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Generate and check your questions
Use deidentified observations to create a permission-based opening, neutral questions, backup wording, and a stopping point for the conversation.
Made for Counselors
Choose Questions for a Client Who Keeps Avoiding the Topic
Also useful for: Mental Health Counselors
10 min
Beginner
Difficult Conversations
Communicate Better
Difficult Conversation
Get a focused set of open questions for raising an avoided topic while protecting your client's choice, dignity, and emotional safety.
We'll use them to write your prompt.
Completed ✓
Make Your Play
Give us the situation. We’ll build the prompt.
It helps you replace leading, blaming, or overly broad questions with language that invites honest discussion.
Your answers save as you type.
What you'll do
This is the plan inside your prompt. Add your details first. Then follow these steps with ChatGPT or Claude.
Make Your Play
Choose Questions for a Client Who Keeps Avoiding the Topic
Tell us what the prompt needs to know
Start with the questions below. Each answer personalizes the playbook and builds the prompt you’ll use at the end.
Your situation
Describe the topic your client appears to avoid without including names or unnecessary identifying details.
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List the specific words, actions, or changes you have directly observed, separating facts from your interpretation.
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Describe how your client responded when the topic was previously mentioned or explored.
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State what you need to understand or make possible without requiring a particular answer from your client.
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Note any safety concerns, reporting duties, time limits, communication needs, or boundaries that should shape the questions.
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This playbook was updated. Review your inputs before copying.
What you'll do
Check a step when you finish it.
01
Generate and check your questions
Use deidentified observations to create a permission-based opening, neutral questions, backup wording, and a stopping point for the conversation.
Fill in the fields above to generate your prompt preview.
Assembled prompt
Beginner instructions
Replace identifying details with general descriptions. Paste the completed prompt into your AI assistant, then read every question aloud. Remove anything that sounds like an accusation or assumes you already know the answer. Choose the opening and two or three questions you are most likely to use.
Advanced instructions
Adjust the wording to match your counseling approach, your client’s own language, cultural context, communication needs, and readiness. Use the questions as options, not a script you must finish. Apply your judgment, supervision, documentation rules, and safety procedures before using the result.
Use this when
Use this before a session when a client changes the subject, gives brief answers, becomes defensive, or repeatedly avoids an issue that matters to the work.
You'll need
- Avoided topic
- Observed pattern
- Client response so far
- Conversation goal
- Boundaries and context
You'll get
- One permission-based opening prepared
- Five neutral core questions prepared
- Three backup questions prepared
- A defensiveness reset prepared
- A clear stopping point prepared
- The wording checked to ensure it doesn't diagnose, shame, corner, or pressure your client.
By the end of this playbook
You will have:
- One permission-based opening prepared
- Five neutral core questions prepared
- Three backup questions prepared
- A defensiveness reset prepared
- A clear stopping point prepared
- The wording checked to ensure it doesn't diagnose, shame, corner, or pressure your client.
Examples
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