My therapist tells me that I am the only client she has ever had that shuts down so bad that I can't talk at all. I might sit there for 30 minutes and barely say a word. She is making me feel like something is wrong with me. I can't force myself to talk. Believe me, I would much rather talk to her than sit in that awkward silence!

If I remember right, there are others on PC who do that. I can't be the only one! I know I have posted a thread like this before, but I still struggle a lot with this. I am trying to think of a way to help me get past this when I get stuck. In the past, I brought music, pictures, blanket, pillow, sat on the floor, paced the floor, played 20 questions game with her, brought journal notes, wrote during our session, etc......I can't think of anything else to do!

As a child, I was somewhat hyper. I remember being told to "stop talking so loud", "stop talking so fast", or "stop talking altogether!" I was told that I was hard to follow because I kept jumping from one topic to another and it was not making sense. This is all symptoms of bipolar disorder.

Maybe I am feeling like that now? I finally have a special time to "talk" and many times I find that I can't! I can talk as much as I want, as loud as I want, as fast as I want, yet I won't or can't. I am beginning to see very clearly how our childhood has alot to do with the person that we become as adults.

Of course, my therapist also feels that there is something buried so deep inside of me that I am scared to death to look at it. I don't know what that would be. I can't think of anything about my childhood that I haven't already shared with her.

[rainbow8]

When you get stuck and can't talk, is it in response to a question that your T asks you or do you start the session not talking? I used to freeze up in therapy because I was afraid of my T or what she would think of me. I didn't feel safe with that T. Do you feel safe with your T? Do you know why you can't talk? Can you draw how you feel when that happens? Maybe in the session? I fingerpainted once in my session and that relaxed me. What about meditation/breathing? Will your T do that with you?

I used to have selective mutism as a child and I remember when I couldn't talk to people. I sort of disassociated, I think, to avoid talking. I don't know exactly why I couldn't talk, though.

It does sound like you've tried a lot of things. Can you accept that you have to communicate a different way when you can't talk? Just write notes back and forth to your T and don't get anxious about not talking? Is it when you're talking about hard things or just anything?

Silence in therapy isn't necessarily bad, though. Maybe you just need to sit there for awhile and try not to judge the silence.

I'm sure you'll get other responses because it's a more common problem than you think. You're not alone!!!

[greengrasshopper]

Oh yea it drives me up the wall. T has even said to me you obviously have had a marked decrease in your functioning you were working and now you can't even hold a conversation one on one with me when you have met me 5 times before lol. I do really try but somehow i find myself silent and staring out the window or muttering "I don't know" to all her questions. It must be super frustrating for her!

[SoupDragon]

I am sure I can sit for whole sessions barely saying anything. Actually T and I were reflecting recently and T said at the beginning he had started to wonder if I needed to see someone else as he thought I would never be able to talk to him. So I know you are not the only one that finds it hard to talk in sessions.

Mine may be partly due to the content of the stuff in the sessions, but also I was always dominated by my eccentric father and later dominating ex, so I was never allowed to say much.

I just believe this stuff will flow when it is ready to and that by seeing it as an issue, for me, increases my anxiety which makes me more quiet.

Soup

[growlycat]

Originally Posted by rainbow8

I used to have selective mutism as a child ...

Wow. Me too! It started with scary adults then it got to the point that I was afraid to talk to my own (very kind) grandparents. A very upsetting time for me, everything made me anxious before I had a word for it!!

[suzzie]

i barely talk in my sessions. i often cant even finish a sentence. and my answers, if i do, are one or two words most times. my t is a good talker though. and doesnt seem bothered by all the silence. i think she likes it. hope it will get better for you.

[ECHOES]

((Squiggle)) My therapist and I just talked about this (again) last night. It's something we talk about when it happens because it's important. She just took a class and I was her case study. Last night she was telling me about feedback she got from another person in the class and how his words were on her mind the session before when I did it again. When I found myself pulling away, giving one word answers if I could answer at all.

I am always trying to NOT say something when I am like that. It takes a lot of focus and energy to not say something!

This time it was about something that happened to me years ago, that I was relating to what we were talking about that was happening in the here and now. Other times it is because I am feeling something I don't want to feel, and often that is anger.

So we talked about what it's like for me when this happens, and what it's like for her and how she can help when she sees me going that direction. Just bringing it to the forefront and noticing it and talking about it is very helpful, even if it's her talking and me listening. With the focus and her patience, I'm now able to get out of it then or after the session. It used to take me a lot longer. I think it's important and I love it that we turn it into something to learn from. I'm usually embarrassed when it happens and afterwards, but she is someone I can be embarrassed with, and going through it with her solidifies the trust in the relationship.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by greengrasshopper

...you obviously have had a marked decrease in your functioning...

