Beyond Symptom Management: The Socratic Intention Method for Stress Dissolution in Coaching

Chronic stress has reached epidemic levels in Western societies, with a majority of adults in Germany reporting frequent or occasional stress. Yet many widely used interventions mainly treat the downstream symptoms of stress rather than its cognitive roots. This conceptual paper presents the Socratic Intention Method (SIM), a practitioner-developed framework for stress dissolution that builds on the transactional model of stress and on Stress Inoculation Training. The SIM proposes that chronic stress is maintained not only by unhelpful appraisal but by the psychological usefulness that stress-sustaining beliefs provide, a mechanism consistent with the wider literature on motivated reasoning and belief-based utility. The model introduces three related constructs: (a) stress-sustaining belief functions, six practitioner-derived motivational categories that explain why people hold on to stress-generating convictions; (b) a two-stage dissolution process that combines Socratic questioning with intentional goal-substitution; and (c) the Creator Perspective (Schöpferstandpunkt), a stance related to internal locus of control, self-efficacy, and dispositional optimism, each of which has been shown to protect against chronic stress. The article sets out the practitioner methodology behind the model's development, presents a clinical illustration of the model in coaching practice, and discusses implications for evidence-based coaching and directions for future research.