to Goolishian and Anderson’s
(1992) notion of “not-knowing.” Jackson (1992) and Frank (1998) eloquently
remind psychiatrists and psychologists that nothing can replace the efficacy of
listening to the patient’s story. Understandably, listening itself has evolved over
the years.
The kind of listening I have in mind is more like an attitude or a relational
position than a technique, closer to what Anderson (1997) calls “a way-of-being” or
to what Frank (1998) calls “a gift.” In The ART of Agape-Listening (Boyd, 1996), I
explored certain implications for listening in the biblical notion of agape, the Greek
word translated “love” in most contemporary editions of the New Testament. That
notion of love prescribes a sacrificial act of caring for the well-being of the other
that can become quite powerful, as seen in the importance of the concept for
Mr. Gandhi and Dr. M. L. King. Such an incarnational presence grows out of the
helper’s commitment to another human being more than a commitment to a theory
or to a set of interviewing skills.

IT WAS THE WAY YOU LISTENED

A client with whom I was working came in for a final session before moving
to another state. Sally, a tall, athletic, former professional actress and singer, often
hilarious and outrageous, had begun to isolate herself in her apartment. She felt
ashamed of eating and smoking too much. Depressed and afraid, Sally needed to
tell her story to someone who could listen and work with her on writing a new
story for her life, a goal which she apparently accomplished.
As I often do during a closing session, I asked Sally what had been most
helpful about our time together. Without hesitation, she announced that it was
when she told the crossing guard story. During the session Sally remembered most
clearly, she had been talking about feeling humiliated in front of a Bible study
group at her church, so I asked her if that experience reminded her of a similar
experience earlier in her life. For a moment, I thought she had become ill. Her
instantly tear-filled eyes opened wide as she drew a gasping breath that matched
the look of horror on her face. It had been years since she had recalled the incident.
Her shaking hands covering an open mouth, she tearfully told about how she had
been chosen to be a crossing guard in elementary school, a surprising honor for
someone who received few affirmations otherwise.
One day on the way to another class, Sally, who was tall for her age, was
jumping up and down out in the hall to see what was going on in her favorite
teacher’s class. Unbeknownst to her, the short middle-aged man who was in charge
of the crossing guards saw her jumping. She cried as she recounted the events of the
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Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions 347

next morning. When all the crossing guards had reported for duty, the man in charge
of crossing guards instructed Sally to come to the front of the class. Not knowing
what to expect, she complied. Once in front of the group, the fellow informed Sally
that he had seen her jumping up and down in the hall and that, because of that
behavior, she was dismissed from crossing guards, effective immediately. Sally
remembered feeling paralyzed, frozen by embarrassment and shame. She never
told her mother, believing that her mother would only shame her further for getting
into trouble. No one ever shared the pain of that experience with her.
Sally reported that the most helpful thing was “the way you listened to the
crossing guard story.” To some extent we were able to turn the tables on the
memory’s negative impact on Sally’s life by telling and retelling that story—until
it was no longer the same story, until Sally was no longer the same Sally. What made
the difference that Sally thought listening made? It was not a counseling technique.
It was not an act of theoretical condescension on the part of an enlightened expert.
It was the joining together in an act of creativity that unfolded in the back and forth
of the mutual involvement of speaker and listener.