Does she really talk like that? (roll eyes)

[greengrasshopper]

Yip, those are the exact words lol but she did then say "no offense". But don't let me sound too harsh though because I do actually like her :-)

[nicoleflynn]

Could you sit with a pad of paper, and just write a response or a thought?

You could use your voice without speaking.

Obviously, if you were told NOT to talk as a child, this is still affecting you....old tapes.

[granite1]

i have a very hard time talking in T and have gone weeks without speaking a word.i am doing a bit better though.but i do still fall back into total silence,some of the things my T does is to insist that i at least respond to her by saying hi or some greeting in the beginning of the session.she will remind me of the consequences of remaining silent during the whole session.she will get on the floor and play games with me to help me relax.she has also done other things to help me relax,like breathing and moving my body.she has also restricted the forms of communication i am allowed to use with her.i can call and talk to her any time and she seems to return the call with in the hour or so. i can read stuff to her i write.i can not e-mail,text,or mail anything she will not read it.and a lot of times she lets the silence be what it is and just sits with me. she also doesn't seem to make to much of the situation.she seems to insist that i use my words as a way to communicate but if i choose not to she is OK with my silence and doesn't demand i talk.these are some things i see my T as doing to try and help me.

what i do that helps,i come here and practice what i may want to say and get things in my head kind of less complicated.i get all kinds of feedback and encouragement here to speak what is going on in my head.at the very least i say hi to T when i meet her.i am willing to sit on the floor or try other things to relax. i write things down to read etc...i'm not sure how much these all help make things easier for me or not. when i look back on the times that i have spoke to her more then hello none of these things seemed to make it easier .it seems i know how terrified i am.i go there and force myself through all the terror,anger,uncomfortablness,and all the complete awfulness that i experience and do it anyway,sometimes it is a whisper.say what i need to say and then DUCK.but sometimes it is just plain impossible and i just stay silent and i get frustrated but sometimes it just is what it is

sorry so long winded.i hope some of this may help.it is clear that i have a lot of work to do on this very subject but i am trying

[Sannah]

Squiggle in your other threads the issue that you won't deal with has been brought up (I can't remember what it is now, maybe self acceptance?). You clearly state that you won't go there but I think this is the issue that is keeping you stuck.

[Perna]

Originally Posted by Squiggle328

I remember being told to "stop talking so loud", "stop talking so fast", or "stop talking altogether!" I was told that I was hard to follow because I kept jumping from one topic to another and it was not making sense.

How do you secretly feel about this? Do you agree with them? My husband has to help me sometimes by saying, "I don't hear any nouns". When I told my therapist that, she brightened up noticeably and asked, "Can I say that too?"

We struggled for 7-8 years with my "avoiding" her by doing my jumping subjects and trying to avoid letting her be on the "same page" I was. Once or twice she asked me to do free association but it was a disaster, I was off any path we had me on and lost in the swamp in less than two thoughts :-)

The first time I saw her though, ten years before the above 7-8 years, I had a year or more of the silence most sessions. We did not know me enough and she was still new to being a therapist so we didn't deal with it well, we were not a good team until nearly 15 years later. At the end of the first bout of therapy with her, she was teaching me to acknowledge what the other person said (by rote; I hated it and complained and struggled against it) as I'd do my jumping, giving no clues to the other what the subject was since I was doing a lot of thinking inside my head in-between subjects and the other person could not see inside my head So, when she responded to something I said, we were making me acknowledge her response in some way, say, "I hear you, you said. . .". It was nearly impossible for me at that time.

I can see how related my silence and acknowledgement struggles of 1978-87 were to my run-around, keep-off-of-my-page, no nouns, struggles of 1996-2003ish were (therapy went to 2005 but we eventually fixed and added tools for dealing with the underlying issues I had that were causing the difficult behavior). I figured out what some of my problem was; my mother had a brain tumor and had difficulty talking/making sense when I was just learning to talk; even now, when I get anxious or excited, my speech gets noticeably less comprehensible and I "lose" words.

I was struck by your being "too loud" as a child, as if you were trying to drown something or someone out? I know I'm one of five children and all of us at the dinner table with our parents and sometimes childhood friends, trying to get acknowledge/heard could be difficult Maybe you were trying to be heard and, since you were a child, didn't know that volume couldn't help if the other was "deaf". Quick movements remind me of a nervous, scared animal too? Such an animal (think rabbit :-) only has one other, opposite trick in their book, sit absolutely still and, wait for it. . . silent. Your quickness won't get you away from your therapist like the loud quickness keep away the acknowledgement that your parents weren't listening/caring for your needs? What does that leave?

