Asking For Change

Practitioners are used to asking questions about their client’s problems and aspirations. You need to be able to find out what is going for them so that you can help: being a detective is part of the job.

Since there are so many questions you could ask your client, how do you decide what to ask?

Of course, there are no simple answers to this question, it all depends on what each unique client brings to their sessions.

However, there are some questions that I find useful:

1. Since the practitioner’s work is to help the client change, questions that orient the client’s experience towards change will be helpful.
2. One of the main tasks of the practitioner is to direct the attention of the client so that the tapping can do its work. Gene Monterastelli of TappingQandA has a delightful, minimalistic formulation of the tapping process: Stimulation (tapping) + Attention → Relief. How you direct the client’s attention will change the results you get.
3. How you ask will have results. In some research into post-operative pain management, patients were split into two groups: one group was asked “What is your level of pain (0-10)?”, the other “What is your level of comfort (0-10)?” (if you think about it, these questions are asking about the same experience, but from opposite perspectives). The group that were asked what is your level of comfort experienced less pain and required less analgesia.

With all that in mind, here are some of my favourite questions which I have organised into three sections: assessing, processing, and progressing.

Note: these questions are biased by my role as a therapist, as a coach you may be asking more questions about what your client wants to achieve.

ASSESSING

Before you start tapping with anyone, you need to find out what they want and need, and what’s important to them. In this part of the work, we are finding out what they would like to change and how their life is not working for them.

What do you want to change?

This is what I think of as a therapist’s question, orienting the client to what is causing their suffering. If I were a coach, I might ask “What do you want to achieve?” but I think this is less useful for a therapist. The problem for most of my clients is where they are, not where they want to be.

Not only does the answer to this question provide useful information about your client’s current situation, that can inform your sessions, it also gives you a way to test your work by returning to the answer to find out what has changed.

How do you know you have ’the problem’?

Many clients bring their problems to you as abstractions or ‘diagnoses’. If somebody tells you that they are ‘co-dependent’ or have low self-esteem, it doesn’t give you much to start tapping on. Tapping on an abstraction is like tapping on smoke, there is nothing to get hold of.

Asking someone to tell you how they know they have a problem encourages them to describe it in concrete terms as feelings, thoughts, memories, internal dialogue etc, which are all much more amenable to tapping.

It also gives you a practical way to measure progress, when you ask them to get back the problematic feelings, thoughts, memories, internal dialogue etc.

You can read a more in-depth article about this approach in Make The Abstract Concrete.

How will you know when you don’t have ’the problem’?

This is the flip-side to the previous questions. If the client can describe how they imagine their experience without the problem, then it gives you both a direction of travel and a test of success.

Note: the answer to this particular question may change over time because what your client imagines is being seen through the lens of the problem, which distorts their perception of what is possible.

If you were to take the day off from ‘your problem’, and I had to stand in for you, what would I have to think, feel or do to have the same problem?

This is a useful multipurpose question which:

• Helps you ‘model’ the problem, which is a fancy way of saying: finding out ‘how the problem works’, specifically the sequence of aspects that make up the problem. From this perspective, a problem is not a thing, rather is a process with a sequence of steps that the client goes through to get the result they don’t want. If you know the aspects and the sequence, you can intervene with tapping to dismantle it. Those of you with experience of NLP will be familiar with this perspective.
• Helps the client be specific about how the problem works, so you again have something concrete to work with.
• Helps the client dis-identify from the problem and see it as something that they do rather than they are. By accepting the premise of the question, they are accepting that they are not the problem and may have more agency than they thought. It can be difficult to change who you are, but it is usually easier to change something you do.

For example:

If a client tells me that they sabotage themselves, I could ask them If you were to take the day off from sabotaging yourself, and I had to stand in for you, what would I have to think, feel or do to have the same problem?

They might say something like this: “When I see a task, I tell myself “I can’t do this, it’s too complicated”, then I see a vivid image of myself failing, then I remember some of the times I’ve failed and that gives me a bad feeling, that stops me from doing what I want to do”.

• I see the task
  • → I tell myself “I can’t do this”
    • → I see a vivid (fantasy) image of failing
      • → I see memories of previous failures
        • → I have a bad feeling
          • → Therefore, I don’t do the task.

Each of these elements / aspects gives you as the practitioner something to change.

If this is the way this problem works, dismantling the ’engine’ of self sabotage, by soothing their self-talk, or defusing their image of failure, neutralising memories or soothing the bad feeling will change the client’s experience.

Notice that the bad feeling is the last part of the sequence, which is caused by the other factors. Just tapping on the bad feeling may not be enough because the bad feeling is the result of the previous steps in the process.

Note: the steps in the problem process are often unconscious, so you may need to explore this question several times to get an accurate picture of the problem at work.