THE WILL TO LISTEN

The word “listen” comes from an Indo-European word for “hearing.” One
dictionary defines “listen” this way: 1) to give attention with the ear; attend closely
for the purpose of hearing; give ear, 2) to pay attention; heed; obey, 3) to wait
attentively for a sound (Random House Unabridged). This definition emphasizes
the word “attention” in a way that suggests something we might miss in the daily
habit of listening. One attends to certain things over others, focuses on this aspect
of reality instead of competing aspects, concentrates on these sounds and not those.
Listening is selective. If one does not tune out a great deal of competing noise,
one would go crazy. To listen is to focus on what one chooses to hear, even if it is
a highly conditioned choosing. Because choosing seems to happen automatically,
it is easy to forget that one is continually filtering out an almost infinite number
of possible distractions. Listening is an act of will. One can be considerably more
conscious about listening by simply choosing to do so.
The will to listen refers to a conscious decision on the part of the pastoral
counselor to value the reality of the client above all else, including theories and
models that might influence one to devalue, distrust, or in some way denigrate
the accuracy of the client’s way of talking about things. There is no substitute for
joining with the client on this most basic level. The will to listen, furthermore, di-
rects one toward a radically relational understanding of listening; nothing happens
without the client’s participation. When a counselor chooses to value listening in
this way, she begins a process which cannot proceed toward helpfulness without
a partnership with the client, a collaborative involvement from which new mean-
ings emerge. It is a listening from within the conversation rather than outside the
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348 Boyd

conversation. It is a listening that believes in the human ability to redescribe our-

selves (Rorty, 1979, 358f) and to cocreate new realities together in the process of
talking about old ones.
Just as our understanding of the unconscious, the human psyche, the impact
of early memories, the role of parent introjects, family communication patterns,
and brain function have evolved over the past one hundred years, so has our
understanding of listening evolved. To paraphrase an old car commercial, this is
not your father’s listening. A postmodern, social constructionist way of talking
about listening (Boyd, 1996a, 1996b, 1998) takes a bold new step forward toward
the inherent creativity in ordinary conversation. This approach asks the professional
to abandon the role of scientific expert in favor of the role of coparticipant in the
evolution of new meanings. Obvious implications include a new way of thinking
about the importance and dignity of any pastoral conversation. A developmental
track can be detected in the history of psychotherapy in the direction of this more
relational understanding of listening.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW CONCEPT

OF LISTENING

Freud

The Enlightenment legacy of individual rights and responsibilities motivates

the contemporary psychotherapist to attend to the unique reality of the individual
as opposed to the official view of reality in the culture-at-large. The fruits of that
legacy ushers one into the brave new world of the inner person, the “unconscious,”
the unedited internal dialogue, the uniqueness and even the eccentricity of the
private world of the individual. Freud was right to be captivated by the breathtaking
panorama that emerged in the recounting of those who came to lie on his couch.
Listening carefully as the analysand obeyed the basic rule of psychoanalysis by
talking without editing or censoring the content of one’s utterances, Freud believed
he had discovered the key to understanding the human condition. Gay (1988)
writes in his biography, “Listening became, for Freud, more than an art; it became
a method, a privileged road to knowledge that his patients mapped out for him”
(p. 70). By means of his psychoanalytic method, he found himself confronted with
an inherent tension between the social control demands of the outer world and
the immense expanse of imagery within the unconscious. As he was successful
in the process of deconstructing the impact of old social constructions on the
patient’s view of reality, new possibilities spontaneously emerged as the analysand
experienced liberation from the neuroses.
Freudians like Theodor Reik (1948) have written about the need to “listen with
the third ear,” Reik’s words for Freud’s admonition to listen with “evenly hovering
attention” (p. 67). Through careful listening, one becomes aware of things one did
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not know that one knew. No other source can provide the understanding gained
through listening to the patient. Reik says:
If the analyst listens to what others say—and listens even to what they do not say—he
will get the messages which, if deciphered, lead to psychological insights that cannot be
reached by any means. If he does not get those messages—if he cannot make out what they
mean—he will search for them in vain in books, lectures, and seminars. (Ibid.)

In her classic discussion of the principles of intensive psychotherapy, Fromm-

Reichmann (1960) suggests that listening is basic to the success of psychotherapy:
What, then, are the basic requirements as to the personality and the professional abilities of
a psychiatrist? If I were asked to answer this question in one sentence, I would reply, “The
psychotherapist must be able to listen.” This does not appear to be a startling statement, but it
is intended to be just that. To be able to listen and to gather information from another person
in this other person’s own right, without reacting along the lines of one’s own problems
or experiences, of which one may be reminded, perhaps in a disturbing way, is an art of
interpersonal exchange which few people are able to practice without special training. (p. 7)

Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious, but without an analyst who
listens carefully and caringly, nothing happens.

