What happens when nobody fills the silence

A question is asked. Nobody answers.

One person is thinking. Another is waiting for someone else to begin. A third has an answer but is deciding whether it is worth saying. The facilitator feels an urge to help.

From outside, there is a silence. Inside it, several different things may be happening.

It is easy to turn the quiet into a diagnosis. The group is disengaged. The question was too difficult. People do not trust one another. Each explanation may be possible. None is established by the absence of speech alone.

What becomes available if we can notice the impulse to fill the silence before obeying it?

For someone who teaches or leads groups, this can be uncomfortable. We are responsible for the time. We want people to feel that something worthwhile is happening. Another question, an explanation, or a joke can bring immediate relief.

But whose relief is it?

Sometimes offering another way in is useful. Sometimes our intervention interrupts the very effort we hoped to support. We cannot decide which merely by adopting a rule that silence is good or that a facilitator should always wait.

We can ask about the particular moment. “I noticed I wanted to say something because the quiet was becoming uncomfortable for me. What was happening for you?”

Now there are accounts to hear. Someone may say they were lost. Someone may say they were about to speak. The silence begins to acquire differences we could not have supplied from the facilitator’s chair.

That is one reason to learn with other people. They can tell us about an experience we were already explaining without them.