Silence in the conversation

Abstract

This paper explores the difficulties of working with clients who struggle to use words in the therapeutic context. How do we work with these difficult clients? I focus particularly on those clients whose organizing principles predispose them to using silence as a means of holding themselves together or who persist in using silence in dissociated ways, often when traumatic memory gets triggered. I present a clinical example, a "silent" client, as a way of developing the sense and feeling of silence in therapy and I explore how we can understand such "silent" clients. Concepts such as dissociation (our clients' and our own), intersubjective and interpersonal listening, and poetic and nonlinear conversation will be considered. Drawing particularly on Bromberg's and Meares' work I will then look at what the therapeutic task is with these clients.