How to Coach Yourself and Others Coaching Families | Page 269

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C: He said that if I didn’t go to therapy, he’d take the car away from me. And the car is under his name.
I’m not 18 yet. I won’t be for another seven months. I started college a year early. I was in a special
program in high school.
T: Wow, so you’re a year ahead of most high school students your age. Could you tell me how you
achieved that?

The client in the above scenario had initially been reluctant to talk about himself when the therapist employed
monadic questions, but when asked a dyadic question, he responded with little hesitation. Generally speaking,
reluctant clients are more apt to answer dyadic questions because they are probably perceived as less
troublesome. Surely there are many operative reasons why clients find them easier to respond to, and those
reasons vary from person to person. As is often the case, the client most likely found little difficulty acting as
“spokesman” for his father’s “thoughts and feelings.”
When dyadic and triadic questions fail to achieve success with involuntary clients, another strategy,
“normalization”, should be considered.

14.

PESSIMISCTIC QUESTIONS

A strategy wherein the therapist joins the pessimism of the client and creates a new context from which the
therapist can launch questions of a different kind that might prove to be more effective than the prior coping
questions.
Strategically, pessimistic sequence questions can often evoke client response because pessimistic questions gain
their strength by yielding to an anticipatory sense of worsening client scenarios.
The therapist’s joining clients in their worsening situation helps to create a reverse psychology scenario where
the therapist—now one of them, so to speak—suggests pre-emptively a kind of hopelessness that ironically the
client might best handle with a positive activity.
The strategy of pessimistic questions involves the therapist’s joining the pessimism of the client(s). As a tactic,
it allows the therapist to launch questions of a different nature, which might prove to be effective almost
immediately in some cases.
Strategically, pessimistic questions can be effective in evoking client responses because these questions gain
their strength by yielding to an anticipatory sense of worsening client scenarios. In effect, the therapist’s act of
joining clients in their worsening situation helps to create a reverse psychology scenario where the
therapist—now being one of them, so to speak—is suggesting pre-emptively a kind of hopelessness that,
ironically, the client might best handle with some kind of positive activity.
Example of the Use of Introductory Pessimistic Questions
Often this line of questioning will enable family members to generate some useful problem solving and coping
strategies to better manage their difficult situation.
Typical examples of pessimistic questions are as follows:
“What do you think will happen if things don’t get better?”;
“And then what?”; “Who will suffer the most?”; “Who will feel the worst?”; “What do you suppose is the
smallest thing you could do that might make a slight difference?”; “And what could other family members do?”;
“How could you get that to happen a little bit now?” (Selekman, 1993, p. 72)
Example of a Pessimistic Question Sequence

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