More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates developed a method of questioning designed to challenge assumptions and uncover deeper truths. We call it Socratic questioning. Rather than just lecturing or teaching his students, he asked carefully crafted, thoughtful, and open-ended questions that compelled them to think critically, examine and contemplate their beliefs, and arrive at their own conclusions.
The Socratic method of questioning has become widely used in philosophy, law, education, and psychotherapy, too, not to mention as a part of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
By asking the right questions, your therapist empowers you to take a step back and challenge negative thought patterns without judgment. What is the nature of your beliefs? Are they rooted in reality or just assumptions? Are there alternative ways of looking at situations you once thought hopeless?
Socratic questioning in therapy is a valuable mode of communication because it allows you to look at your mindset from a new perspective, untangle and loosen deeply held, habitual beliefs, and break free from problematic or irrational ways of thinking that might be contributing to a mental health disorder or leading to drug or alcohol abuse.
Learning to question your own thoughts — just as Socrates encouraged — can be a powerful step toward change. But what is Socratic questioning in CBT, exactly? If you’ve been looking into therapy, either for yourself or a loved one, read on to learn more about what to expect.
What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
CBT is a type of talk therapy that’s based on the principle that your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors are all intertwined — psychological problems are rooted in both unhealthy ways of thinking and learned behaviors. But if you were to change your negative way of thinking, you can influence your feelings and actions positively and accordingly.
“CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way,” states the Mayo Clinic.
Mental health disorders like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and various substance use disorders are just a few of the conditions that CBT can effectively treat since each one is rooted in damaging behaviors that can manifest through negative thought patterns.
It was developed in the early 1960s by psychiatrist Aaron Beck, who crafted a new form of cognitive therapy after noticing certain patterns in his patients.
“Working with depressed patients, he found that they experienced streams of negative thoughts that seemed to pop up spontaneously. He termed these cognitions ‘automatic thoughts’ and discovered that their content fell into three categories: negative ideas about themselves, the world, and the future,” notes a Pearson bio on Beck. “He began helping patients identify and evaluate these thoughts and found that by doing so, patients were able to think more realistically, which led them to feel better emotionally and behave more functionally.”
If you struggle with mental health or addiction, your brain can start to believe things that aren’t true, like “I’m not good enough” or “I can’t handle this without a drink.” CBT helps you identify these cognitive distortions and replace them with healthier ones, creating more positive behaviors in the process.
What Is Socratic Questioning in CBT?
Socrates knew that true wisdom wasn’t about just feeding a student answers — in fact; he understood that it came from not knowing all the answers but from questioning what we assume to be true. It’s OK if we don’t have all the answers and if our questions produce more questions. That’s the nature of self-discovery.
It’s here that true self-reflection happens, helping you take a more objective look at self-limiting biases and beliefs. “In CBT, where the focus is on modifying thinking to facilitate emotional and behavioral change, the (CBT Socratic questioning) technique is recognized as helping clients define problems, identify the impact of their beliefs and thoughts, and examine the meaning of events,” notes a 2011 study.
Psychologists like Beck and Albert Ellis saw the value of this philosophical questioning process in helping people challenge negative thought patterns. Instead of simply providing you with answers, therapists using Socratic questioning in therapy may ask a series of open-ended, reflective questions to help you recognize negative thought patterns. (For example, you may discern that many of the negative beliefs you hold about yourself, others, or situations are not necessarily based on evidence but rather on misinterpretations or exaggerations of reality.)
“The use of the Socratic method by CBT therapists helps clients become aware of and modify processes that perpetuate their difficulties,” notes Positive Psychology. “The subsequent shift in perspective and the accompanying reevaluation of information and thoughts can be hugely beneficial.”
Where Did Socratic Questioning Come From?
Socrates empowered his students because he prompted them to think for themselves without being fed absolute answers in a didactic fashion. His approach of open-ended, probing questions — where there’s often no right or wrong answer — gave them a chance to examine their own beliefs and reasoning, ultimately helping them arrive at conclusions through critical thinking.
CBT Socratic questioning serves the exact same purpose: to help you ultimately gain insight into your own thoughts by compelling you to reflect objectively through a structured inquiry. It’s effectively a dialogue between you and your therapist to challenge distorted thinking and examine your thoughts.
What Can CBT Treat?
For decades, CBT has remained an evidence-based treatment for a myriad of emotional- and addiction-based conditions.
CBT for Mental Health Disorders
CBT is an effective, first-line treatment for many mental health issues, including:
- Depression: CBT helps you identify and challenge hopeless or self-critical thoughts.
- Anxiety: Irrational fears prompting avoidance behaviors are common in anxiety disorders. CBT works to learn how these are connected and face them in a safe space.
- PTSD: CBT aids in processing traumatic memories and reducing distressing symptoms like nightmares and flashbacks.
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): Through cognitive examination, CBT helps break compulsive thought loops and habitual behaviors.
CBT for Co-Occurring Disorders
A co-occurring disorder is when a substance use disorder and mental health condition exist at the same time — for instance, depression and alcoholism or anxiety and opioid use disorder. The framework of CBT understands that drug addiction and mental health stem from the same negative thought processes in the brain, which is why the clinical approach is integrated to address the interplay between your thoughts (how mental health affects your mindset), your emotions (how they make you feel about yourself) and your behaviors (abusing drugs or alcohol).
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How Does Socratic Questioning During CBT Help?
Socratic questioning in CBT works because it encourages you to gain insight and engage deeply with any illogical, negative thoughts or assumptions that might be fueling a mental health disorder. Rather than simply telling you what to think and leaving it at that, your therapist will ask questions that guide you to challenge your beliefs, helping you uncover patterns that can guide you both down a pathway of solutions.
