What Good Listening Actually Looks Like in Counselling (It's Not What You Think)

Discover what therapeutic listening really involves. Practical guidance for CPCAB Level 2 students on developing active listening and responding skills.

If you're training at CPCAB Level 2, you'll discover something surprising: the listening you've done your whole life isn't the listening you need for counselling.

Most students arrive believing they're already good listeners. They're kind, attentive people who care about others. But therapeutic listening is something different entirely.

It's not passive. It's not easy. And it's not what you think.

Let's explore what students typically get wrong about listening, what appropriate listening and responding actually involves, and how you develop this skill throughout your training.

The Misconception About Listening

When students start Level 2, they typically think good listening means having a conversation. Back and forth. Opinions and thoughts and guidance exchanged. Good conversation equals good listening, right?

There's this feeling that because you have natural hearing ability, you're qualified as a good listener. That belief gets eroded throughout the course as you recognise that truly listening, actively listening, paying attention to another person requires a whole range of attitudes, skills, and techniques.

Being able to hear is not enough.

You need to work actively with what you're hearing and engage with it. Even through your own thought processes, you might not say anything or respond, but you're actively engaging with what you're hearing and ascribing awareness to it as you go.

What Students Actually Do

Here's what typically happens: students believe they're listening through their talking. They think engagement means contributing their perspective.

But look at what's really going on. You're not listening to the other person. You're listening for the space where you can offer your opinions and thoughts.

The other person becomes very unpresent in your perception. You're focussed on yourself, on your opinions, on your things. You're hunting down the space in the conversation where there's a drop or silence, thinking: that's when I must fill it with something.

Social Listening vs Therapeutic Listening

Social listening creates space for you to offer something further rather than inquire deeper. Therapeutic listening is a collaborative exploration of the individual's experiencing of their issue or current state.

That's at the heart of the difference.

Students feel skilled in social listening and think it's therapeutic. While it serves a purpose in everyday life, it's very different from what you're learning on a counselling course. That's why training takes years.

The challenge comes when you're asked to remove that need to bring your opinions, hunt for the spaces, offer your insights. When that's taken away, what's left?

That bit is really hard. And it's quite exposing.

What do you say in those spaces? Who are you in those spaces when you typically fill them with yourself? What do you do with all these internal thoughts?

This makes it incredibly difficult to really listen. But this is exactly what you work with and through on the course.

Listening to Formulate vs Listening to Understand

When you're listening for your chance to respond, you're not looking to understand. You're not curious to dig further into the individual's experience.

As you grow through the course, students often shift from offering opinions to jumping in with questions. But this is still further away from what you're trying to achieve. "I should be asking lots of questions" is not an example of good listening. It's an example of someone paying more attention to their own process than to the other person.

What Gets in the Way

What stops you from really listening?

• Your own judgements

• Your thoughts and opinions

• Mistaking therapeutic listening for social listening

• Thinking you need to offer solutions

• Believing giving advice is helpful

Active listening requires sustained concentration on the other. That's crucially difficult to get used to. That's why you spend time every single session practising this. The challenges within it are significant.

What Therapeutic Listening Really Involves

Within a sentence: you're looking to learn how the individual is experiencing their world.

You're looking to better understand, with non-judgement and respect and curiosity, how the other person is feeling, what they're experiencing, their understanding of that experiencing. You're looking to get closer to a deeper sense of that individual.

The Layers You're Holding

You're attending to body language. Voice tone. Physical movements and signals. What are those messages saying? Whether you determine it's worth bringing into the session or not, you're paying attention to it. What's going on for the other person? Being curious and inquisitive towards that, maybe just from an attitude rather than a direct instruction to do something.

You're listening for the feelings beneath the content. What's being said underneath all this? The narrative and story will be the narrative and story, but what's more important is looking to understand the emotions and feelings.

Daniel Kahneman's reference about the emotional tail wagging the rational dog speaks to this. At the end of the day, emotions dictate responses no matter how much cognitive rationality and logic you apply. Emotions have a profound effect. You're looking at that part, at the emotions underneath that are affecting the person rather than just the narrative being described.

The narrative is relevant, but you're looking to say: that's all there. What was it like to feel that when those things happened to you? Those bits are the unheard, unsaid elements you want to get closer to and better understand.

The Multiple Layers Simultaneously

This is an ongoing process, not always captured over a few weeks but over the course itself.

You're paying attention to, connecting with, and holding:

• The content being shared, the narrative description

• The emotions and feelings generated for that individual

• What it means to them, what they're experiencing

• How they're metabolising the situation internally

• What patterns might be repeating in their behaviour

• How they're experiencing those patterns

You're noticing so many parts of the individual. And you haven't even considered the relationship dynamic itself, which sits with another topic.

The Energy Required

This heightened level of attention takes energy. Students typically come away feeling quite tired after a lesson because of the amount of attention they're developing. They're actively using parts of their mind to engage with all those layers of the individual.

At the same time, you're recognising yourself. As we've discussed in previous posts about watching out for your own material, you're making sure you keep that out of the way so you're paying full attention to the other person, staying within their frame of reference.

These are incredibly difficult things.

