Why therapists actually love that awkward silence

If I just say the words "awkward silence," can you already start to feel the subtle discomfort begin to creep up through your body? The compulsion to already devise the quickest route to escape it? The anxiety, self consciousness, and existential dread that perhaps this painful experience will never come to an end?

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

For those of you who have been in therapy or worked with a coach 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? What the hell am I paying for, are we actually getting anywhere?

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

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 (as in coaching and therapy, too) is to notice when we feel the urge to talk, and first ask ourselves what purpose it's to serve. Is it to ease our own discomfort with the silence? 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 I impatiently rushed into speaking in order to satisfy my students' need to "hurry up and relax" already, and the times I stepped back in order to create the conditions to actually slow them down. Speak too early and I would rush into everything, bringing all my students' swirling thoughts, moods and anxieties from the rest of the day along with all of us. Push just past the point of discomfort in remaining quiet, and suddenly - oftentimes as if it was in one singular moment or one simultaneous exhale - I could feel the whole class release the tension they stepped into the room with and become more calm, more grounded, more here.

So what actually goes on when we lean into silence? One answer is: change. According to Gestalt therapist Gary Yontef, change is a "time/space process," and when we start to understand our experience in a therapy session or yoga class through this lens, we see that silence itself works dynamically in both these domains. 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. 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 and we'll be stuck in an awkward unmoving conversation for the rest of the hour unless we take action to actively change it ourselves. But if we accept the assumption that change is inevitable, silence can be one of the most powerful tools we have in which to allow such change to happen without distraction or interference. In fact, it also removes much of the noise constantly taking up our attention and allows us to bring the subtle change process happening in the background to the front.

And silence is also so much more. It's the unknown. It's what's bubbling just below the surface we don't know if we should touch, or the difficult feelings and memories we unconsciously seek to avoid. It's depth. It's giving our minds the time to digest and fully make contact with whatever just happened, rather than submitting to the impulse to immediately jump to whatever's next. It's being vulnerable. Being seen. Being exposed without something to hide behind. And it's a form communication in and of itself. It's 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.

This week start to notice what comes up for you in silence. Is it as sense of social anxiety? Impatience? Sadness? Peace? Where else is that a theme? How does it show up throughout your life?

And then 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.