Jung

In his reflections on the dream analysis process, Jung (1933, pp. 1ff) discussed
his view of understanding which he described as a sometimes one-sided subjective
process in which the physician understands while the patient does not. Such one-
sidedness ignores the relational aspect of transformation, the mutual influencing
that takes place between doctor and patient. In Jung’s terms, the analyst is in
analysis as much as the patient (p. 50). Rather than attempting to convince the
patient, Jung thought it preferable to stress one’s lack of understanding. Sounding
postmodern, Jung wrote:
It is relatively unimportant whether the doctor understands or not, but everything hangs on
the patient’s doing so. What is really needed is a mutual agreement which is the fruit of
joint reflection. It is one-sided, and therefore dangerous, understanding for the doctor to
prejudge the dream from the standpoint of a certain doctrine and to make a pronouncement
which may be theoretically sound, but does not win the patient’s assent. (p. 9)

In order to avoid the tendency to pare down the meaning of a dream to fit a
narrow doctrine, the therapist must remember how powerfully the role of expert
can influence clients. One’s own ideas can keep one from being able to hear the
client in his or her own language.
Without a theory, one cannot proceed, but one must use the theory properly.
Jung (1933) writes, “When we take up an obscure dream, our first task is not to
understand and interpret it, but to establish the context with minute care” (p. 12).
In other words, one avoids premature conclusions by continuing to listen carefully.
Reminiscent of the warnings of Goolishian and Anderson (1992), Jung encourages
the careful counselor to treat preconceptions as if they were not fixed. “This is as
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much as to say that we must renounce all preconceived opinions, however knowing
they make us feel, and try to discover the meaning of things for the patient.” (Jung,
1933, 23). Jung believed that the therapist is not in a better position to understand
the patient than the patient.

Buber

Martin Buber represents an important voice in the developmental history

of listening. In her article, “I, Thou, and We: A Dialogical Approach to Couples
Therapy,” Fishbane (1998) suggests that the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber,
which poses a relational view of the person, is remarkably similar to current voices
in contemporary family therapy. Buber believed in attending to the uniqueness and
particularity of each person. According to Buber’s anthropology, the fundamental
fact of human existence is human relation. The sphere in which persons meet is,
unfortunately, not a smooth surface. Buber (1958) calls that sphere “the dialogical.”
While not the major crisis that the Holocaust would be, the first World War
was the turning point of Buber’s life and thought, as it was for many other important
thinkers. In 1914, he was invited to participate in a high-level discussion with seven
others of various nationalities as they looked for a way to circumvent war. In his bio-
graphy, Maurice Friedman (1991) writes of the impact of the experience on Buber:

The conversations of the group, Buber testified, were marked by an unreserve whose sub-
stance and fruitfulness he had scarcely ever experienced so strongly. This reality of group
presence and presentness had such an effect on all who took part that the ficticious fell away
and every word was an actuality. (p. 75)

Under the spell of this mutual presence, Buber began to think about how to write
about such an exchange. The pivotal event leading to his best known work took
place in July 1914. On that July afternoon, a young student named Mehe decided to
visit Buber who was accustomed to entertaining visitors after lunch. That particular
afternoon followed a morning of unusual mystical rapture for Buber. He cordially
talked with the young man, answering his questions politely. Learning two months
later that the young man had been killed on the front in France, Buber felt that he
had not grasped the ultimate question on Mehe’s mind. Buber believed that he had
not taken the young man’s quest for meaning seriously. He had not been listening
carefully enough to the young man’s real struggle. This event converted him from
mysticism to responsible engagement with the real world of human events. At the
height of the war, in 1916, he wrote the first draft of I and Thou.
The little book for which Martin Buber is best known was published in
1923; an unusual book, beautifully poetic and irritatingly abstract, it presents
no philosophical system, but a vision. Buber would often say, “I have no teach-
ing, but I carry on a conversation” (Friedman, 1991, p. 129). The way of dialogue
poetically described in I and Thou elaborates a philosophical way of thinking about
the importance of listening in human relations.
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Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions 351