Go and try having a conversation with a friend where you don't bring your opinion, thoughts, or ideas. Simply listen and maybe offer reflections, but don't bring any of yourself into it. The cognitive load can be stressful.

There's tension in the system where you feel you should be sharing something. Whilst combatting that, whilst trying to pay attention to the other person, you're struggling because you're trying to suppress or deal with that cognitive load: I need to say something. I need to offer an opinion. I must ask a question. I cannot sit with what they're going through. I need to offer my solutions.

Huge psychic pressure is going on.

The Skills That Demonstrate Listening

If you're to avoid sitting in utter silence whilst applying this awareness and consideration of the layers of the individual, what skills do you use?

Two key ones you build on are paraphrasing and reflection.

Paraphrasing demonstrates you've listened because you're hearing the other person say something, applying your understanding to it, and returning it for verification. You're saying: I've heard you. This is what I've heard you say. Does that tally with you?

You're capturing the meaning, maybe through your own language. But that means you've metabolised it, returned it, and shared that you're paying attention. That's hugely powerful for the individual to feel they've been listened to.

Reflection is where you simply return the language the person has used. You're not metabolising it through your processes or frames. You're returning it back in a way that presents it to them. It's a mirror.

For example, the helpee might say: "I'm tired" or "I'm feeling tired."

A reflection would be: "You're saying you're tired."

A paraphrase would be: "You're going through a bit of fatigue."

This gives a sense of the difference between these two types of listening skills.

Staying Within Their Frame

The active listening skills of reflection stay within the language, within the individual's frame of reference. Paraphrasing shifts to some degree because it's been processed by the helper, but at the heart of both, you're demonstrating you're listening to the other person's language and how they're communicating.

As highlighted through this post and all the other posts, you're developing more than just a skill. It's a collaboration of skill and attitude.

The attitudinal qualities are crucial. You need to prize and respect the other person's processing, no matter how confusing or unclear it might be to you. You offer the individual respect and understanding so they feel heard, feel listened to.

Essentially, not feeling alone. Sometimes that's all someone wants.

How Students Develop This Skill

What works in training the most? Learning how to set aside yourself in order to pay closer attention to the other individual's experiencing.

That's the challenge within most of the work you do.

There are skills and techniques: paraphrasing, clarifying, focussing, reflection, open questions. All are relevant and important. But it's through the interactions, through listening and noticing what comes up for you as a student, as a helper, that you improve those skills.

Practice Is Key

What actually works in training is practice. That's why every lesson offers significant opportunities to practise being either the helper or the client. Both are informative. Both are useful. Both offer opportunities for learning.

Practice to notice what happens for you. Practising the listening. Practising working through what comes up for you and what you're witnessing or hearing from the other person.

Triads through role play allow you to notice when you're truly being listened to, what it takes, and the challenges involved.

A word on role play: this is always at the discretion of the individual to share whatever they're comfortable with. There's no mandatory expectation to share more than you're happy with. It's always your choice about what you share in skill sessions.

The Role of Feedback

A key part of the course is receiving feedback and development. Where are there areas to develop? Where are there areas to better understand? Where are things getting a particular response?

Feedback is huge. It's part of the criteria, part of the curriculum. Within that triad work, someone's role is to be the observer. This is another student from the group working with the person who's the client and the counsellor.

The observer is there to notice any blind spots, anything worthwhile feeding back as part of improvement. The observer is paying attention and deeply listening to the interaction. What do they see? What do they notice? What went well? What could have been improved?

This feedback is critical to your development. When you're doing so much work, so much attention paid to the act of listening as well as your own process and material, you're going to miss bits.

The observer captures that, shares what they notice. Not in judgement of whether it's gone well or badly. Simply witnessing what they witness from their perspective, offering an alternative point of view. Something you either accept or dismiss.

If feedback comes back consistently on the same theme, maybe it shouldn't be dismissed. Maybe there's something to attend to. That's fine as you fold it in and weave it into your personal development.

Common Feedback Students Get

Typically, feedback about listening includes that students tend to incorporate questions quite often. While questions aren't wrong in themselves, they limit because generating a question means the student has to go through a process to offer it. In that moment, they're paying less attention to the other person.

If it's an open question, that might open up the conversation for the helpee to explain and expand. But a closed question does exactly that: closes a person down, stops them expanding further.

Common feedback: too many questions. Not enough space to really listen to the other person.

Whilst you want to encourage curiosity, there are alternative ways of being curious and better understanding the individual than simply asking questions. In worst cases, it feels like an interrogation.

The observer role is crucial to notice what you're not seeing, what that might reveal.

The observer also notices when you're struggling to formulate thoughts, when there are gaps. Not with judgement or criticism, but to draw it into awareness, to see what could be discussed and understood further. All wrapped around personal development.

Other Skills to Consider

Summarising is another helpful skill. Some students are told to summarise at the very end of a session. But there's a question about that, because it sounds like a rule.

There's benefit in earlier parts of the session to actually summarise or capture little pieces of information that feel relevant, to make sure it's been understood or to ask for clarity.

