Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Deep Self-Inquiry

What It Is

The second question, not the first.

People arrive with a question that is usually a stand-in. Should I leave this job. Why can I not sleep. What is wrong with me lately. Answer those directly and you have solved nothing, because they are the surface of something the person has not yet been able to say.

Inquiry means going one layer down and then waiting. The waiting is the difficult part. There is a silence after a real question that both people want to fill, and the answer is almost always on the other side of it.

It is not interrogation and it is not cleverness. A good question is often very simple and asked at the right moment, which is usually just after somebody has said something true by accident.

The discipline is in not answering it for you. I have opinions, and I will give them when they are useful, but an answer I supply will never hold the weight of one you arrived at yourself.

In a Session

Staying with it longer than is comfortable.

I will sometimes ask the same question twice, in different words, because the first answer was the practiced one. That is not a trick. The practiced answer is genuine, it is simply the version you have told before.

Sessions usually make room for this after we have settled and looked at what is here. It is hard to hear a true answer over a nervous system in a hurry, which is one of the reasons I begin every session with conversation, taking time to meet and hear from you.

Whatever surfaces belongs to you rather than to me. My job is to ask well and then get out of the way, not to supply a conclusion you can borrow.

What It Is For

Where the meaning work happens.

This is the practice that carries the existential conversation. What was the life for. What did you agree to and when. What are you calling a value that you actually inherited and have never once examined.

It is also how the second half of life gets thought about honestly rather than managed. Not by finding a slogan, but by holding a real question long enough that your own answer becomes audible.

Nobody can hand you that. I have never been able to shortcut it for anybody, and I have stopped trying.

Why It Matters

Questions outlast answers.

An answer suits the circumstances you were in when you found it. A capacity for good questions keeps working when the circumstances change, which they will.

That is why inquiry is taught here as a practice rather than performed as a service. You are learning to do it for yourself, including in the years after counseling ends.

You do not complete it. You build it, and then it is yours.

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