How to embrace the awkward silence in therapy

Just conjuring the words "awkward silence," and you can probably already start to feel a subtle discomfort begin to creep into your body. Perhaps a compulsion to devise the quickest escape route? The anxiety, self consciousness, or existential dread that this painful experience may simply never come to an end?

What makes silence so foreign and nerve-racking to us? So defiant of social norms that we desperately fear it, or of so little value we can't tolerate the idea of wasting our precious time with it?

If you’ve had experience in therapy before, you might be familiar with the inevitable silence that occasionally befalls the conversation without warning.

So...what are we supposed to talk about now? Are they waiting for me to talk first? Am I doing this wrong?

The truth is, while it may not always be comfortable, silence is often where the real magic begins. It's one of the most powerful tools we have to use in therapy, parenting, our personal relationships, and more.

The Power of Silence

I first began to understand the power of silence when I started working as a yoga teacher. One of the things we’re often taught is to notice when we feel the urge to talk, and ask ourselves what purpose it's to serve. Is it to ease our own discomfort with silence? Perhaps to prove that we know what we’re doing?

A good teacher knows what to say. A great teacher knows how to shut up.

While hard to do at first, over time I started to really notice the difference between the times that I would race to satisfy my class’s need to "hurry up and relax" already, and those times in which I stepped back in order to create the conditions to actually slow them down.

Speak too early and I would rush into everything, takes the swirl of thoughts, moods and anxieties from my students’ days along with us. Push just past the point of discomfort in remaining quiet, and suddenly - oftentimes as if it was in one simultaneous exhale - I could feel the whole class release the tension they stepped into the room with and become more calm, grounded, and here.

So what actually goes on when we lean into silence?

One answer is: change.

Gestalt therapist Gary Yontef explores the idea of change as a "time/space process.” It may be a mouthful, but if you break it apart, you find that silence works dynamically in both of these domains: time, and space. When we say that we use silence in order to give something the “time” or “space” to arise, we are quite literally giving ourselves the factors we need for some form of change to naturally occur, whether it be the surfacing of a new thought, urge, emotion, or state. The same thing happens during meditation.

But it's not actually just "time" or “space” doing the work; it's change itself. Change is an inevitable force that is constantly moving. Oftentimes the most effective thing we can do is simply get out of the way.

The irony, perhaps then, is that many of us fear silence because we worry it signals just the opposite - that nothing will change, or that we'll be stuck in an awkward and unmoving conversation for the rest of the hour unless we take swift and immediate action. But if we accept the assumption that change is inevitable, silence can be one of the most powerful tools we have to allow such change to happen without distraction or interference. In fact, it also removes much of the noise taking up our attention otherwise, and allows us to bring the subtle change process happening in the background to the front.

And silence is also so much more. Oftentimes it's the unknown. It's that thing bubbling just below the surface that we don't know if we should touch, or the difficult feelings and memories we might subconsciously be trying to avoid. Silence gives our minds the time to digest and make more complete contact with whatever just happened, rather than submitting to the impulse to immediately jump to whatever's next. And it’s really vulnerable. In silence we can feel exposed, but without something to hide behind, how else can we be truly seen? And, oh, is silence a form connection, in and of itself. Simply being with one another. Sitting with a feeling or an experience, and sharing the same space. Accepting that there are no words, there is just this.

So perhaps you start to notice what comes up for you in silence. Is it anxiety, embarassment, impatience, peace? Where else is might that be a theme?

And the next time you are confronted with that awkward moment, lean into it. Take a deep breath, experience it, and just see what comes next.