Summarising is literally what it says. A collecting up of the overall impression of what the helpee has been sharing. This demonstrates you've been paying attention and listening, placing things together as a summary of understanding. This feels like acknowledgement, recognition that you've been listening. The person feels heard.

Be mindful that sometimes summarising feels laboured and artificial. Throughout the course, you build methods and ways to soften that, to make it more natural. Not just harshly punctuating the end of a session by covering everything that's been shared whilst the helpee thinks: well, I just said all that, why are you repeating it?

It's not a given rule to always include. But in terms of specific techniques: reflection, paraphrasing, summarising are great ways of demonstrating active listening.

Open Questions and Silence

As mentioned, open questions encourage the helpee to expand how they're feeling, to open up further about what they notice, what they're saying. They broaden the conversation further, reflecting exploration and curiosity in the individual, their process, what they're feeling and doing.

We've spoken about silence in previous posts. I'd encourage you to check that out because it contains information about working with silence.

The Balance Between Listening and Responding

You're always responding in some way: micro muscle movements, shifts in posture. You're always offering some sort of response.

In terms of a literal response, I think back to Nancy Kline's book, "The Promise That Changes Everything," where she puts forward the idea of the promise of not interrupting. Allowing the other person to talk out everything on their mind, even when they think they've got nothing left to say. Still encouraging it.

That's closer to where I'd be thinking about balance. It's more about the other person. Responding only for them, only for the other person to open up further or to encourage further. Listening, then responding. The responding comes from wanting to expand the conversation for the other person further.

Why Some Students Struggle More

I go back to the first set of points about social conversations and the need to fill the spaces with opinions, insights, advice. People feel conversation is all that's really happening, that there isn't more to it than that. That's where students struggle.

The Core Attitude Underneath

At the heart of much of this is a blend of skill alongside an attitude, an approach to these skills.

You cannot do one without the other.

What you start on Level 2 continues forever. Because at the heart of all this, you're looking to better understand yourself, what's evoked inside you that creates these responses.

How is it that you're beginning to interrupt a person? How is it you're doing all the heavy lifting in the conversation? What's going on for you there?

This develops only in terms of becoming more aware of the occasions where you're interfering, directing, or leading. You go back to these core listening skills where you notice those things, where you're removing or reducing the autonomy and agency of the other and replacing it with your frame of reference.

This is a core skill, but also a core awareness and a core attitude being developed throughout the course and onto Level 4 and beyond.

Ready to Progress Your Training?

If you're navigating CPCAB Level 2 and discovering that therapeutic listening requires sustained concentration, energy, and the discipline to set aside your own need to contribute, you're developing the foundation of all counselling work.

When you're ready to progress to CPCAB Level 3, where you'll continue this development as a trainee counsellor working with clients in supervised practice, we'd love to support your journey. Our approach values the attitudinal qualities underneath the skills, recognising that listening is both technique and presence, both skill and respect.

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About The School of Counselling

The School of Counselling is a CPCAB-approved training centre and BACP member organisation, specialising in person-centred counselling training. We support students through their journey from Level 2 helper skills through to qualified practice, with experienced tutors who understand that listening is active work, not passive waiting. We're committed to helping you develop both the skills and the attitude that make therapeutic listening possible.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between social listening and therapeutic listening?

Social listening creates space for you to offer your perspective, opinions, or advice. You're listening for the gap where you can contribute. Therapeutic listening is a collaborative exploration of the individual's experiencing. You're paying attention to their content, emotions, patterns, and what's beneath the words. You're staying within their frame of reference, not bringing yours in. It requires sustained concentration on the other person, not on formulating your response.

Why is therapeutic listening so much harder than I expected?

Because you're holding multiple layers simultaneously: the narrative, the emotions beneath it, what it means to them, how they're processing it, patterns that might be repeating, plus managing your own material that gets activated. You're also fighting against lifelong conditioning to fill silences, offer opinions, ask questions, and contribute to conversations. The cognitive load is significant. That's why practice every lesson is essential.

What are reflection and paraphrasing, and when do I use them?

Reflection means returning the language the person used, like a mirror. If they say "I'm tired," you say "You're saying you're tired." Paraphrasing means capturing the meaning through your own language: "You're going through a bit of fatigue." Reflection stays completely within their frame of reference. Paraphrasing processes it slightly through yours. Both demonstrate you've listened and help the person feel heard. Use them throughout sessions to show attentiveness without directing or advising.

How do I know if I'm asking too many questions?

If feedback consistently mentions it, pay attention. Questions aren't wrong, but each question requires you to formulate it, which means you're paying less attention to the other person in that moment. Closed questions limit expansion. Too many questions feel like interrogation. Ask yourself: am I asking because I'm curious about their experience, or because I'm uncomfortable with silence? Could reflection or paraphrasing serve better than a question? Are my questions opening up their exploration or directing it?

How long does it take to develop good listening skills?

This develops from Level 2 through Level 4 and beyond. It's not something you master in a few weeks or even months. What starts on Level 2 continues forever because you're always becoming more aware of when you're interfering, directing, or leading rather than truly listening. The attitudinal qualities underneath the skills, the respect and prizing of the other person's process, deepen with practice, feedback, supervision, and self-awareness work throughout your training and career.