A Silence Arises
In this piece for Inside Out, the Journal of the Irish Association of Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, Susan Holliday illustrates how the space between words creates an opening onto a deeper experience of self.
A shiny clingfilm of cheerfulness covers Rachel’s face, denying air and movement to the being beneath. ‘I’ve been bulimic since I was fourteen,’ she tells me. Her voice is bright but brittle. It’s as though she just told me she has blue eyes and brown hair. Rachel is in her final year of a law degree. ‘It’s hard work,’ she tells me. Then, sounding strained and off-key, she adds ‘but very rewarding.’ Her expression remains set. Nothing moves. Buried in the subtext of this first meeting I hear the silent plea ‘find me’.
Our early sessions resound with stories about other people in Rachel’s life. She returns often to accounts of her amazing parents, both barristers in a successful legal practice. Each week she brings a new drama from the courtroom to share with me. The more they unfold into their brilliance, the more eclipsed her life seems to become. I do what I can to slow everything down, so we can attend to what might be happening in the currents of her own being. It’s as though we are sitting by a mountain stream alive with surface burble and babble. I feel myself leaning in, listening for the lower octaves of a deeper sound beneath these top notes. Nothing about this is easy. We are working against the grain of a lifetime’s habit of tuning herself out.
Entangled in the drama of other people’s lives, Rachel has lost touch with the sound of her own authentic aliveness. In the riverbed of her being there is no comforting sound, no original voice. Just a dull and desolate silence. It is the silence of one who has never been listened to, the silence of the disregarded soul. Rachel is mortally afraid of this silence, afraid she could drown in its barren emptiness. To guard against this fear, she fills the sessions with words.
Ma: An emergent space
In the West we have come to understand silence as absence, nothingness, void. Spaces between words can feel like failures of articulation, or dumb stupidity. We rush to fill this ‘awkward’ silence. Eastern traditions on the other hand have always emphasised the pregnancy of silence, its fullness and potentiality. Japanese culture celebrates the idea of Ma as the unsounded realm from which all things are born. This Ma is not a void, but an entity, filled with emotion, meaning and purpose. Ma is the momentary pause in speech needed to convey depth of feeling, truth and meaning, the silence between notes that makes the music. (Matsumoto, 2020).
In Japanese culture, silence and space are central to all forms of expression. In architectural design, the interior space is left empty of decorative fixtures and ornaments. This emptiness allows the space to be defined by the experiences which pass through it – the momentary gatherings of people and objects. Seen in this way, a room is defined not by the sum total of what we come to ‘know about’ it (the concrete facts and permanent objects), but rather as a vessel for the relationships that are alive within it. We might draw a parallel with a river, where the riverbanks are walls which contain the ever-changing life of the water which flows between them.
Sitting with Rachel in these early sessions, I hold both the defining facts she tells me about her life and at the same time I am searching for an opening, a space between words, which might reveal her authentic aliveness. I am listening for the original sound of her own true soul river. In psychosynthesis psychotherapy, this attitude of attending to the surface story of a wounded personality whilst simultaneously listening for traces of a person’s original nature, is known as “bifocal vision” (Whitmore,1998, p.62). Whilst the therapist pays attention to the expression of the personality, with all its historical experience and physical, emotional and mental characteristics, she simultaneously watches for evidence of a more original and essential Self. This vital dimension of being is governed by its own unique purpose and potentiality, which is constantly seeking to emerge. Aligning with this emerging purpose lies at the heart of an authentic, meaningful and fulfilling life.
‘What is it that you listen for?’ I ask a musician friend. We are sitting at her kitchen table sipping mugs of Italian coffee, musing over the parallels between the conversation of instruments in her string quartet and the interplay of two people in a therapy relationship. ‘Notes don’t simply add up to something meaningful,’ she says. ‘When I play, I’m listening for a deeper voice within the music. I’m feeling my way towards the sound as it was originally conceived. Fresh. Sheer. And wholly uncorrupted.’ ‘And how do you know when you have found this original sound?’ I ask. ‘Mostly you just know when you haven’t found it,’ she replies. ‘The musical conversation is always a kind of yearning or searching for something lost.’ This strikes me as a perfect description of the therapy conversation. We listen for traces of the original, uncorrupted ‘voice’ of a person. The core of who they most authentically are. Life circumstances tend to overlay or distort the incomparable nature of this original self. This loss of connection can leave us with a sort of nameless yearning, a longing which often ignites the impulse to begin a journey of self-discovery.
