Chapter 5
ENCOURAGING, PARAPHRASING, AND
SUMMARIZING
Active Listening and Cognition
How can these active listening skills help you and your clients?
Chapter 5, Encouraging, Paraphrasing, And Summarizing: Active Listening and
Cognition, is best used to help clients bring out their stories concretely and specifically.
By saying back to the client the essence of what they have said, you help them clarify
CHAPTER GOALS
Clients need to know that the interviewer hears what they say, sees their point of view,
and feels their world as they retell their experience. Encouragement, paraphrases, and
summarizations are active listening skills that are the heart of the basic listening sequence
and help to build empathy. When clients sense that their story is heard, they open up and
become more ready for change.
Awareness, knowledge, skills, and actions developed through the concepts of this chapter
will enable you to:
▲ Check on the accuracy of what you hear by saying back to clients the essence of their
comments and providing periodic summaries.
INTRODUCTION
We have found it possible to teach encouraging, paraphrasing, and summarizing together,
as they all have the same general purpose—hearing the client accurately. As a general
target for our students, we are asking them to increase their use of encouragers in the
issues, and decision making. Emotional regulation is the other critical aspect of executive
brain functioning. The next chapter on reflection of feelings discusses drawing out client
emotions and balancing these feelings with cognitive reality. This chapter focuses
primarily on cognition. Needless to say, we need a cognitive/emotional balance.
OVERVIEW OF THE CHAPTER AND MINDTAP SUPPORT
DEFINING ACTIVE LISTENING
The definition of active listening begins this section. A description of each active
listening skill and expected client response follows. Students are invited to explore
List of MindTap resources available for this section:
1. List of Websites: Each of the suggested websites presents examples of active listening.
3. Interactive Exercise: Identification and Classification. Work with a condensed portion
4. Interactive Exercise: Basic Competence. How would you respond to the five client
comments?
DISCERNING: THE BASIC TECHNIQUES AND STRATEGIES OF
ENCOURAGING, PARAPHRASING, AND SUMMARIZING
The specifics of encouraging, paraphrasing, summarizing, and checking out are presented
here. Each of these skills facilitate client talking. Encouragers help clients elaborate their
stories and include exact key words they spoke, uh-huh’s, smiles, a warm style, and short
comments. The restatement is a form of encourager, but that repeats key words or short
The summary covers a longer period of the interview. It is also often used to begin or end
a session or repeat back to the client what was said in the previous session(s). Checking
what you hear helps you better understand clients’ comments and increases accuracy.
List of MindTap resources available for this section:
1. Interactive Exercise: Writing Listening Responses. Your turn to practice what you
learned!
2. Interactive Exercise: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing: Marshall and Jesse
3. Interactive Exercise: Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing: Can you identify
OBSERVING: LISTENING SKILLS AND CHILDREN
Mary Ivey’s interview with Damaris illustrates the listening skills. Process comments
discuss what is happening during the session. The concluding part of this section
discusses informed consent with children. Note that the case of Damaris demonstrates
List of MindTap resources available for this section:
1. List of Websites: Each of the suggested websites teaches active listening for children.
PRACTICING: BECOMING COMPETENT IN ENCOURAGING,
PARAPHRASING, AND SUMMARIZATION
The exercises presented in this section will help students increase awareness, knowledge,
and competence on the listening skills. To increase effective use of encouragers,
List of MindTap resources available for this section:
2. Interactive Exercise: Toward Intentional Competence. This interactive exercise uses
two activities to help you master the listening skills.
3. Group Practice Exercise: Group Practice with Active Listening Skills.
4. Case Study: Meredith. This interview discusses the loss of power that women
sometimes feel in the process of seeking medical assistance for life-threatening illness.
REFINING: EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING, MICROAGGRESIONS, DIVERSITY
ISSUES
The three skills are defined in more detail, and issues of multiculturalism and trust
building are discussed. Executive functions are the cognitive mental processes that
Cognitive-based counseling and therapy focus on changing clients’ cognitions in order to
achieve change. The listening skills presented in this chapter are cognitive center.