PROCESSING

Once you have decided what to tap on, and you are in the tapping process you can use different questions to help guide your tapping in the moment.

What is most noticeable?

When your client gives you a long list of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, you can’t tap on all of them effectively in one go, you need to find out which aspect is most relevant. A simple way to do this is to ask: “Which is most noticeable?” The most noticeable one will be the one with the most emotional intensity, this question helps you tune into what is relevant without having to discuss each aspect with your client to figure it out.

You can find out more about this approach in How Do You Know What To Tap On

How is it going?

This is just a simple little question to ask while someone is tapping on an uncomfortable feeling, difficult memory etc. It serves two purposes, the question solicits more information which can be useful, and the literal meaning of the phrase “How’s it going?” also presupposes that the problematic aspect is going, i.e. changing, diminishing, or leaving. It’s a useful little question to ‘grease the wheels’ of the processing.

What’s happening? / What are you noticing?

During the tapping session some practitioners will ask the client “How are you feeling?” to gauge progress. This is a perfectly good question, as far as it goes, but there is more to a client’s experience than just feelings.

If you pay attention to your own internal experience you will probably notice that it is a complex, shifting mix of feelings, images, memories, sensations, internal dialogue, perceptions, etc.

By asking “How are you feeling?” you are directing the client’s attention to just one part of their experience (which might not be the most relevant). To answer the question as phrased they have to exclude everything else, they might also assume that because you are not asking about everything else that feelings are the only thing of relevance.

If you ask someone “What’s happening?” or “What are you noticing?” you are not excluding any part of their experience, they can answer with whatever is in their awareness at that moment. This allows you to use all the information that is available from the client to guide the tapping more skilfully.

What’s left?

It would be nice if just one round of tapping completely neutralised a painful emotion, but that doesn’t happen frequently. It is much more likely that if you ask your client what’s happening after a round of tapping that they will say something like: “it’s better”, “it’s not as bad”, “it’s less painful”, etc.

Some progress has been made, but something is still bothersome. It’s important to note that the thing that is still bothersome might not be the thought or feeling you started with. If they started with anger and that shifted into hurt during the tapping, asking someone “How strong is the anger?” will not fit, and the client will have to reorient themselves to answer your question.

By asking “What’s left?” they can tell you directly about their experience and give you the next thing to tap on.

If there was something inside, underneath or behind X what would it be?

Sometimes, your client’s progress can stall on one feeling, after more than a few rounds nothing seems to change. One possibility can be that the feeling that is present is masking something deeper and more painful. In that case, asking “If there was something inside, underneath or behind … what would it be?” is a powerful way of unpacking the blocked feeling.

This question can access a lot of deep emotion, so it needs to be used with care.

You can read a more detailed description in Tapping Into Hidden Emotions

PROGRESSING

After all the detective work and tapping it’s good to know how your client is making progress.

This is a question that can be addressed over three timescales: during the session itself, between individual sessions, and after a series of sessions.

In the session

In the session we want to know if what we have been tapping on has shifted, have the feelings, sensations, thoughts, memories changed.

What has changed?

Remember the pain or comfort questions, by using the question “What has changed?” we are forcing the client to pay attention to the difference in their experience.

If the client’s problem has been long-standing they may have become used to thinking about the problem as eternally unchanging and unchangeable. This focus on the sameness of the problem can get in the way of change. It is more useful in the short term to direct their attention to what has changed, so they can recognise that something has changed.

Directing their attention to what has changed in the session can also be useful in the long term, ’training’ your client to look for differences so they can be aware of them and gain encouragement that things are changing.

Between sessions

Our clients only spend a small part of their lives with us, the rest of the time they are living their daily lives. A change that only occurs in our sessions is not very useful, we would like the changes that the client makes in the sessions to have a positive effect in the rest of their lives when they are not with us.

What has changed?

Asking your client what has changed regarding their problem between sessions will help them focus on the differences and provide you with more information about what still needs to be addressed.

For example: if your client has come to you to better deal with interview nerves, and they come to their next session and tell you that they didn’t have a panic attack before their interview last week, but they still felt nervous, this gives you the next area to focus on as presented to you by their real-world experience.

After a few sessions

At some point, you will need to evaluate your client’s progress in respect of their original problem or goal, which is why they came to you in the first place.

What is different?

Invite the client to go back to their original problem (or goal) and ask them what is different about that problem now. This draws the client’s attention to what has changed and validates their efforts.

Then you can ask.

What still needs to change?

It’s possible that there are still aspects of the original problem that have not yet been addressed, or new difficulties that have arisen along the way that need attention.

By asking what still has to change, you can bring your new sessions into alignment with the client’s needs.