It’s an active process that helps you shift your perspective — now, challenges once deemed insurmountable become easier to conquer as you open up new ways of thinking, recognize distortions, and reframe negative perspectives. Instead of simply accepting negative thoughts as truth, you learn to evaluate them and make space for more balanced, rational, and critical thinking.
Identify Cognitive Distortions
“Cognitive distortions are internal mental filters or biases that increase our misery, fuel our anxiety,y and make us feel bad about ourselves,” notes Harvard Medical School.
These cognitively distorted patterns of thinking are common when struggling with mental health concerns or addictions and take a few forms that Socratic questioning helps you identify in therapy:
Catastrophizing
Catastrophic thinking is a type of cognitive distortion where someone assumes and jumps to a worst-case conclusion even when they have very little factual reason for their concerns. You might end up thinking, “If I relapse, I’ll never recover, and my life will be ruined.” The end result of this flawed mindset can only result in a catastrophe.
CBT Socratic questioning helps you to challenge this. Your therapist may ask you, What’s the likelihood of this outcome? orOrhas there ever been a time when you struggled or relapsed but still recovered? These pragmatic types of responses help you look at unrealistic thinking, not based on fact.
Black-and-White Thinking
In a black-or-white mindset, there are extreme outcomes — either all good or all bad — with no alternatives in between. It’s a mental form of compartmentalizing one’s thoughts and jumping to rigid conclusions without any nuances. (For example, thinking if you make one mistake, you’re immediately a failure.)
A Socratic method of questioning encourages you to explore the gray areas of a given hypothetical situation — in the above example, seeing if it’s possible to be successful and still make mistakes or to not judge ourselves so harshly because mistakes are part of being human and not a personal failing.
Overgeneralizing
Similar to black-and-white, extreme thinking, overgeneralizing happens when you take one negative event or an experience with a person and apply overly broad language and sweeping assumptions about all instances or people.
For example, you might get a new phone and struggle to set it up while thinking, “I can never figure out technology. I’m completely hopeless with anything new. I give up,” overlooking the times when you learned to use a new app or tool with just a little patience. Psychologist Ryan Martin gives an example of stopping abruptly at a red light yet wondering why you get stuck at every red light, or being late for a meeting, behind a group of slow-walking people, and getting angry that all people walk slow. “People who overgeneralize tend to get angrier than others; they express that anger in less healthy ways, and they suffer greater consequences as a result of their anger,” Ryan says.
Socratic questioning in therapy posits questions that can challenge one’s use of extreme terms like “always,” “everybody,” and “nobody,” which can dominate an overgeneralized type of thinking. Is one experience enough to predict all future outcomes, or are all people slow or rude just because of one isolated encounter?
Promoting Alternative Perspectives
Another powerful function of Socratic questioning is that it can guide you considering different, alternate viewpoints. Instead of being trapped in a singular, negative narrative, you learn to see situations in a new way, through a new lens, from multiple angles.
Reframing Negative Thoughts
Negative, self-defeating thoughts can be hard to break or look at in a new way when we convince ourselves that it is the absolute truth. Socratic questioning aims to inject a dose of reality to reframe negative thinking:
- Negative thought: “I’ll never be successful. I’m a total failure.”
Socratic Question: “What does success mean to you? Are you overlooking small achievements along the way?”
Reframed thought: “Success takes time and effort, and I am making progress.”
Your therapist, in your shared dialogue, may additionally ask you to provide evidence that supports your beliefs, or for example, when you have made progress. If you can’t provide proof for the former but for the latter, it creates an alternative perspective where negative beliefs are often unfounded and where change is possible.
Building Problem-Solving Skills
Part of defeating negative thoughts is learning how to work through difficult situations that would normally lead to jumping to conclusions with catastrophic or overgeneralized assumptions and giving up on situations and people.
Socratic questioning in therapy challenges the validity of your beliefs so you can work to develop problem-solving strategies when faced with a challenge — even if it’s a substance abuse problem that stems from your own motivations. Here, instead of reacting impulsively, you can learn to analyze the problem, generate potential solutions, and evaluate the best course of action.
Examples of Socratic Questioning During CBT
What are some Socratic questioning examples you might hear in a CBT session?
- “What’s the evidence for and against this belief?” (Encourages taking an objective evaluation of your thoughts)
- “Am I making assumptions that might not be accurate?” (Helps identify and challenge cognitive distortions that may adversely impact how you engage in a situation)
- “What’s the worst-case scenario, and how likely is it to happen?” (Reduces catastrophizing and fatalistic thinking by assessing realistic, rather than imagined, probabilities)
- “How would I view this situation if it happened to someone else?” (Promotes self-compassion — putting yourself in someone else’s shoes — and alternative perspectives)
Finding a Therapist Who Offers Socratic Questioning During CBT
CBT Socratic questioning has become a hallmark of our cognitive behavioral therapy, designed to enlighten you to different, more positive ways of thinking when the symptoms of a mental health disorder or addiction can narrow one’s negative view of people, the world, and your circumstances.
Royal Life Centers’ Chapter 5 campus remains sensitive to the struggles men face in light of these issues, and our therapists are experienced and trained in helping people challenge harmful thought patterns and build resilience.
CBT can be an effective tool in your journey of recovery to sobriety and better mental health. And it’s understandable that you may have questions about it. What is the duration of therapy? What does it entail? How much does it cost, and will insurance cover the expense?
We’re happy to guide you in the right direction and provide answers. Change your life with one call. You can do it; we can help.
- Socratic Questions | Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
- Cognitive behavioral therapy – Mayo Clinic
- Socratic Questioning in Psychology: Examples and Techniques
- Two Theoretical Perspectives on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) – College of Cognitive Behavioural Therapies
- How to recognize and tame your cognitive distortions – Harvard Health
- Catastrophizing | Psychology Today
