Socratic questioning
In CBT, Socratic questioning means asking questions that help a person look at their own thought and reach their own answer. It isn't cross-examination, and it isn't leading someone to a conclusion that was decided in advance. The research on it measured therapists asking the questions, not people questioning themselves, so self-questioning is a reasonable use with less evidence behind it.
Use the questions below on one thought from today. The thought record asks them step by step, and nothing you type leaves your device.
The moment
Just the facts, as a camera would record them.
If writing this out leaves you feeling worse, it's fine to stop and come back later, or to talk to someone you trust. If you're thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or see crisis resources.
Changing minds or guiding discovery
In 1993, the psychologist Christine Padesky gave a talk with a pointed title: "Socratic questioning: changing minds or guiding discovery?" Reading published therapy examples, she noticed many therapists asked a quick run of factual questions and then said, almost triumphantly, "well, then how can you think thus and so?"1 She called this "One-two-three-aha!"1
Her point was that this can work in the room. In her clinical experience, though, few people change for good because someone showed their thinking was illogical.1 She wanted questions that help the person discover something, and own it.
She defined good Socratic questions as ones that:1
- the person has the knowledge to answer;
- draw attention to something relevant that's outside their current focus;
- generally move from the concrete to the more abstract;
- help the person use what they found to rethink an old conclusion or build a new idea.
Padesky's four stages
- Ask informational questions: Questions you can answer from your own life, that make the problem concrete.
- Listen: To the actual answers, including the surprising ones.
- Summarize: Pull together what you found every few minutes, and write it down.
- Ask a synthesizing question: "How does all this fit with my idea that...?"
Padesky said the most common mistakes were not summarizing enough and stopping before the last stage. Without the synthesizing question, people answer dozens of good questions and never put the answers together.1
Five kinds of question to ask yourself
They're grouped by what they do. The first five quoted questions are from Padesky's own list of good ones.1
To bring back what you already know
"Have you ever been in similar circumstances before? What did you do? How did that turn out? What do you know now that you didn't know then?"1
"I've had a client email like this before. I called them, and it was a small fix."
To step outside the thought
"What would you advise a friend who told you something similar?"1
"I'd tell her one bad exam doesn't make her stupid."
To make it concrete
"What exactly do I mean by 'a failure'? Failed at what, and by whose standard?"
"I mean I didn't finish the course. I did finish two others."
To weigh it
"What fits this thought? What doesn't fit it?"
"It fits that he didn't call. It doesn't fit that he texted twice yesterday."
To put it together
"How does all of this fit with my idea that I'm hopeless at this?"
"I'm slower than I'd like at it. That's not the same as hopeless."
When the answer is "everything"
Ask yourself "what fits this thought?" and the first answer is often the thought again in different words. "Everything." Slow down and ask for one specific example, with a time and a place.
You might also catch yourself asking questions to win an argument with yourself. That's the "aha" style Padesky warned about.1 Her test is curiosity: "If you are not truly curious to know the answer, don't ask the question."1
What the therapy studies measured
The evidence here comes from therapy rooms, with a trained therapist asking the questions, and that matters for how far it stretches.
Depression improved more by the next session when therapists asked more Socratic questions. Justin Braun and colleagues had observers rate the first three sessions of 55 adults in cognitive therapy for depression, and when a therapist used more Socratic questioning than usual with a patient, that patient's symptoms were lower at the next session.2 Each standard deviation of extra questioning went with 1.51 fewer points on the BDI-II depression scale, and it held with the therapy relationship taken into account.2 It's a correlation, so it can't prove the questions caused the change.
The link seems to run through changes in thinking. Among 123 clients in a later study, Socratic questioning went with changes in thinking, which went with symptom change, and the effect was stronger for people who started with fewer CBT skills.3
Neither study tested people asking themselves the questions. Padesky also pointed out that without a clear description of good questioning, no one could test whether guided discovery helps more than changing minds.1
Stepping outside the thought: the self-distancing studies
The closest evidence for doing this on your own comes from a different body of research, on self-distancing: looking at a hard moment as an outsider would, instead of replaying it from the inside.
Murdoch and colleagues pooled 25 experiments in 2023 that compared the two ways of reflecting.4 Self-distanced reflection came out ahead, by a small margin (g = 0.19), and the authors rated the quality of the evidence as uncertain.4
Small and uncertain is still something.
Note what was tested, though. The experiments asked people to reflect from a distance, for example in the third person. "What would you tell a friend?" is a close cousin of that, and it's the question CBT worksheets use, but it isn't the exact technique the studies tested.
When the thought is a worry
These questions work best on thoughts about yourself or about something that already happened. A worry about the future has no facts yet to weigh, so there's little for the questions to work on. Test it instead: write what you fear and when you'll know, then check. The worry time page shows how, and what happened when people with generalized anxiety disorder did it.
If you keep getting stuck
Both questioning studies above had a trained therapist asking the questions. If you keep landing on "everything fits the thought", that's a good reason to work with a CBT therapist, who can ask the questions you can't yet ask yourself.
Pick one thought that's bothered you this week. Answer three questions in writing: When has something like this happened before, and how did it turn out? What would you tell a friend? How does what you just wrote fit with the thought?
Answer this with JoyQuestions people ask
Why is it called Socratic?
It's named after the Greek philosopher Socrates, who taught by asking questions instead of giving answers. CBT borrowed the idea and adapted it for looking at thoughts.
Can I use Socratic questioning on myself?
Yes, and many CBT worksheets are built for that. Writing the answers down and ending with a "how does this fit" question follows Padesky's stages.1 Just know that the studies tested therapists asking the questions.2
What is the difference between Socratic questioning and the downward arrow?
Socratic questions check whether a thought fits the facts. The downward arrow asks what a thought would mean if it were true, to find the belief under it.
What are the most common Socratic questions?
"What's the evidence for this thought, and against it?" and "What would I tell a friend?" are two you'll see on many worksheets. Padesky's own favorites, above, start further back: what you already know from times like this before.1
Related
- Cognitive restructuring: the wider skill these questions are part of.
- Thought record: a worksheet that asks these questions in order.
- Automatic thoughts: the thoughts you ask the questions about.