ARTICLE REVIEW: SILENCE DURING THERAPY

Article Review: Silence during Therapy

Article Review: Silence during Therapy

The authors of this article recommended that the counselor must be more action oriented in (a) initiating counseling, (b) structuring the interview, and (c) helping clients cope with pressing social problems of immediate concern to them.

To a great extent, the techniques of the counselor must break traditional training and not rely solely on talk (Calia, 1968). Being action oriented makes the counselor and client deal with the actual rather than the abstract.

Getting job interviews for clients, teaching them specific educational skills, teaching social skills, helping them fill out unemployment forms, or teaching them to take tests are not traditionally defined as counseling.

Yet, such an approach may be of pressing concern to the client. Furthermore, by helping the client through these situational problems, greater trust and rapport may be established. Cobb (1972) concludes that lower class patients respond better to therapists who take a more active role in counseling.

The establishment of a good relationship is the first step toward further exploration of problems that the minority client might wish to share with the counselor.

Significantly more self-exploration is the result when the counselor is able to understand the cultural and class conventions of the client and to share expectations of the process.

This article concluded that in terms of the timing of silence, therapists indicated only moderate agreement with using it early or late in sessions, treatment, or brief therapy.

Therefore, these therapists did not seem to ascribe to the common folk wisdom of beginning sessions with silence to allow clients to determine the flow of the session. Nor did they seem to ascribe to any other simple formula about when to use silence. Once again, the use of silence was probably more dependent on situational variables in treatment than on specific times in sessions or treatment.

In addition, therapists indicated that they learned most of what they knew about using silence by clinical experience and supervision, experimenting with silence through trial and error with clients to find out what level of silence felt comfortable for them with different clients.

The authors analyzed fifty-nine, one-hour interview meetings to determine the way in which quiet interacts with rapport.

Results indicated considerably higher allowances of quiet during minutes rated as very high in rapport versus those ranked as low in rapport, and that counsellor-initiated but client-terminated calms were more expected to assist in the direction of rapport than calms that were initiated and terminated by the counsellor.

The authors suggest that the use of quiet be integrated into training programs, and that practitioners be boosted and not threatened or troubled about using silence throughout interviews.

Additional research needs to be conducted to determine the extent to which the factors relating to silence are generalisable to therapists from a variety of theoretical orientations, to clients presenting with various symptoms, and to a variety of settings.

The quality and quantity of silence in actual therapy sessions should be examined (Greenson, 1967; Stone, 1961). In these sessions, client reactions and experiences of ...