Pastoral Conversation: Relational Listening and Open-Ended Questions

This article suggests that the most important thing a pastoral counselor does is to listen carefully to the client. It emphasizes the will to listen and a more relational understanding of listening as a natural outcome of the evolutionary history of psychotherapy. It highlights the importance of the work of Goolishian and Anderson (1992) and Anderson (1997) for this more relational view of therapeutic conversation. The article further suggests that one of the implications of a new conception of listening is an innovative understanding of open-ended questions for facilitating an inherently creative therapy conversation more than information gathering.