"Beginning therapists must learn that there are times to sit in silence, sometimes in silent communion, sometimes simply while waiting for patients' thoughts to appear in a form that they may be expressed."
Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy
Some clients come to us with a narrative that is self-generating to the extent that their story is expelled fast and relentlessly. They want to tell how it is for them and the material is infinite. As a therapist you may interject to ask questions, to challenge inconsistent re-tellings, to pause and take a moment to assess and validate the impact of a life-event. As a good therapist, you will pause the session and try and find some stillness in silence with your client, to ask them what is happening in their body, something they may have disconnected from long ago. There is an irony that in talking therapies it is the stillness and silence that can often speak most loudly.
But why?
The story will have been told many times, if only in the client's head. It will have been told so many times that the emotional narrative has receded. The story itself has become a distraction from the emotions that once cleaved to it. As psychotherapists we are emotion-hunters. Your words are important, how you tell your story is important to us but only as a dossier of clues that, in time, we hope will lead us to the client's emotions. Emotions, when we are experiencing them, can be very exposing. They can feel out of our control and that makes us feel vulnerable. We live in a world where rational thought is prized above all else as a means of decision-making and moving forward in a cohesive, sensible manner. And yet, studies suggest that we are mostly making decisions (about 95%) for impulsive, intuitive reasons that we like to dress up with rational explanations and justifications. In this way, who can forgive us if we have buried the emotional wound, the emotional outburst waiting to happen? We have been talked out of our emotions since we were very small. There are extreme and traumatic consequences to this in childhood - children who are told they are safe when they are not, children who are told to override how they feel to make others feel better. However, for most of us there is just a slow process of distancing from what we think may hurt us and what we have been lead to believe is an unnecessary part of human existence. We strive to move through life emotion-less and we may, at times, achieve this. When the career that we have spent some time constructing starts to provide us with stimulating work for which we are highly remunerated, we may throw ourselves into that world, body and soul. Society will applaud us for our productivity, for the way we are contributing whilst making ourselves financially independent and therefore untouchable. But the workaholic is not so different from the alcoholic. Neither is an addict first and foremost; the workaholic just picked a more acceptable and enabling way of numbing. Because the workaholic also has funds, which means in his spare time he can afford to go and visit European cities, jump out of aeroplanes, eat in elite restaurants. He can mix up the distraction.
Until one day a small crack appears. Maybe he feels too tired to jump out of another aeroplane, maybe he looks back and wonders where all his friends went, maybe his parents die, maybe his back seizes up. Quite suddenly the distraction does not seem enough; emotions, particularly those that we deem negative - sadness and fear - start to seep into our lives. Perhaps we visit a therapist to ask what on earth is wrong with us. We will hope that the therapist has a way of putting the feelings into some kind of airtight container and burying them at sea. It feels preposterous that what the therapist will ask of us is that we try, slowly and with courage we don't think that we have, to get closer to the emotions. We must move forward with curiosity and faith; faith that they will not overwhelm us. At first, even a hint of feeling may cause us to weep and wring our hands, may even induce a panic attack. Our body and mind are screaming at us to get away. Perhaps we do but it is important to understand that we cannot regulate what we cannot feel. Those feelings will continue to loom large like monsters until we practice feeling them. Only then will they start to shrink. When we move away from our distractions into stillness, even if it's for only ten minutes of mindfulness a day, we allow ourselves to get better acquainted with our emotions. A whole bank of understanding exists within our sentient selves, a whole new way of experiencing the world that we have not allowed to flourish. We have survived on thought and reason for so long, we have imagined that it is the only way to decode the world around us.
It is worth mentioning that when we numb ourselves with distraction, which we all do to some extent because too much reality is brutal, we cannot choose to only numb the sadness and the anxiety. We will also numb the higher range of joy that can be present in life. We are literally dialling down the frequency on all our feelings. When we learn this new language, when we practice it daily, we will find that it enables us to communicate with the world around us in a way that enhances our lived experience and makes us feel fully alive.
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