SILENCE AND COUNSELING Introduction According t

We can assume that silence means different things to different people, and that it can communicate many and different things. Silence can, so to say, be 'used' in various ways. We can, for example, elect to be silent, but in some situations silence is imposed, as one cannot find words to respond. Irrespective of the reason for the silence, one can emphasize that a non-message is also a message--the silence tells us something. (p. 41)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of silence in counseling, emphasizing the types of messages that can be communicated with silence, the number of times silence is typically used in a counseling situation, and the factors that allow clients to discern the various meanings that silence is used to convey.

Frequency of Silence in Counseling and How Therapists Us

. . .
hat factors help clients to understand precisely what message a counselor is trying to convey when using silence? Lane, Koetting and Bishop (2002) feel that great care needs to be taken to ensure that clients do get the message intended. They note that the intervention of silence must be skillfully employed which is to say that counselors need to know what they are doing when it comes to using silence as a therapeutic technique. If the counselor is not skillful in using silences to convey whatever messages they wish silence to transmit, the likelihood is, according to the authors, that the silence could be interpreted as "distance, disinterest, and disengagement, leading to breaches in the trust and safety of the therapeutic alliance." (p. 1091). Levitt (2001) states that part of a counselor's skill in knowing how to use silence to convey messages is understanding why and how the client uses it to communicate. In this regard, Levitt notes that clients will often use silence to signal disengagement, or emotionality, or for expressiveness' purposes. At other times, a silence will be merely part of the client's interactive process, or he/she might be pausing to remember something. In any case, in order to use silence properly, cou
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Approximate Word count = 1260
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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