ABSTRACT
This chapter’s focus is on the third step of the revised Socratic framework. This step represents an alternative to common pitfalls such as debating, arguing, or telling. This chapter teaches the therapist how to align with the client so that alternate perspectives can be jointly discovered (through Socratic questioning, guided discovery, and collaborative empiricism). While this step is technically the disconfirming evidence step, there is much work that can be done beforehand to help set you up for success. First, choosing an ideal treatment target in the focusing section can make a big difference, and coming to have a good understanding of the context and why the client believes that thought will help you better understand how to help them attend to the information they might be missing. It is often easier to expand the client’s point of view, if you first focus on coming to see things the way they do. We can jointly expand their point of view as follows: (1) evaluating the previously presented evidence to see if anything has been skewed, twisted, or overstated; (2) attending to disconfirming evidence; and (3) seeking out new evidence with behavioral experiments. The impact of these strategies can be enhanced and solidified with summary and synthesis strategies, which will be discussed in the next chapter. In parallel with other step-specific chapters, the reader is provided with the rationale for this step, step-specific strategies, and procedural instructions specific to this step. This chapter contains several examples emphasizing this step in application.