Buber writes about the difference between the two words, I-Thou and I-It.
These are the twofold ways of relating to the world. I-It refers to the instrumental
or objectifying mode without which we could not live in the world. We live in a
world that confronts us with separateness and otherness, things and experiences
to be understood, to be studied, to be controlled, to be used to our advantage. I-It
can also be an attitude toward persons.
The I-Thou attitude, on the other hand, refers to the reciprocal or relational
mode. I-Thou is innately dialogical. Every Thou is a dialogical partner, whether
it is a tree, a pet, a person, or God. The choice of Thou may seem unfortunate
because of connotations of prayer and religion. The original German title is Ich
und Du and can be translated, as Walter Kaufmann (1970) has done, “I and You.”
One problem is that “you” is both nominative and objective while “thou” is only
nominative, a term of address. Another problem is that “you” is both singular and
plural, while “thou” is singular and thus more suitable as a word of relation.
I-Thou designates a relationship between subjects. While one lives in a world
of I-It objectivity, one is fully human only as addressed by another with the word
Thou or You in the sense that Buber means. It is through an I-Thou relationship
that personality emerges. The more fully and genuinely we relate to each other,
the more fully real we become. Buber’s (1958, p. 11) famous words are, “All real
living is meeting,” a transformation of communication into communion.
This is relevant for the life of dialogue because even when I want to know
you, my image of you is imperfect, a mixture of I-It and I-Thou, a confluence
of my own distortions and yours. I can never know for sure what will happen
between us. One thing is certain: I can never become all that I am meant to be
without you, without the genuine presence of mutuality. You are the essential other
half of my encounter with the Eternal Thou. Facing this kind of potential in every
conversation, a therapist knows the deep wisdom in being as present as possible
by means of careful listening.

Collaborative Therapies

Anderson’s (1997) Collaborative Language Systems approach amounts to a

sophisticated and substantive theory of listening in the spirit of those already dis-
cussed (cf. Boyd, 1996a, 1996b, 1998). Hoffman (1998) confirms that impression
in her discussion of the reflective conversation and the importance of the work
of Donald Schön (1983) to her appreciation of the innovations of Goolishian and
Anderson. Hoffman recounts how she began to see something unique in Anderson’s
clinical work illustrating Schön’s observations about the reflective practitioner.
A light went off in my head. Anderson was not concentrating so much on the act of speaking
but on the act of hearing. By offering an experience of indirect listening, she gave those
present a chance to overhear the speaker’s story without needing to be defensive or to
immediately respond. I saw that the context of listening could act as a solvent that altered
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352 Boyd

the feelings and attitudes, or what I began to call the “cloud of perceptions,” that had come
to the door. (p. 149)

The concept of “not-knowing” (Goolishian & Anderson, 1992) encourages the

therapist to stay focused on listening to the ongoing language of the client without
assuming the possibility of a natural stopping place at which expert knowledge
takes over in the process of solving the client’s problems. As Anderson believes,
problems are not so much solved as dissolved in the ongoing conversation guided
by the therapist’s continual listening in the spirit of mutual inquiry. This listening,
far from being passive, draws one into an active, cocreative, constructive, narrative
illuminating, imagination-nurturing dialogue.
Every mental health professional knows that people are dying to be heard.
People are also living to be heard. We ought to be able to do something for this
second group, i.e., keep them from slipping into the first group. This makes listening
sound like a matter of life and death. At the beginning of their classic article,
Goolishian and Anderson (1992), quote the complaints of thirty-year-old Bill who
had been diagnosed by numerous psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic and for
that reason had been hospitalized on several occasions. When asked what might
have been done differently that would have been more helpful, Bill answered
(sounding very unlike a schizophrenic):
That is an interesting and complicated question. If a person like you had found a way to
talk with me when I was first going crazy . . . at all the times of my delusion that I was
a grand military figure . . . I knew that this (delusion) was a way that I was trying to tell
myself that I could overcome my panic and fear . . . Rather than talk with me about this, my
doctors would always ask me what I call conditional questions . . . You (the professionals)
are always checking me out . . . checking me out, to see if I knew what you knew rather than
find a way to talk with me. You would ask, “Is this an ashtray?” to see if I knew or not.
It was as if you knew and wanted to see if I could . . . that only made me more frightened,
more panicked. If you could have talked with the “me” that knew how frightened I was. If
you had been able to understand how crazy I had to be so that I could be strong enough to
deal with this life threatening fear . . . then we could have handled that crazy general. (p. 25)