Traces of the hidden dimension of our incomparable being rarely announce themselves with fanfare, but rather seem to peep through cracks in the surface story, often in those rare moments when we are lost for words. In Japanese, the kanji symbol representing Ma shows a combination of ‘door’ 門 and ‘sun’日. Together these two characters depict a space between forms, an opening or crevice through which sunlight peeps in 間. In his song ‘Anthem’ Canadian poet and musician Leonard Cohen famously expressed this sense of Ma as a crack through which we catch a glimpse of a deeper reality: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”(Cohen, 1992).
The crack
In therapy, weeks of conversation often turn on a decisive moment when the rhythm of interplay suddenly cracks. A creative rupture punctures the flow with a sudden silence or a pregnant pause. Something authentic and un-curated can enter the space at any moment. These unexpected openings are often fleeting. Virginia Woolf refers to them as “matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” (Woolf, 1927, p.156). Listening to Rachel’s account of herself, I try to hold an unbroken line of attention. I can’t afford to miss a beat, because at some point there might be a tear in the surface score, a crack through which we might catch a glimpse of her original nature. Neither of us can be sure what we are listening for. There is no score for revelation. All I know at this point is that this opening onto the buried text is likely to surface in a kind of rupture where sound gives way to silence. In a moment of Ma.
Rachel arrives at her session today flushed and flustered. Her father has just won a high profile legal case. Mirroring the look on her face, I venture ‘you must feel very proud?’ ‘I am,’ she replies. As she says this, Rachel’s hand jerks suddenly towards her throat, which flushes red. She coughs, as though choking on her own words. A look of bewilderment flares across her face. The whole gesture wings past us in the blink of an eye. The discrepancy between the story Rachel is telling me and the evidence of her body is palpable. Neither of us has a clue what just happened. All at once we are both wide-eyed and speechless. Words fail us.
This startled pause, which cleaves the familiar flow of words, seems to indicate we have come to a place of fracture. Through this opening we glimpse a fleeting view of an unfamiliar presence. Something, or someone, has just broken through the clingfilm of her defences. In this decisive moment I am left with the sense that Rachel has just given herself away. The stranger in our midst is already disappearing, like the tail end of a dream and I catch myself thinking ‘it’s probably nothing.’ But then again, perhaps we have found a hairline crack in the surface narrative, a doorway to revelation.
In the cavernous silence which follows, I find myself blushing, as though unaccountably shy in the presence of something ‘other’. I am aware of a break in eye contact and a temporary cessation in my ability to think. In his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ Rainer Maria Rilke (1904) describes such moments of disclosure:
They are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. (Letter No.8)
Rachel looks at me with the searching eyes of a child who cannot understand why I am not just getting us ‘back on track’. Staying with the silence, I find myself mirroring her gesture. I bring my hand up to my throat. There is a subtle shift in our relating. The flow of time slows. In this moment of witness Rachel understands that her gesture has been seen. Resisting the impulse to return to the comfort of language, we wait. It takes courage to stay with the wilderness of silence. Like many of us, Rachel has come to believe that beyond the babbled drama of other people’s lives, her inner self is just a barren wasteland.
Rachel is first to break the silence. Letting go of the security of her familiar narrative, she confesses ‘It’s not a new feeling. I try to avoid it. I don’t like the way it makes me feel.’ Her eyes are suddenly hot with tears. The pull to turn away from this unwelcome feeling is overwhelming. Sensing the need to stay with the wisdom of the body, I ask Rachel ‘how might you enact this feeling, if you gave it free reign?’ Rachel pauses and draws breath. Then, with newfound conviction, she stands up, raises her right foot and brings it down heavily on the floor. Unnerved by the force of this stomping, every ounce of me strains to stay with the unfamiliar presence emerging. ‘And what does your foot want to do?’ I ask. Looking straight at me, Rachel replies ‘It wants to wreck things. Spoil things. Stamp on things.’
Released from its buried chamber, a newly untethered creature seems to have been set loose from the darkness. To my surprise I find myself punctured by an image of the Minotaur, the mythical creature described by Ovid as half-man, half-bull. Locked away in the bowels of a labyrinth the creature was severed from its natural sources of sustenance and fed on the unnatural offerings of sacrificed maidens and youths. Unhinged by this monstrous treatment, the Minotaur became crazed with grief. That’s when I recall Rachel’s diagnosis. ‘Bulimia’. The word originates in the Greek bous, meaning ‘bull’ and limos meaning ‘hunger’. Rachel, it seems, is ‘bull-hungry’. Perhaps she is also ‘bull-angry’.
Drawing on my own courage I ask ‘What things would you wreck? What might you want to stamp on?’ Steeling herself Rachel answers, ‘All the beautiful, special, amazing things that everyone else gets to do, except me.’ And there we have it, our first view onto the overlooked interior of her being. Peeping through the narrow crack of her incongruous gesture we now have a glimpse of a concealed drama full of choked-up longing, wrapped up in shame and envy. Instead of a barren emptiness what we have stumbled on, beneath the clingfilm of compliance, is the forsaken cry for an unlived life. Released from its damming authority, the label ‘bulimia’ opens like a window to reveal a vital inner drama.
