Therapy is tough. I’ll give that to you.
You’re sitting across from your therapist. The last thing that was said has dissolved into air. Your therapist is looking at you, warmly with a slight hint of a smile, and your mind is doing nothing.
No thoughts. No emotions or feelings you can name. Just the low hum of florescent light, the awkward eye contact and the unsettling certainty that you are, somehow, failing miserably at therapy.
You’re not.
What the silence feels like from your chair
For most clients, going blank in a session can give rise to an immediate spiral. (I’m wasting time as I have nothing concrete to tell them. I should have something to say. I’m paying for this one hour and I can’t even think of coming up with a single coherent emotion. What a waste!)
Underneath all this, there’s often something older and quieter i,e., the fear of being seen difficult, hollow, or beyond help.
Clients who have anxious attachment history tend to feel this more acutely. Silence for them can be unsettling as it unconsciously mirrors early experiences of emotional unavailability: a parent who didn’t respond when they needed them the most, a need that went unmet.
That’s why, in a session, the therapist’s stillness, however gentle, can be seen as abandonment before the rational mind catches up.
What’s actually happening on the therapist’s side
Here’s what most clients don’t know: a skilled trauma-informed therapist is rarely concerned when you have nothing to say or when you go silent. They’re busy.
They’re noting what you were talking about just before the words stopped, because that’s often where the tender sensitive thing lives. They’re sitting with the discomfort alongside you deliberately, because they are trained to understand that silence is not dead air. It’s information.
A good therapist will not rush to fill the quiet moment. They know that the moment they do, they’ve resued you from the very feeling that most needed to surface.
Discomfort in therapy isn’t a sign that something is going wrong. It’s frequently a sign that something real is about to go right.
What can you say during these difficult moments
The most useful thing to realise is this: “I don’t quite know what to say” is not a failure to produce therapeutic materal. It is therapeutic material.
Try shedding the fear and saying it out loud. You can feel the fear and say it awkwardly.
- “I’m drawing a blank now, I don’t what to say and I’m pretty embarrassed about it”.
- “I don’t know how or where to start and I’m feeling anxious”.
- “There’s something going on inside me but I can’t find the right words for it just yet”.
Any of these sentences opens a door. Your therapist can work with all of them because these words are honest, they’re present within you, and point directly at the emotional experience you’re currently having, in the session, which is exactly what therapy is all about.
Reframing the ‘Blank’
Silence in therapy is not emptiness. It’s often the opposite. A moment so full, that language hasn’t caught up yet.
Shame does this.
So does holding on to something alone for a long time, particularly exhaustion.
Not knowing what to say might be the most honest, raw thing you’ve brought into the session. And, honesty, however wordless and halting, is always somewhere to begin.