“If you had been able to understand,” he says. What might take the therapist in
that direction? For Bill, talking to someone who cared to listen might have been
the difference between life and death, sanity and insanity.

SOME ASPECTS OF A RELATIONAL CONCEPTION OF LISTENING

Listening Is an Active Relational Skill

Communication requires “communion” (from the Latin word, communio,

meaning to build something together). Because a listener spends some time in
silence does not mean the listener is passive. Speaker and listener work together
to build that which can only be accomplished by cooperation. A speaker requires
a listener like flowers require sunshine. They are part of the same building to-
gether of something necessary for both. Communication builds community, not
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communication as a conveyance of information, but communication as a process of

speaking-and-listening strong enough to hold people together through good times
and bad.
Contemporary culture devalues listening, probably because it is a culture of
doing, a get-it-done-yesterday mindset that frames speaking as power and listening
as weakness. One who can impose one’s will on others often achieves hero status.
To listen means to defer to power. If you are not talking, you do not exist. Old
notions about the irrelevance of “just talking” are as absurd as notions about “just
listening.” A relational view of listening emphasizes the need to reevaluate and
revalue listening.

“Without Somebody, Nothin’ Ain’t Worth a Dime”

A listener, like a speaker, is a self-in-relation. The new view of listening en-

courages us to think relationally. Using theological language, we would say that
God created us to be together. The importance of seeing ourselves as selves-in-
relation grows out of the crucial need to see ourselves as social beings. There is no
me without you. There is no relational anything without both of us. As the popular
country singer, Alan Jackson, sings, “Without somebody, nothin’ ain’t worth a
dime.”
A self-in-relation is a continually listening self. Knowing the importance of
the others, we value each other’s reality as a potter would value clay. Together we
undertake the task, as copotters, of rolling and kneading, adding water, smoothing,
doing whatever it takes to prepare the clay for shaping. We turn the clay as together
we shape it into a functional and often beautiful piece of ceramic. Listening respects
and affirms the other’s clay. No judgment. Only grace. If one’s reality seems
inadequate to someone else, that does not always mean it is inadequate. Perhaps
one’s standards of adequacy are inadequate.
Individualist myths that encourage us to be good strong island rocks in need of
nothing and no one devalue exactly what makes us human—other human beings.
Psychologist and philosopher Thomas Parry (1993) notes an especially frightening
failure of modernity. Parry fears that “with the decline of religion as a major societal
force coupled with the emergence of an art that stressed the self as creative spirit,
there was no vision arising out of modernity that included anything akin to an
obligation to the other” (p. 435). We need to live as if we really are accountable
to each other, the essence of the agape principle. People of almost every faith are
called to a sense of obligation to others. Learning to think relationally is part of
learning to think like a person who takes ethics seriously. Rabbi Michael Lerner
(1996) reminds us that we do not live and die alone and that we must build relational
values into the fabric of our political will.

