The 5 Types Of Circular Questions That Do the Most Work in Family Therapy

For years, I thought "circular questioning" was a skill my very hippie grad school neglected to teach, and that it was yet another $3,000 training I’d have to put on my list of things to save up for.

It turns out that it’s neither expensive nor hard to learn; it just requires a different way of thinking that, once you understand, is invaluable for working with families and couples, and even in individual and group therapy.

In this edition, I’ll share five types of circular questions to help get you thinking differently about them. Once you know the main categories, I suspect you’ll find yourself using them more often than you expect.

But first, there’s something important to be aware of....

TLDR: This week I'm sorting circular questions into five usable buckets: comparison, sequence, hypothetical, triadic, and meaning. You get example questions for each one, plus the single thing that stops them from turning into a pile of random questions.

The Caveat

If you just ask a bunch of clever-sounding circular questions without any game plan, they can feel like a gimmick. You’ll definitely get some rich answers from the family you’re with, but they won’t deliver their full potential, and I run the risk of you unsubscribing and thinking I’m full of it!

Circular questions work best when you’re using them in combination with a working hypothesis. That’s just a systemic guess about the patterns or structure of the family and an idea of who’s doing what and why around the problem.

If you have a rough conceptualization and then go into a session armed with specific circular questions, the answers work to either confirm or blow up your hypothesis. As I write this, I think I’m realizing that’s what I love about these questions: there’s a certain rush I get when everything I suspect gets confirmed. I’m also not attached to my hypothesis, so if it sounds like I’m way off the mark, the answers might move me closer to a more accurate one.

Also, I’m aware I’ve been avoiding sending an email about how to formulate a hypothesis; so watch this space.

Blatant Self Promotion:

1. The Podcast

There's like, a lot of words in this email, and seriously, who has time to read.If words are hard, why not listen to the audio version?

I figured out how to get this onto Apple, Spotify and Amazon Music. 

2.The Video

MyYoutube Video On Circular Questions -

Type 1: Comparison & Ranking 

What It Is: This category of questions focuses on understanding differences. The general goal is to get the family or couple to start thinking about relationships a little differently, along the lines of who does more, who’s closer, or who’s first.

They can prevent people in the room from giving overly global answers like “we all fight”, and generate answers that reveal who fights more and who never fights.

Kids often find these questions easier than open-ended ones, so they’re great for families with younger children, and they’re especially helpful when families use absolute terms such as ‘we all ’, ’ never ’, or 'always’.

Why It Works: The value of this category rests on the idea that differences of opinion are valuable information for us.

A thought or opinion on its own, like,

• "Mom is worried about us" is a solid ‘pass’, but the moment you set it against a contrast, you move closer to an “A”.

The same answer with a comparison does much more:

• “Mom worries more than Dad”, or
• “Mom is the first to get anxious before anyone else even notices”.

The job beneath every circular question in this category is to create or sharpen a difference so that some new information about the problem or relationships is revealed.

When you ask everyone the same question, I wouldn’t count on getting the same answer from everyone in the room, but those contrasting or contradictory ideas reveal even more about how the family is organized, its structure and what goes on.

Examples

• "Who's closer to your dad, your sister or your mom?"
• "Who argues the most in this family? And who's next?"
• "When grandpa steps in, who gets more wound up, your mom or your dad?"

Type 2 — Behavioral Sequence

What It Is: Questions in this category map out what actually happens in the family, particularly around the presenting problem. Ideally, they target what happens right before the problem, right after, and then what comes next.

They can start to shift the focus from blaming someone like:

• “He’s just difficult”, to a more global way of thinking, like
• “His behavior is more challenging in the morning when Mom and Dad fight the night before”.

Why It Works: Most families come in with a linear, or ‘cause-and-effect’ story, like “he’s withdrawn because he’s depressed” or “she nags because she’s controlling.”

Linear thinking explains why someone is depressed and assumes a single cause is to blame, and often it is only sitting inside that one person, I call it the IP Trap.

Behavioral sequence type questions change the answers you get to include other people in the family.

So you ask when things happen, or what happens, but follow up by asking what others do in response.

When you map out enough of these steps, the problem stops looking like one person’s flaw and starts to look like a pattern the whole family shares. And once the family can see the loop laid out, you've found your opening, because you only have to shift one move in the sequence to break the entire cycle. At least in theory.

