Sourcing & Open-ended Questions
A worker asks a child home from school: "Where is your coat? Did you eat lunch? Who was at the house?" This is an example of this Hepworth verbal barrier.
What is Interrogating or "Peppering" the client?
A same-level restatement of facts or concrete timeline details that stays completely safe and never triggers client defensiveness.
What is a Simple Reflection (or Paraphrase)?
Shulman defines this prequel skill as the worker's effort to sensitize themselves to a client's unspoken feelings before the first face-to-face meeting.
What is Tuning In?
Claudia Dewane outlines this framework, which describes how a helper purposefully integrates their personality, values, and insights to directly benefit a client.
What is the Professional Use of Self?
This type of question must always begin with the words "How" or "What" and cedes conversational control completely to the client.
What is an Open-Ended Question?
A client says: "The caseworker arrived at midnight." The worker responds: "So the agency came to your house in the middle of the night." This is an example of this level of reflection.
What is a Simple Reflection (or Paraphrase)?
When a client places their hand on the door handle at the final minute of a session and suddenly blurts out a massive trauma, it is known by this term.
What is Doorknob Communication?
In Dewane's five-part typology, a worker uses this personal discomfort constructively as a diagnostic tool to read the unspoken tension in a client's system.
What is the Use of Anxiety?
An advocate tells a client: "Given how chaotic your home environment has been this semester, how have you managed to keep yourself safe and show up here today?"
What is a Coping Question?
This deeper level of reflection goes right beneath the timeline to explicitly name and scale the client's unsaid emotional affect or vulnerability.
What is a Complex Reflection (or Reflecting Feelings)?
According to Shulman Chapter 4, this core phase involves an open, negotiated verbal agreement regarding the purpose of the work, agency limits, and worker roles.
What is Contracting?
This model requires an advocate to continuous self-reflect, drop their ego, step out of the expert role, and honor the client as the ultimate expert on their own life story.
What is Cultural Humility?
An interviewer asks a client two questions back-to-back before letting them speak. Corcoran labels this specific "Don't" as this.
What is a Double-Barreled Question?
A client says: "The caseworker arrived at midnight."
The worker responds: "I can sense completely blindsided, terrified, and violated by having the system invade your home while you slept." This matches this level of reflection.
What is a Complex Reflection?
When clients show up and actively discuss completely irrelevant topics (like sports or weather) to avoid being vulnerable, Shulman calls this dynamic this.
What is The Illusion of Work?
These are brief, everyday, often unintentional verbal or physical slights that communicate hostile or negative insults toward marginalized identities.
What are Micro-Aggressions?
Corcoran Chapter 3 states that a worker should aim for this specific question-to-statement ratio to ensure an intake doesn't feel like a harsh interrogation.
What is a 1-to-3 question-to-statement ratio?
This advanced micro-skill involves deliberately overstating or magnifying a client's absolute statement of resistance to provoke them into defending the positive side of change.
What is an Amplified Reflection?
Helping a child or parent break down a massive, overwhelming crisis down into tiny manageable steps is known as this skill.
What is Partializing?
In Dewane's framework, any personal values or worldviews that a worker holds fall under the "Use of" this core category.
What is the Belief System?