We used to live in a society in which we felt a greater sense of solidarity with one another,
and hence were less willing to let others be left to their own fates . . . All this turning away
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from one another is terrible for our souls. When we live in a world in which ethical and
spiritual goals have been excluded and ridiculed, we find the human spirit shrinking, with
disastrous consequences. (pp. 9–10)

We need to imagine a new social change movement that takes seriously economic,
ecological, and spiritual concerns. Such a movement will be impossible without a
new relational view of listening.

Listening Changes the Relationship

Around the Houston Galveston Institute there is a legendary story (Anderson,

1997, pp. 138–140) about the time Harry Goolishian saw a man in therapy who
had been convinced for years that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease
when he was in the military. After many years of tests and examinations that found
nothing, the fellow persisted in his belief that he was infected. His obsession made
his life miserable in many ways. Finally, when he began to consult with psychia-
trists, they would ask, “How long have you thought you had this disease?” They
tried to convince him it was all in his head. The man would become defensive im-
mediately, feeling the reality of his experience challenged. When he finally came to
Dr. Goolishian, he was surprised when Harry, in all sincerity, asked him, “How
long have you had this disease?” With that the man felt respect and thus began
a relationship of discovery-in-safety that eventually resulted in release from his
obsession.

Listening Opens Us Up to Ourselves

One of the most exciting aspects of the new relational listening grows out of
the way it opens us up to ourselves. After years of full-time pastoral counseling, I
realized that the one who benefited most from listening to clients was me. When
they dealt with their disappointment, grief, anger or fear, I was helped to deal with
my own. By allowing myself to venture into their reality, I could not help exposing
myself to my own reality. I learned something from every one of my clients. The
speaker’s story always touches the listener’s story in some way.

AGAPE LISTENING IS RELATIONAL LISTENING

I have suggested (Boyd, 1996b, 1996c) that one can think of the New
Testament concept of agape-love as a conversational ethic, a code for talking
and listening in a uniquely relational way. When a speaker describes a listener as
patient, kind, humble, not insisting on being right, not irritable or hostile, but hope-
ful and encouraging, then listening sounds like the description of agape-love in I
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Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions 355

Corinthians 13:4–7:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does
not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing,
but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things.

It does not take a rocket scientist (no offense to my friends at NASA) to see how
one could substitute agape-listening for love in that famous passage.
There is more. Nothing is clearer than the fact that Jesus wanted his hearers
to think of God, not as some angry, vengeful Super Tyrant, but rather as valuing
and caring toward them. God is the source of sacred safety. In the Sermon on the
Mount, Jesus describes God as the ultimate Agape Listener. Agape listening seeks
to express the love of the God Who Listens.

HOW TO TEACH THIS APPROACH TO LISTENING?

I have learned that the best way to teach listening is to encourage students
to think in terms of asking questions in addition to paraphrasing what one hears
a client saying. An attitude of gentle curiosity naturally inclines the therapist to
ask questions as a way to stay close to the client’s unfolding story. In addition
to being curious, one must be respectful and, therefore, gentle in the asking of
most questions. The therapist who understands that one is always on the way to
understanding and who has bracketed the expert position, will not relate to a client
as one who arrogantly knows better. Expertise is not a preexisting condition. It
evolves out of the conversational partnership created by a gently curious inquiry
into the client’s reality. Regarding this kind of cocreated expertise, Goolishian and
Anderson (1992) observe:
The therapeutic or conversational question is the primary tool that the therapist uses to
express this expertise. It is the means through which the therapist remains on the road to
understanding. Therapeutic questions always stem from a need to know more about what
has just been said. Thus, the therapist is always being informed by the client’s stories and is
always learning new language and new reality. The basis of therapeutic questioning is not
simply to interrogate the client or to gather information validating or supporting hypotheses.
Rather, the aim is to allow the client to lead the therapist’s own range of understanding into
question. (p. 32)

The importance of asking therapeutic questions from a “not-knowing” position

(Goolishian and Anderson, 1992) clearly points to the vital role played by careful
listening in such a conversation.
Anderson (1997) discusses at length the role of conversational questions,
pointing out that clients endorse the suggestion that one of the most important
aspects of a successful therapy experience is the way the therapist asks questions.
Such questions are generated from within the therapy conversation in the give and
take of the mutual inquiry of the dialogue, further encouraging and nurturing an
attitude of curiosity on the part of the client.
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356 Boyd

