“I need one person to volunteer as the therapist and another to volunteer as the client,” said the professor. If I acted quickly, I could play the part of the client with very little risk, I thought. “I’ll play the client,” we said at the same time. Another student must have had the same idea. We looked at each other realizing we both had a problem. “You’ll be the therapist,” the professor said, clearly looking in my direction. I looked behind me. “Nope. You. You’ll be the therapist,” she said. My heart climbed into my throat.
“No problem,” I replied. No problem? Why did I just say that? This was a very big problem. I was two semesters into my counseling education. A student sitting to my left nodded encouragingly. “You’re very brave,” she said incorrectly. I wasn’t brave, I was trapped. The professor continued, “For the client, I want you to pick something that isn’t too intense. Something that you would rate as a 5 out of 10.” I tried to collect myself. I’ll be fine. A five out of 10 can’t be too bad. At the very least, I can listen carefully and express compassion.
Role Playing for Real
“Come to the front of the room.” The professor waved us forward. We sat in two chairs that were facing each other. “Begin when you’re ready, please.”
The student pretending to be my client began, “Alright. When I was 15, I was severely beaten by my stepfather. And not just once. Every day. I’ve never been able to get over it. Ruthless. He was just ruthless. And deep down, I think I might have deserved it.”
This couldn’t be a 5 out of 10, could it? I looked at the professor hoping she would redirect the exercise. She didn’t. Sharpening her focus, she looked back at me, waiting for my response. I cleared my throat attempting to buy the smallest amount of time. “It must be very normal to think that way, but I don’t think it’s true. I’m so sorry you went through that.”
“Yeah, I appreciate it. I have had people tell me that before,” he replied.
“So, what else?” I rubbed the back of my neck. The truth is, I didn’t know what else to do. An empty space crawled between us.
“It’s okay, man,” my partner shrugged. Then he stood up and walked back to his chair. With a supportive look, the professor followed him and called for a 10-minute break. I limped back to my seat.
“That must have been hard, but you did great,” said the student sitting next to me. It was compassionate, but it wasn’t true. Whatever success meant in that moment, it required getting past the 30 second mark. My attempt at compassion wasn’t enough. Had this been a real therapeutic hour, it would have ended for me in that first interchange—with 49 minutes to spare.
The Dark Side of Compassion
There was compassion coming from every direction that night. I felt stung by my client’s suffering, and he felt badly about my embarrassment. The professor felt compassion for my client and the student to my left, felt it for me. It was a compassion car wash. But despite compassion moving in every direction, the one thing that didn’t happen was a productive exchange between my (faux) client and me. This wasn’t because compassion was absent. The problem was that compassion was everywhere.
It’s strange to think of compassion as unhelpful, but any reaction that prevents client exploration warrants rethinking. And compassion can do just that. It can lead us down the path of reassurance while obscuring the paths unchosen. Consider the other questions that might have deepened my client’s exploration, instead:
You mentioned being beaten by your stepfather was your fault. Would you tell me about how you’ve come to that conclusion?
When you’ve tried to talk yourself out of being to blame, what made that unsuccessful?
When people have tried to reassure you in the past, what didn’t they understand that made them unpersuasive?
There are many responses that might have deepened that conversation, but my incurious expression of reassurance (“It must be very normal to think that way, but I don’t think it’s true.”) prevented this from happening. It was compassion blocking.
Compassion blocking is the act of expressing reassurance when it would have been better to express curiosity. It avoids the exploration of the client’s inner experience and keeps the conversation in shallow water. But effective therapy calls us down into the deep. So why does compassion blocking occur?
Sometimes, compassion blocking occurs because we’re surprised by a client’s self-talk, and we want to correct it. But most of the time, compassion blocking occurs when we’re in a conversation that makes us uncomfortable. To express curiosity means hearing the client say things we haven’t heard before and this means finding words we’ve never said. So, we keep the waterline at our ankles, because the deeper the water becomes, the harder it is to see. We offer reassurance to reassure ourselves.
We worry that the private limits of our wisdom will become visible. We’re afraid of being confused when we’re supposed to know the way. And perhaps most of all, we fear hearing cries for help and discovering we have no help.
When Silence Comes Second
Whatever fear motivated my compassion blocking that evening, it was surely realized. The irony of my response was that it created the very silence I was hoping to avoid. The silence came because my client decided my reassurance wasn’t credible. And he was right. How could I console someone whose problem I barely understood? He didn’t elaborate because I blocked him from doing so. Silence was his only option. It was his only haven.
While silence in this instance wasn’t helpful, this isn’t true of all quiet moments. In fact, having nothing to say can be the right response to suffering. Despair should make us question the use of words themselves. While it’s true that words can be empty, it’s also true that silences can be full. Silence can make room for something large. It can acknowledge that great pain will need space of its own. That words will crowd a wound this large, but that a silence might hold it.
It shouldn’t have been silence that I feared with my classmate, but silence in the wrong order. Silence appearing before curiosity is different from silence appearing after it. Silence is useful when it comes second. This doesn’t mean words are never required when we travel into deep water. Sometimes the right words make a great difference. But if words are the only tool we have, this creates immense pressure to know what these words should be, and this pressure makes these words harder when they’re needed.
But once the value of silence that comes second is understood, we begin practicing therapy with a greater number of choices. Silence and speaking both become important. This removes pressure, and in the times when words are needed, we discover them more readily. Released from the obligation to fix, we become free to explore.
The connection between my fear of silence and my reactive compassion was a hidden one. My compassion worked as camouflage. It looked like care, but it was self-protection. It wasn’t what I opposed that interfered with effective therapy, but what I believed in most deeply. My values disguised my fear. But this fear of silence was quieted when it no longer threatened to expose me. Instead, silence became an open space, given to those whose pain deserved more than my reassurances could offer.
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