To explore the roots of her hunger, I ask Rachel when she last felt deeply fulfilled. ‘When was the last time you got to do something beautiful and amazing?’ Eyes suddenly bright, she recalls a childhood memory. ‘Before she died, my grandmother gave me a dolls-house. A three-storey replica of a Georgian townhouse. I loved it more than anything.’ Tucked away in her bedroom with this handmade treasure, Rachel would spend hours absorbed in an intimate world of imaginal play. Many of the original pieces of furniture had been lost, so she would refashion everyday objects to replace them. Postage stamps became framed masterpieces on the walls, a small stack of matchboxes, brightly painted, stood in for a chest of drawers, whilst the dining table began life as a playing card glued onto a bobbin of cotton thread. Immersed in the making of these miniature worlds she would feel enormous, like Alice in Wonderland.
Recollecting these experiences, Rachel’s face is rapt. Feeling the power of her aliveness, I ask if she still has the dolls-house. ‘No,’ she replies, her tone suddenly flat. ‘Not since I started secondary school.’ On that crisp autumn day in her eleventh year, Rachel returned home to discover a smart black desk in the place where the dolls-house once stood. ‘Dolls houses,’ her father explained firmly, ‘are for babies.’ It was time for his daughter to grow up. Blind with a shame-filled grief Rachel searched everywhere for the dolls-house, but she found nothing. Her heart’s true joy was never mentioned again. Over the months that followed Rachel was repeatedly told to put away all her ‘childish play’. Her parents had high hopes for her. There was nothing to stop her ‘making it all the way to the top’, they said. She too could be a barrister one day. Rachel was rewarded for studying hard and for being helpful to her mother. She found herself increasingly walking in the shadow of other people’s expectations. Sealed up with shame, the creative child was hidden away, like the minotaur, in a dark chamber deep inside.
Recalling this painful betrayal clearly for the first time, Rachel begins to sense the buried truth, which surfaced so unexpectedly as she recounted the news of her father’s legal triumph. Lauding his achievement, she had caught herself in a flash of longing for her own joy, for the joy he had so definitively trampled on. Horrified by the exposure of her envy and forbidden longing, the shamed child had reached towards her throat in an unsuccessful attempt to strangle the dangerous disclosure. The force of this contradiction opened up a crack in her defences and in the pregnant pause which followed, we found a doorway to her original self.
It takes time for Rachel to trust the forbidden truth of her gesture, to free herself from the injunctions laid down by her parents. Her journey back to her original joy centres on giving space for her essentially creative nature to become vivid, distinct and legitimate. These days Rachel is a set designer for a children’s theatre company. She creates spaces on stage for the play of imagination. On the other side of silence, the little girl with the dolls-house has finally found her original voice.
The silence in the middle
Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim suggests that in music there are several types of silence. “There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle” (Barenboim, 2004, para.2). Within the therapy conversation there is always the ‘silence in the middle’. For every word spoken there is at the same time, all that is unspoken. There is all that appears unspeakable. Silence, the unspoken space, can be the blueprint to a life. It has a history, a form. Drawn from the inchoate depth of being, silence can be a presence, an “unthought known” (Bollas, 1987:277-83). Sometimes we have no words to clothe this ‘known’ because the buried experience is rooted in an age before we developed speech. Then there are silenced truths that are simply unspeakable, due to shame or terror. Or love. Or loss.
Beyond our wounding, in the very womb of our being, our deepest truths are ineffable, seemingly too great to be expressed in words, yet often palpable in the spaces between words. These in-between spaces are not blank or empty, but luminous, particular and pregnant with implicate knowing. Bearing our deepest recollection of an original state of wholeness, the ‘silence in the middle’ is a seedbed of possibility. An intimation of who we are meant to be.
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Author’s Note:
Rachel’s story is a creative collage which conveys insights from my therapy practice whilst preserving client confidentiality.
References:
Barenboim, D. (2004). The phenomenon of sound. Retrieved from https://danielbarenboim.com/the-phenomenon-of-sound
Bollas, C. (1987). The shadow of the object. Free Association Books.
Cohen, L. (1992). Anthem [Song]. On The Future.
Matsumoto, K (2020). MA - The Japanese concept of space and time. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@kiyoshimatsumoto/ma-the-japanese-concept-of-space-and-time
Rilke, R.M. (1904). Letters to a young poet, Reginald Snell translation, Dover Publications.
Whitmore, D. (1998). Psychosynthesis counselling in action. Sage Publications Ltd.
Woolf, V. (1927). To the lightouse, Penguin Classics.
