Once, in psych school, I sat quiet for 16 min waiting for my client to start talking. It was challenging. I fixated on the clock in the room, and then waited. At some point I tried to say something empathetic like “Sometimes it’s difficult to find the words. Take your time.” but it didn’t seem to unlock much. It was very uncomfortable. But eventually, the client did start talking. And what came out was real, cautious and raw.
In conversations about work since then, I haven’t sat with silence quite that long. But silences are part of most conversations, and they play a role, have meaning and shape what happens between people. When I started listening to recordings of conversations I had with people I realised that I didn't allow silences. As soon as someone stopped talking, I jumped in with a question. In hindsight, I could hear myself redirecting conversations just as they were becoming revealing or interesting.
A silence can last three seconds. But the story we tell ourselves about those three seconds can be quite elaborate.
I've lost them.
They don't know what to say.
I should have asked a better question.
This isn't going anywhere.
I'm responsible for keeping this conversation alive.
If I don't say something, we'll lose the connection.
I need to help them.
And so, we jump in. We explain, clarify, offer another question, make a joke, change the subject. Sometimes we do this just as the other person is beginning to think or gather the courage to say something difficult. We might be interrupting the very thing we hoped the conversation would produce.
What might silence trigger in us? I think there are a few things happening at once.
1. Uncertainty
Conversation is full of signals. Nods, words, facial expressions, and questions. They help us make sense of how things are going. When those signals disappear, even briefly, we have less information about what's happening between us. Is the other person thinking? Disagreeing? Bored? Uncomfortable? We don't know. And we can find not knowing uncomfortable.
2. A threat to connection
We're social creatures. We care about how we're being received, whether we're understood, and whether we are accepted. A silence can feel like a withdrawal of connection, even when nothing has actually changed. Perhaps we experience the absence of a response as a response in itself.
3. A sense of responsibility
Perhaps we have learned that good conversation means a smooth exchange: one person speaks, the other responds, and things keep moving. Pauses become gaps in the performance. And we feel responsible for maintaining that flow. Perhaps we mistake conversational fluency for conversational quality. Smooth doesn’t necessarily mean good, interesting or revealing. Some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had have involved uncertainty, misunderstandings and corrections, vulnerability, unfinished thoughts and feelings, and moments where neither of us knows what to say.
Of course, silence can be uncomfortable, and in some circumstances it can communicate exclusion, disapproval, intimidation or indifference. We shouldn't romanticise it. But the silence itself doesn't tell us which of these things is happening. The danger may lie in treating our interpretation of the silence as if it were a fact.
I feel uncomfortable, so I assume something is wrong. I assume something is wrong, so I intervene. I intervene to relieve my discomfort, perhaps at the expense of the other person's thinking or the possibility of a different kind of connection.
Learning to sit with silence is more than learning to stay quiet. The other person might need something from us, not just time. They might need to know we're still with them. They might need encouragement to keep going, or a sign that what they've just said has landed. They might need us to acknowledge the difficulty of what they're trying to express. Sometimes the helpful thing is to stay quiet. Sometimes it's to say something.
What if we related to silence differently? As a space in which something might happen. A moment to think. To feel. To reconsider. To pay closer attention to the other person. To allow something difficult to be said.
Sometimes the quality of a conversation may depend as much on what we’re willing to leave open as on what we know how to say.
What might become possible if you didn’t have to fill the silence?
We don’t know what it will produce. Perhaps that’s the point: to remain present without needing to determine the outcome in advance.