On silence: a language for emotional experience.

Silence is an important aspect of human interaction, but is often experienced with discomfort and quickly filled with words. While quantitative parameters of silence such as timing and duration are easily recognised, qualitative experiential aspects are much more difficult to identify and describe. Emotions are experiential and complex, having antecedents in personal history, but words used to describe emotions are generally inadequate and simplistic. Silence is a useful experiential medium in which to identify and work with emotions. It is necessary to recognise what is being communicated by silence in each silence. This paper explores types of silences encountered in clinical work, and techniques to deal with them, avoiding symbolized language and technical terms of individual schools of psychotherapy.