Originally Posted by Squiggle328

Of course, my therapist also feels that there is something buried so deep inside of me that I am scared to death to look at it. I don't know what that would be. I can't think of anything about my childhood that I haven't already shared with her.

I don't have any advice about the silence issue as I don't have much experience with that.

What caught my attention was this last paragraph. Many years ago, I had a T basically tell me the same thing. He said he had a vision of me hanging over the edge of a dark pit where I couldn't see the bottom. He had the feeling that whatever was at the bottom of the pit was pretty awful, but he felt like if I let go to drop it wouldn't be a very long drop.

He was right. I finally let go and dropped into the yuck, and it didn't take long to get there. The yuck wasn't fun, but ultimately it was healing to let go of the edge.

Originally Posted by rainbow8

When you get stuck and can't talk, is it in response to a question that your T asks you or do you start the session not talking? Most of the time it happens on the way to the session. I can feel it coming on. Nothing has to really trigger it. There is something about walking in her office that makes me completely shut down at times.

Do you feel safe with your T? Yes, I am comfortable with her. Even though I don't like her, I like her. That is crazy, but true.

Do you know why you can't talk? I am not sure. She talks to me, but I won't answer her. I ignore her. Is that not weird? I sometimes turn my chair away from her so that I don't have to look at her and she can't look at me. If I start to cry, she can still see that. She will ask me what the tears are about. I ignore her. She hands me a tissue. I ignore that. I am totally being a defiant brat!

Can you accept that you have to communicate a different way when you can't talk? Just write notes back and forth to your T and don't get anxious about not talking? When I shut down like that, we have often written back and forth. I bring a notebook with me everytime just for that purpose.

Is it when you're talking about hard things or just anything? Probably hard things. Sometimes I feel like she is tired of me and doesn't really want me there. This is that negative tape playing in my mind. When those thoughts come right before I go into a session, shut down will happen for sure!

Silence in therapy isn't necessarily bad, though. Maybe you just need to sit there for awhile and try not to judge the silence. I feel like I am wasting money when I do that. If it takes me 30 minutes to get started, we still have an hour to work on things. Often times when I have a terribly hard time getting the courage up to talk, we meet for longer. I feel that I am taking advantage of her. Then again, she is the therapist. She can tell me when it is time for the session to end. We have gone 2 hours many, many times.

I'm sure you'll get other responses because it's a more common problem than you think. You're not alone!!!

I don't understand why she has never been faced with this before. I may copy some of the responses on here and show her that I am not the only one who goes into the mute phase! I want so bad to stop doing that. She told me that she will be glad when I can learn to stop it before it happens. She told me that she doesn't want to see me come in pain and then leave in pain.

I feel like she thinks I am doing it on purpose, or that I can make myself stop doing it. I can't!

Originally Posted by Sannah

Squiggle in your other threads the issue that you won't deal with has been brought up (I can't remember what it is now, maybe self acceptance?). You clearly state that you won't go there but I think this is the issue that is keeping you stuck.

If I knew "how" to go there, I would. She tells me that I have such a negative self image about myself that I assume others do too. This causes me to get hurt over and over by things people say or do because I take it the wrong way.

In my career, I am professional. In my everyday life, people think I am fine. I have been told many times that I carry myself in a manner that speaks "Authority Figure", "Very Controlled", and "Confident". That is bizarre. So far from who I think I am.

With others I can play the role, but with myself, I can't really do that because my negative self image won't let me accept myself for some reason. I don't have any real reason to be so hard on myself, so why am I doing this? I sure wish I could figure that out.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by Squiggle328

I don't understand why she has never been faced with this before.

Not the most encouraging thing for a T to say, is it?

It may be true that T has never seen a case like yours, but probably best not to volunteer that information.

Is you ask directly, T should say, "No two cases are exactly alike, and yours does have some unusual features. But the basic issues of love and shame and fear and anger apply to everyone."

[greengrasshopper]

Obviously, if you were told NOT to talk as a child, this is still affecting you....old tapes.[/quote]

This is a very common childhood experience is it not?
You always hear adults say ....
Shhhh
Speak when spoken to
Children should be seen not heard
I'm the adult, i speak, you listen etc.