Examples

• "When your mom and your brother are going at it, what does your dad do? And then what does your mom do?"
• "What happened right before your mom got angry? What happened after? And then? And then?"
• "When your mom tries to get your son to eat and he won't, what does your dad do? And when that happens, what does your mom do?"

Type 3: Future and Hypothetical

What It Is: This category of questions tries to move the family out of their usual story and into a “what if” scenario. These questions are the most likely to spark change, especially when things feel stuck and you want movement without forcing it.

Why It Works: These questions work by introducing a future scenario, then adding a relationship aspect to it.

So it’s not just a question about the future like

• “Do you want to go to college?”

It’s more like:

• “When you head off to college, which parent will miss you most?”

To answer these questions, the person has to temporarily imagine the future and weigh the present situation against it.  They can also draw out relationship information you might not get without that imagined future scenario.

I also love them because they plant the seed that the family's patterns and dynamics could and will change, that nothing is set in stone.

Examples

• "If your mom decided to stop worrying about you, what do you think your dad would do?"
• "When you head off to college, which parent's going to miss you most?"
• "If the fighting stopped tomorrow, what else would be different around here?"

Type 4: Triadic

What It Is: This category is the most obviously circular type of question, because you’re asking one person to describe the relationship they see between two others.

Teenagers, in my experience, don’t always love these types of questions unless they’re excited to spill the gossip, but in theory, people are supposed to help others be less defensive when you ask them to use this type.

The overall goal is to get a third-person view of the relationship between two other people, which might deliver a wildly different answer than asking them directly.  

Why It Works: Families usually avoid talking about other people’s relationships when everyone is present. Triadic questions blow that rule up.

When you ask someone to describe what they think of the relationship between two other people, sometimes a lot of hidden information comes out. It’s much harder to talk about yourself and be vulnerable about the quality of your relationships, but I find that often clients have no problem dishing the dirt on others. They'll often speak far more freely than the two people in that relationship ever could.

We human beings don't, as a rule, describe other people's relationships while they sit there listening, and as a result, those two people don’t ever hear their own relationship described by other people. Sometimes it can be quite emotional for parents to hear a child describe their parents as hating each other. Most often, the reason these questions work in the first session is to do with setting the tone of family therapy, what we will be asking, and what’s encouraged.

Examples

•  “How would you describe the relationship between your sister and your mom?”
• “If your brother and sister were to get along better, how do you think Dad would react?”
• “Who is most likely to be able to cheer your Dad up, your sister or your Mom?”

Type 5: Meaning and Belief

What It Is:  This category of questions explores the gap between what someone does and the meaning they or the family gives it. The questions are an attempt to get to the core belief or understanding of why someone acts the way they do, and are quite probing and deep, so they might not be the ones to use in a first session.

The goal of these questions is rooted in the theory that behaviors are influenced by our underlying beliefs and that changing those beliefs can change behaviors.

I’d be more likely to use these questions after I’ve mapped the family behavioral loop around the problem and found that the family’s story about the issue is keeping things stuck. As these questions can be intense, I try to remember to ask them gently and with genuine interest, rather than with an agenda to change or deliver results.

Why It Works: These questions also help in another way.

When a parent says,

• “My son never takes the trash out; he is just lazy.” It sounds like a verdict, delivered as a fact, which just isn't particularly helpful.

So, I might respond by asking a belief question like,

• “When your son is behaving like he’s lazy, what do you imagine his beliefs are about helping with chores?

The idea is that it turns a fixed trait or a judgment into something deeper. Dr. Anthony Bateman and Dr. Peter Fonagy would say this encourages mentalization. It’s a request to move to a more complicated layer of thinking. It’s not quite empathy, but along the same lines.

In the example above, the question asks the parent to imagine more deeply what goes on inside their child, to think a bit more systemically. It starts to move people from a closed judgment to a more open mindset with more potential.

Examples

• "How do you make sense of your dad working all the time?"
• "When Jimmy's sad, what do you think goes on in his mind?”
• "When Jenny won't help around the house, what do you think she believes about responsibility?"
• "What does it mean to you that year after year, nothing between the two of you has changed?"

If you don’t use circular questions regularly, my top tip is to start getting used to them and try a few in your next sessions. I am not embarrassed to still be taking in a big list of questions I have printed off, but I’m finding over time I need to look at it less. The more you practice, the more you realize that you can figure out your own versions, or you get more confident using them.

If you want to learn more about circular questions and have me share my cheat sheet, leave me a comment, and I’ll make it happen!  

Till next time,
Oliver & My People Patterns