Talk Therapy With a Little Less Talking

I have never had a client come into my office who could not think. But plenty of people have trouble feeling something, especially letting themselves stay with their feelings. We call it talk therapy, but is talking the only thing that’s helpful? Would a long silence be a waste of time? What’s a client supposed to do in the session, to get the most of it?

Of course it depends on the person and what they’re dealing with. Talking ABOUT what you think and feel is a vital part of therapy for everyone. But therapy is also a place just to notice how you feel in the moment and feel some of it in silence, without having to apologize or explain or figure anything out. If a client of mine goes silent as they start to experience a feeling, I don’t start asking twenty questions about what’s happening for them. I let them be the first one to start talking again. Usually the moment lasts for less than I think would be beneficial. I suppose it’s not normal in our society to just feel something in the presence of another person without apologizing and explaining what’s going on. But therapy’s not normal, right?

The heart of the point I’m trying to make is: In therapy it’s good to use our analytical skills to help us understand things and learn. But silently being with yourself with an attitude of curiosity and compassion, in the presence of your therapist who is offering you the same thing, is an equally valid way to investigate, to understand, apart from conscious analysis—and it’s the way that most people do not utilize as fully as the other.

So, in your next session, consider pushing yourself a bit and use some of the time to witness yourself in silence (what you’re feeling, what you want to say, how your body is feeling, etc.), and to delay the compulsion to plunge ahead into thinking and talking. It may make your thinking and talking more informed, more deeply connected, for one thing.

People Spectrums

My father was a junior high earth sciences teacher when I started as an elementary student at the same school. When the last class was done each day and the big kids pushed their way out the classroom doors, I would sneak by them and sit at his desk in the office at the back.

The classroom often smelled like bunson burners the kids just extinguished. Walls were lined with shelves of rock and mineral samples like quartz crystals, pyrite, micah, yellow sulfur. There were preserved butterflies and moths that I knew my oldest brother had collected, labeled and stuck to pins in wooden cases, an erosion table with a pump sending water in little rivers downhill over a bed of sand, a functioning ham radio set, a weather station recording data.

I liked to play with the large prism on his desk. If you held it up to the light coming through the window blinds, you would see lines and dots of color show up all over the desk and walls. When I was finally old enough to be a student in my dad’s class, I learned those colors were the ROY G BIV of a rainbow, same as outside. He taught us that while we see light as white, it’s actually a spectrum, composed of wavelengths, which can show up as those distinct colors.

This is true for people too. We typically see each other (and ourselves) as a single, indivisible self. But if we hold up a “prism,” just like with apparently white light, we see our wavelengths show up.

Internal Family Systems is one of a number of psychotherapies that suggest each of us have wavelengths or distinguishable parts/aspects/areas to our selves which we and others can become aware of. This is considered standard equipment for human beings, not a sign of disorder, as popular culture has warned through sensationalized depictions of Dissociative Identity Disorder. These normally occurring parts are accompanied by a central, deeper Self, whose ideal role is to be the main attachment figure for the other parts, like a healthy parent in a family system—in this case an internal family system.

However, overwhelming traumatic experiences often leave a single part of ourselves stuck with bearing most of the intolerable memories, emotional pain, reactivity, etc., while the rest of the person tries to move on with life. Other parts may be enlisted to manage the burdened part—to keep it from being triggered or to minimize the flooding if it is. Either suddenly or gradually, the burdened part becomes exiled from the Self, the rest of the parts, and from day to day life—perhaps even largely from conscious awareness. The heart and mind find their way forward, but it’s like a bone healing over without being properly set; the arm may function again, but there’s chronic pain and vulnerability.

This is one of the times when IFS can be a good treatment, can help a client find their Self and see their parts: the roles they play and why, the burdens they carry and how they might find relief. Not everyone is up for jumping into a therapy like this, but you can start gradually. The next time you feel a strong emotion or reaction, try to offer yourself some genuine curiosity rather than judgment. If you do, even a little, then you will be using your Self to see and listen to a part of you that likely needs it very much.