Guest post by Caroline Greenwood Dower
Psychotherapy is understood as the ‘talking cure’. “It’s good to talk” has become a mantra of efforts to de-stigmatise mental ill-health and distress. But sometimes it is good not to talk. So what is the role of silence in the process of therapy?
As a practicing psychotherapist, I see the aim of therapy as restoring, or initiating, a set of possibilities for how the individual relates both to the world and to themselves. Some qualities of silence reveal how the individual has closed, or been closed, to connecting with the world and with themselves. Other qualities of silence offer possibilities for greater connection with the world and with themselves. Silence between us may feel respectful and empowering. Silence for the individual may offer the space for deep connection with the felt-sense of their experience.
How can we know the difference? How can we come to an awareness of the quality of silence we experience? It surely begins with a close attention to the quality of the present moment. How is this individual before me for me? How do I experience myself in their presence? How are they with themselves? Their words, their experiences, are important, of course. The key issue though is how words, or the lack of words, feels between us.
If the silence between us was expressed in a gesture what would it look like? Our talking and our silence has moving qualities.
In my silence am I receiving them, taking a moment to consider them deeply? Am I refusing to offer something? Does it feel like a withholding of something they want or need, or dread? Or am I offering something to them – a warm encouragement for them to continue with their private contemplation or musing? And their silence – are they refusing me, blocking me, putting a wall between us for their safety, or mine? Or are they taking a moment, feeling the support of my presence, to open to themselves? Am I providing a containing structure, or a neutral background, for their own awareness to unfold? Does the space between us feel spacious and calm, or does it feel charged, narrowed? I use a fully embodied sense of the moment to feel how I am moved by and appear to be moving my client.
And yet, how can we know? I may imagine that my silence is supporting their awareness, and they may be sat on the other side of the room full of anxiety for how I am holding them in my mind. As I fall silent and consider my client, they may feel excited by being of such interest to me, or it may be threatening. It may not always have been safe to have been privately considered. And as they sit in silence, are they opening to themselves, or dissociating from the present moment, or quietly losing a sense of themselves and their reality, and unable to say.
The challenge, of course, is that to really know, we will need to enquire, but enquiry inevitably breaks the silence. Therapy above all is a process of clarifying experience, and mostly we do this through the words – through describing our experience, and through words being put to that experience. Our experience comes to make sense, to the therapist and to ourselves. Again and again I have witnessed the relief that comes with the deep realisation that we make sense. At some point, it will surely be helpful to reflect openly, verbally, on the quality of the silence.
In therapy and in life, it seems to me that an important skill is to have the capacity to move between states of deep experience and states of reflection upon the experience. A therapeutic skill – to be aspired towards, and rarely achieved – is the sense of timing. How long to leave the experience of silence to unfold, and when to enquire into that very experience, in a way that offers the possibility of making new sense without prematurely cutting through an important moment. And how we will know? We can feel how our enquiry lands, or we can enquire about how the enquiry felt? More talking… And so we go on… in a rich journey of exploration, moving in and out of experiencing and reflecting. As we move, how can we find support, or an anchor? Perhaps one valuable anchor is a quality of respect – respect for the value of talking and the value of silence.
Author Bio
Caroline Greenwood Dower is a psychotherapist and researcher. As a psychotherapist she has a particular interest in integrating embodied awareness into talking therapies – so how we non-verbally create our world and relate to it. Her academic research is on anxiety, looking at developing a deeper awareness of the embodiment of anxiety may contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon and point to new ways of supporting individuals with chronic anxiety.