What is it about?
Silence is a common part of psychotherapy, but there is limited research on how therapists actually use it. This study interviewed practicing psychotherapists and analyzed their accounts using a constructivist grounded-theory approach. The analysis produced a model with four parts: the situations that lead to silence, the skills that make silence useful, what silence can achieve in sessions, and practical issues such as timing.
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Why is it important?
Therapists routinely face the question of whether to speak or stay silent, yet guidance is often vague or divided by theoretical tradition. By mapping clinicians’ lived decision-making into a clear framework (conditions, cornerstones, consequences, considerations), this study makes the use of silence easier to teach, supervise, and discuss across modalities.
Perspectives
As clinicians, we can feel pressure to “keep the work moving” by filling gaps with words. What stood out in these interviews was how often silence was described not as absence, but as an active, shared space that can comfort, challenge, and help both people notice what is happening in the relationship.
Michael Montgomery
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The shifting sound of silence: A constructivist grounded theory, Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, April 2023, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/capr.12654.
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