Silent light

It's what we don't say in therapy that leads to co-understanding

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

“I don’t understand why you’re not saying anything,” she said, increasingly anxious, angry even, with bewilderment on my end.

Most of my job is listening—or hearing, per the title of this Substack series: an active taking in, an attempt to stand in the patient’s world.  But in the silent pause, my patient “Jane” worriedly asked, “Are you hearing me?” 

Part of her confusion related to being somewhat new to psychotherapy; therapists tend to listen more than talk.  I’m happy to talk, if it’s clear what’s helpful to say.  This was relatively early in treatment and therapy, being a human endeavor, is also a process of two people getting to know each other and their quirks of communication.

Communication is generally more slippery than meets the eye or ear.  Two intimates believe they understand each other, only to later realize much has been lost in translation.  We look at a loved one and say, astonished, “You don’t get me at all.”

I try to listen for a patient’s emotional thematics, the pulsing undertow of the story—fear, desire, dread—rather than a mere listing of events.  “I got nothing done yesterday,” is an incident; “I felt unmotivated and apathetic all day” is the start of a story.   

We tend to take our own clarity for granted.  But language and speech are complicated enough that any person’s idiom or way of speaking needs some getting used to. Someone tagging “but, whatever” to the end of an anecdote can mean….many things.

Of course, in therapy much is not said but implied—by tone, ambience of a conversation, and what is left out.  But such nuances of implication are, again, individualized. Silences mean different things: a moment of tension, a pregnant pause, the inexpressibility of grief, and so on.

Americans tend to be talkers, one reason the classical European “blank screen” approach feels so old school.  Yet most of my work consists in silently reflecting upon a patient’s experience absorbed in active hearing.  Such silence gives patients the space and room to develop their own thoughts and associated feelings. I might nod my head, smile, and so on (I stop short of waving a pennant flag), as a way to signal I’m here.

Yet some patients might not understand why I don’t respond immediately, or am unclear about what they are saying, when a feeling is so palpably present—i.e., “well I’m anxious about this, what now?”  The what may be clear (anxiety, anger) but not the why. There may be any of a hundred reasons that a situation is so unnerving, in what it symbolizes to the person. Sometimes it is obvious; usually there are deeper resonances as to anxiety’s grip.

It is always risky to expose one’s feelings to another; most of my patients come from families whose cadences and idioms are like pre-ordained moves of a dance, memorized but never discussed or negotiated, and foreclosing of intimacy (often violently so).  There remains one way to dance, leaving little room for spontaneity or personalization. 

Thus a patient feels anxiety “means” it has to be gotten rid of right away, if the person never received much comfort from others in their life generally intolerant to the underlying reasons for anxiousness.  Just…make it stop.

But I often hear anxiety as part of a larger theme, which Jane could not yet have understood, at the moment she feared my silence was a sign of disinterest, given a specific personal history I was still getting to know; in her case, such history included the tremendous risk of exposing almost any difficult emotion or psychic stuckness to impatient, often ridiculing others. I was there, but was I really?

Oppressive systems have a dark magnetism, at least for those (including therapists) who are familiar with such ambience or “dance moves.”  It is so familiar we become drawn to it hypnotically, with dance moves we know in our sleep.  It felt a bit ominously familiar for me when Jane expressed anxiety about my silence, as if I had tripped up somewhere.

Fortunately I got in touch with my counter-transference, my own anxiety, to imagine that Jane too feared that she was “messing up,” perhaps by seeking help in the first place.

In Jane’s early world, silence often meant a traumatizing shoe was ready to drop. This led to hyper-vigilance and tremendous stress.

Young Jane was the family scapegoat, always closest to her father, staying loyal to him after her parents’ bitter divorce.  He was fond of alcohol: his protection and presence with Jane was erratic.  Still it was more than Jane got from her mother, who favored her two brothers and verbally degraded her ex-husband whenever she could. 

Jane’s brothers emulated such poisonous contempt.  Mom remained angry that Jane “took his side,” abstaining from gossip rather than join in ritual character assassinations.  Silence, for Jane (I eventually learned), threatened hostile rejection.

What was overlooked by all parties was the divisive effect of the divorce on the children, especially Jane, the youngest, only nine-years-old when the marriage imploded. 

Jane’s world was turned upside down, any illusion of a unified family now demolished. What was lost in the din, stubbornly unheard, was Jane’s grief. This too became part of the silence: swollen with the unsaid.