I find it an interesting theory as to why people can't speak freely as adults. Worth thinking about even if only to be sure not to treat the children i interact with this way.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by greengrasshopper

This is a very common childhood experience is it not?
You always hear adults say ....
Shhhh
Speak when spoken to
Children should be seen not heard
I'm the adult, i speak, you listen etc.

Alas, too true. But obviously I didn't listen.

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by Perna

How do you secretly feel about this? Do you agree with them? My husband has to help me sometimes by saying, "I don't hear any nouns". When I told my therapist that, she brightened up noticeably and asked, "Can I say that too?"

GENTLE TEASING:

Find the three nouns in that paragraph! Nouns are not as common as we might think.

Originally Posted by CantExplain

Not the most encouraging thing for a T to say, is it?

It may be true that T has never seen a case like yours, but probably best not to volunteer that information.

Is you ask directly, T should say, "No two cases are exactly alike, and yours does have some unusual features. But the basic issues of love and shame and fear and anger apply to everyone."

I am the one who asked her straight out "Have you ever had a client who shut down and was not able to talk for most of the session?" She normally will not answer questions like that, but I kept wanting to know. She tells me all the time that I tend to compare myself to others. And if I don't do things like most others do, I think I am the weird one.

She also tells me that I am the only one we are focusing on and that it does not matter if everyone else does this or that, I am the one that we are focusing on, not them. I have a tendency to deflect by trying to make my session about someone else and not me.

Originally Posted by CantExplain

GENTLE TEASING:

Find the three nouns in that paragraph! Nouns are not as common as we might think.

Originally Posted by Perna
How do you secretly feel about this? Do you agree with them? My husband has to help me sometimes by saying, "I don't hear any nouns". When I told my therapist that, she brightened up noticeably and asked, "Can I say that too?"

Being that I am an elementary school teacher, I had to get in on this and classify this post (label the parts). A noun names a person, place, thing, or idea. The nouns in this post are: husband, therapist, and nouns is also used as a noun here because it is a direct object to the verb "hear what?" so it is a thing. My count is 3 nouns.

Since a pronoun takes the place of a noun, she actually used a lot more nouns than it appears. I count 11 pronouns. I only teach at a 3rd grade level, so I may not have gotten all of this correct. I did have my 18 year old daughter check for me.

You see what I just did? I completely deflected from the topic of this thread. Classifying this sentence has nothing to do with why I can't talk in a session. This is what my therapist says I do all the time. I avoid and deflect. I try my darndest to chase rabbits and get her so off topic of the real issue that it takes us in a whirlwind of nothingness to get back to why I am not talking in the first place!

Every sentence must contain a noun or a pronoun. So, nouns are common if you count pronouns in the sentence.

[elliemay]

In my opinion, in the hands of a skilled therapist, anything that is said in therapy is of value. Usually, the therapist can glean some kind of information about you, even if you are simply talking about the weather.

For instance, simply by telling my therapist that I hated wind we were able to move that simple fact into an insight about situations when I was a child when all of my senses were totally overwhelmed. I simply did not have the coping skills to tolerate a barrage of sensory input - and that's why wind irritated me so much.

I think that rather than putting so much pressure on yourself, or accepting so much pressure from your therapist, that you should just talk and be yourself.

[unaluna]

Originally Posted by Squiggle328

Of course, my therapist also feels that there is something buried so deep inside of me that I am scared to death to look at it... I can't think of anything about my childhood that I haven't already shared with her.

When I first read your post, childhood jumped out at me, and I thought, the issue isn't in the past, it's in the present. With your husband going in and out of the hospital, I wonder if you might not be feeling guilty over feeling a little relief from the day-to-day burdens of his care? Not that his being in hosp or rehab is a picnic for you either. You're always stuck between a rock and a hard place, there is no comfort for you, squiggle, not on this earth, it seems, only in the heavenly plane.

[skeksi]

I struggled a lot with my silence when I began therapy. To be honest, I still struggle with the silence, but it doesn't bother me in the same way as it once did. Some people do therapy by talking for 50 minutes straight and don't let the T say much. Some have a 50-minute conversation with equal parts T and client. And some people, like me, struggle to find the words in most sessions.

The biggest work I've done with T is share my trauma history and come to be less ashamed of my memories and who I am and how I act today. Much of that work was accomplished with me saying a small bit, and then being accepted by T. That required the act of being together so much more than talking.

I still have days where I am so frustrated with myself, and T and I still try lots of techniques to help me share more. But it's just what I need, and accepting that has been a huge benefit to me. I don't know if that helps, Squiggle, but it's been my experience.