Paraphrasing

In therapy, therapists use a skill called paraphrasing to condense a story into a sentence (like a blurb for a book) for a few reasons:

- To better help the client reflect

- To help organise thoughts

- To show the client they have been heard

- To allow the client to correct any misunderstandings

But good paraphrasing is never just regurgitating what you've heard using the same words, it's finding the underlying issue and using your own words. This helps the person not only feel heard, but understood.

From Geldard et al., 2016: Basic Personal Counselling: A training manual for counsellors