The importance of hearing stories

This is going back to basics, but is something I have had reinforced from experience. Any counselling is based on allowing the clients to fully tell their stories and on rapport building, and these build on each other. The metaphor of putting together a jigsaw puzzle is useful here.

Putting together the frame 

Initially we may gain an outline of the client's situation as we listen to the beginnings of their stories and we may then be tempted to begin to work with this framework. However the framework is usually about the situation and may not include the client's reactions to the situation and/ or the pain it is causing them. This is like putting all the outer edges of the puzzle together along with a few obvious inner pieces and then assuming we have the whole picture.

This was reinforced to me many years ago when I attended a workshop on Doing Justice and Respect  which was conducted by St Lukes. In a role play situation where I was the client I foolishly chose to share about a current situation that was causing me great distress and felt quite dismayed and unheard when the two participants who were role playing the counsellor pulled out Strengths cards and proceed to encourage me to use them. However this was an excellent learning opportunity for me about the importance of hearing the client's story and allowing it to be fully told before introducing tools for solutions.I also learnt not to role-play using stories of personal distress!

Filling in the pieces

We need to hear the pain. The power of listening and conveying empathy is often underestimated and the best tools to use here are reflective listening and open questions. This is like filling in the middle pieces of the puzzle.

Attending a workshop on Solution Focused Therapy by Michael Durrant, reinforced this for me when he played a video (this was also many years ago) of work with a real client on her second visit and lots of listening occurred before he even gave a hint of using any Solution Focussed tools (even although he was very passionate about the value of their use).

Missing pieces

Sometimes when a story has been told we have a sense that there is more that has not yet been shared. The pieces do not quite add up and we may feel a bit stuck. This is when we may need to search for missing pieces of the puzzle by asking additional questions based on any hypotheses we may have begun to form. The puzzle will not be complete until we find, and place in, the missing pieces.

Of course, no-one's life is static and new puzzles may emerge over the life of our work with the client. Thus listening and hearing stories does take up 80% to 90% of our work with clients.

The word 'listen' contains the same letters as the word 'silent'. Alfred Brendel