Questions Generate Experience

In addition to inviting information-sharing, questions also generate new ex-

perience. When a pastoral counselor asks a question, the client responds with
reflection, creativity, and imagination. Together they begin to cocreate possibili-
ties that never existed before. Freedman and Combs (1996) begin their chapter on
questions with this reminder:
We’ve all been asking questions for almost as long as we’ve been talking. However, as
narrative therapists we think about questions, compose them, and use them differently than
we did before. The biggest difference is that we ask questions to generate experience rather
than to gather information. (p. 113)

Freedman and Combs (1996) go on to relate an important turning point in their

understanding of change around the case of a young woman named Kathy who
refused to go to school. She did not want to be influenced by some of the things her
classmates were doing. The therapist learned that all the children in the family wor-
ried about their parents’ heavy smoking. Kathy was most active in the conversation
about smoking. The therapist asked her, “Who would be in greater danger—your
parents if they continue smoking or you if you go to school?” She answered that
her parents faced the greater danger. The therapist inquired, “Are you the kind of
person who will take a risk for the welfare of someone you care about?” She said
yes. “Would it help you to do something that seemed dangerous if you knew that
it was really benefiting someone important to you?” She agreed. “Could you go to
school if you knew it might save your parents’ lives?” She quickly answered yes.
When asked what she would do if she began to fear being negatively influenced
by peers at school, Kathy answered, “Just concentrate on the work and on being
there” (pp. 114ff).
What interested Freedman and Combs was that when they met again with the
family in two weeks, both parents were still smoking, but Kathy had attended school
everyday since the first session. Kathy’s experience challenged the therapists’
notions about asking questions.
We now think that experience is colored by the meaning people make of it and that it is
attended to or not as it seems relevant to the stories people are living. Therefore, when
we ask questions, rather than believing that people can retrieve particular experiences with
particular predetermined meanings, we are very aware of how our questions co-author
experience. (p. 116)

Respectful Curiosity

Asking respectfully curious questions has a time-honored history in helping.

More recently, postmodern psychotherapists have placed a renewed emphasis on
curiosity and respect. Cecchin (1987) talks about neutrality in terms of curiosity:
“Curiosity leads to exploration and invention of alternative views and moves, and
different moves and views breed curiosity” (Cecchin, 1987, p. 406). Therapists
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Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions 357

must beware of linear, cause-and-effect descriptions and explanations because

they detract from curiosity. Curiosity, in turn, generates respect. People are only
respectful of that about which they are most curious.

From this perspective, we respect the integrity of the system. And, recursively, our respect
of the system enhances our curiosity about how ideas, behaviors, and events participate in
creating and maintaining the integrity of the system. Respecting a system means that you
act toward the system with the recursive understanding that the system is simply doing what
it does, and that this doing is the it that it does. (Cecchin, 1987, p. 408)

Respect means a strong disavowal of social control, the need to instruct some-
one about more correct or socially acceptable behavior. Unfortunately, many thera-
pists believe that social control is their primary responsibility which values neither
curiosity nor respect in the sense that it is used here. When confronted with clients
whose behavior is defined by the culture as immoral or inappropriate, therapists
easily lose their curiosity about the system because they have already lost respect
for those involved.

OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS: NEW AND IMPROVED

Fromm-Reichman (1960, p. 50) noted long ago that psychotherapeutic ques-

tions should not be formulated in a way that the client can answer “yes” or “no.”
Open-ended questions, in the context of a new relational understanding of listening,
go beyond an earlier understanding of open-ended questions as focused primarily
on information gathering. They create an open space for the client’s own words
and narrative imagination, but they also play a part in the ongoing give-and-take
of the therapy conversation. Open-ended questions fit into a broader context of
dominant values in a postmodern way of thinking and working. In this way of
working, the (expert) therapist is not a dispenser of relational correctives as the
(nonexpert) client sits and listens. When the only reality that counts is the real-
ity coconstructed in the therapeutic conversation, the therapist must puzzle over
how to connect with this particular client in a way that makes sense in light of
the client’s vision for change. The client’s agenda takes priority over every other
agenda in keeping with the importance of client factors (Duncan and Miller, 2000,
pp. 56–59).
Pastoral conversation enriches itself by asking open-ended questions which
not only provide information but also invites the client into a process that takes
both participants toward a relationally constructed healing wisdom. A medical
professional asks questions as part of a decision-making process designed to take
the physician toward as accurate a diagnosis as possible. Why is this important?
Because diagnosis determines appropriate treatment and an inaccurate diagnosis
might suggest a treatment protocol that will hurt rather than help. If, as Pope and
Vasquez (1998, p. 1) say in their book on ethics in counseling and psychother-
apy, our goal is helping without hurting, the patient pastoral counselor who is
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358 Boyd

determined to provide meaningful help rather than control, pursues an analogous

strategy. Open-ended questions take one in the direction of increasingly accurate
understanding for the sake of a dialogical conversation as precise as possible for
the kind of problem-dissolving and solution-generating that might be helpful for
the client.
Open-ended questions are questions that ask for information from the client
in a way that facilitates a process of ongoing understanding of the client’s reality.
Such questions seek the client’s input, the client’s opinion, the client’s memory, the
client’s speculations, the client’s point of view, not a confirmation of the counselor’s
perspective. The helper cannot know anything, cannot have an opinion based on
anything, unless and until the client has provided enough information to begin to
understand what the client wants to understand or change.
Effective relational listening begins, therefore, with an attitude of respectful
curiosity and, specifically, with asking open-ended questions. “What do you need?”
“What is the problem?” “How can I help?” Therapists ask even more specific
questions. “What would you like to talk about today?” “What would you rather
see happen?” “Of all the things you’ve mentioned, which one needs most attention
today?” Any expertise to which a professional helper might have access in a therapy
conversation grows out of the collaborative partnership she or he develops with
the client.
Examples of open-ended questions are:
1. First session
What would you like to talk about?
What prompted you to call us?
What do we need to know to be able to be helpful to you?
Would it be alright if you shared some of the details?
Can you tell me more about that?
What did you conclude from his/her behavior/words?
When you use the word , how are you using it?
What impact did that have on you?
How did you handle that?
Is that how you would handle it if you had it to do over?
What would you rather see happen?
2. Subsequent sessions
How have you been since our session last week?
What have you been thinking about the most?
What ideas have you had about what we were talking about at the end of
the session?
How will you know when there is no longer a need to come here?
How have you handled that situation in the past?
How would you prefer to handle it in the future?
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Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions 359

If you were no longer , how would you be different?

What keeps you from being where you would rather be?
When you told that story, you used the word ; what does it mean to
you?
When you try that, what happens?
What part of your solution needs more of our attention?
Would you mind telling me a story to illustrate what you mean?
3. Follow-up
How have things changed since our last session?
How did you manage to do that?
What was that like?
What made you think of that strategy?
How is the outcome of that approach different from other approaches
you’ve tried in the past?
What do you think might happen if you maintain this course for the next
week, month, etc.?
What can we talk about that might help you maintain the progress you’ve
made?
What are your thoughts about why/how things changed?
If you continue to , what will be different about you in the future?
What would you say has been the most helpful part of our conversations
in the past?
The most important thing a pastoral specialist does is listen carefully to the
client. A revised view of open-ended questions allows one who listens with rela-
tional ears to stay close to a position of respectful curiosity about the uniqueness
of the client’s struggle to dissolve old realities in favor of new ones. The agape-
listening pastoral counselor can play an important role in the coconstruction of
relational wisdom that helps to illuminate the road ahead—for both client and
helper.

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