Additional concepts discussed in this section include microaggressions—the small hurts
The listening skills are widely used cross-culturally and throughout the counseling and
psychotherapy world, but more or less participation and self-disclosure on the part of the
List of MindTap resources available for this section:
1. Video Activity: Toward Multicultural Competence.
2. Web Links: Review different web links focusing on bilingualism, nonverbal
communication, and attending.
DEMONSTRATIONS AND VIDEOS TO SUPPLEMENT ESSENTIALS OF
INTENTIONAL INTERVIEWING, Third Edition
• Live instructor demonstration.
• Tapes or DVDs developed by ourselves and students over the years. Consider the
possibility of saving good modeling tapes developed in your classes as examples.
• Video-based exercise Encouraging, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing: Can you
identify these important skills? The goal of this exercise is to advance students’
understanding of encouraging, paraphrasing, and summarizing. To achieve this goal
they will practice skill identification on 18 client statements. Each statement is
• Counseling Children: A Microskills Approach by Mary Bradford Ivey contains the
actual interview discussed in this chapter. The video includes clear delineation of
skills with subtitles.
CLASS PROCEDURES
This brief outline of main points provides a foundation for the practice of these skills.
1. Introduction. Briefly present the main ideas and functions of these skills. Then ask
the trainees to write down what you have just said. Their paraphrases and summaries
3. Presentation. See key points in the text. You may wish to use the PowerPoint® slides
developed for the book.
5. Generalization and self-assessment. The Portfolio of Competence becomes important
here.
6. Live modeling of encouraging. The instructor starts talking about almost any topic
and the students provide single-word encouragers leading in various different
7. Follow-up on client observation skills. Early in the class or workshop, ask several
students to observe you during the session. One student writes down your auditory,
8. Practice paraphrasing in pairs. One student talks for two minutes about reactions to
GROUP PRACTICE WITH ACTIVE LISTENING SKILLS
Experience has shown that the skills of this chapter are often difficult to master. It is easy
to try to feed back what another person has said, but to do it accurately, so that the client
feels truly heard, is another matter.
Step 2: Select a group leader.
• Client
• Interviewer
Step 4: Plan. Establish and state clear goals for the practice session. The
interviewer should plan a role-play in which open questions are used to
elicit the client’s concern. Once this is done, use encouragers to help bring
out more details and deeper meanings. Use more open and closed
For real mastery, seek to use only the three skills in this chapter and use
questions only as a last resort.
The suggested topic for this practice session is the story of a past or
present stressful experience that may in some way relate to the ideas of
accumulative trauma. Examples include teasing; bullying; being made the
Emotions may appear as the story unfolds. Feel free to paraphrase or
summarize these emotions, but this time focus first on the story and the
All of the above incidents or topics will provide observers with the
opportunity to observe nonverbal behaviors and discrepancies,
incongruity, and conflict. Does the client internalize or externalize
responsibility and blame? Internal attribution occurs when clients see
Step 5: Conduct a three-minute practice session.
Step 6: Review the practice session and provide feedback to the interviewer for 12
minutes. Be sure to use the Feedback Form to ensure that the
interviewer’s statements are available for discussion. This form provides a
helpful log of the session, which greatly facilitates discussion. And give
Step 7: Rotate roles.
FEEDBACK FORM: ENCOURAGING, PARAPHRASING, AND
SUMMARIZING
Date: ___________________
________________________________ ___________________________________
Name of Interviewer Name of Person Completing Form
1. What nonverbal dimensions did you observe?
2. What did the interviewer do right?
Instructions: Write below as much as you can of each counselor statement. Then classify
the statement as a question, an encourager, a paraphrase, a summarization, or
other. Rate each of the three active listening skills on a scale of 1 (low) to 5
(high) for its accuracy.
Counselor statement
Open question
Closed question
Encourager
Summarization
Other
Accuracy rating
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.