But such saying was dangerous.  Her father gave her benign, inebriated praise—provided she returned the favor—while the others were vicious. (Much of this was told to me in a somewhat scattershot way, as even small pieces of the puzzle were hard to revisit.) 

Jane’s “unworthiness” came to feel more vivid than anything else, but even this could not be expressed. In such scenarios, the child’s wounding loses currency or significance, dwarfed by the priorities of the powerful.

It took me time to get used to how Jane spoke, the cadences and rhythm.  She would describe what sounded like a difficult situation, stopping short as stress or tension crept in.  I didn’t know what stopped her; often she seemed to think she had told a whole story, rather than an epilogue (to my ears).

Jane also sometimes wondered if she sounded “too negative.”   She often said she was a “live and let live” kinda gal. She liked yoga, al-Anon meetings, and walks with her rescue dog. (I saw the pictures; he was hard to resist.). She volunteered at the dog shelter and felt a kinship with abandoned creatures.

When I was quietly confused that day, waiting for more of a story (involving a fraught phone conversation with her brother), she became irritated.  “You’re so quiet. I’m waiting for feedback,” she said.  I asked what kind of feedback.  She responded, annoyed, “Well…your perspective as a therapist.”

The night before, her brother had angrily blamed her for “ignoring” their mother, not calling or emailing.  She told him, trying to stay cool, “Why, so she can gossip about me later?” It was at this point she stopped and watched me for feedback.  

I was not sure where to start, wondered if there was more to add—which is when she said, “I’m not sure you’re getting this.” There was more than a hint of exasperation, as if I were the last stop in a long line of clueless listeners.

Was she right?  Was I missing something obvious?  Self-doubts of my own made an unwelcome appearance.  

In fact I wondered at that early phase of my career if I said too much with patients, out of an anxiety to “prove” I understood them—filling in silences with chatter that took away opportunity for reflection.

I said to Jane, “You sound irritated that I’m not hearing you, not responding, that perhaps you’re…speaking into a void.  And I imagine that would be super irritating with your therapist.”

She relaxed a bit and said, “I mean this happens with other people, not just here. That’s projection, right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Just know it’s not about you.”

“But I’m here now. And I’m learning something about you.”

When she said she still didn’t understand why I didn’t say anything, I told her that I was listening for the struggle behind the dialogue, the emotional backdrop.  Silence was not disinterest, it was listening for the part where she might need help. This seemed helpful. 

“I don’t want to be difficult,” she said.

“It’s ok,” I said, “be difficult!” (In fact her whole situation was difficult.)

“I just feel like everyone says what they have to say instead of listening,” she said, “It’s like, ‘Ok thanks for your opinion.’ You know what? If I want your fucking opinion, I’ll ask!”  She angrily swiped a tear away. 

Then, a very different kind of silence.

After a few moments, I said I imagined what she feared most, along with not being heard, was that she had nothing of interest to say or, worst of all, that she wasn’t making any sense to the other person.  There was always a threat of invalidation, so unnerving at moments where she needed to be heard.

Jane worried she was not interesting enough, always in competition with others, especially her brothers, who were loud and boisterous, and favored by mom. Conversation was a competition she was always losing.

In fact, I had overlooked the biggest anxiety of all—that Jane herself was the problem: too sensitive, selfish, or stubborn, just as her mother always said. She feared I was inwardly rolling my eyes are her so-called “issues.”  (Her al-Anon sponsor sounded pretty tough, often saying that “all of this is a first-world problem.”)

Jane was a quiet, reflective person.  My silence carried the threat of abandonment, per the idiom or “grammar” of her family’s language games, which tended to erase her very existence. In al-Anon she feared her story was too “trivial” compared to others.

Jane’s noxious family system had encouraged extreme self-reliance as a default (convenient for caregivers.)  I began to understand the tremendous risk she took each time she entered the room.  In talking to me, she pushed up against old family “rules” about staying silent. Together she and I were rewriting the rules, diligently discovering new moves for routines that long been set in stone.

I want to pause here to reflect upon our need to fill the gaps in our frantic ways of life, those routines of chatter, online and elsewhere, perhaps an accompanying fear of boredom, of not being busy to the point of mania. 

It is silence that illuminates our words and the spontaneous truth that waits for us, the vastness of the unknown, murmuring within earshot when we are quiet enough to hear it.