When Silence Speaks: Understanding Silence in EMDR Therapy

When Silence Speaks: Understanding Silence in EMDR Therapy Guest Blog Post by Dr. Adrian Cillo There is a particular kind of discomfort that most Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapists know well, even if they don’t always talk about it: the moment a client goes quiet mid-processing and stays that way. The bilateral stimulation ends. Nothing comes. The client stares at some middle distance, or closes their eyes, or looks slightly away. And the therapist sits there, holding a question they’re not sure they should ask yet. Is this integration? Dissociation? Are they avoiding something? Did I just lose them? That internal scramble — that pull toward intervening — is worth paying attention to. Because often, the urge to speak has more to do with the therapist’s discomfort than with what the client actually needs. The therapist’s discomfort is data , too Most of us were trained, in one way or another, to equate progress with verbalization. When a client talks, we feel like we understand what is happening. We can track it, respond to it, document it. Silence is harder. Silence asks us to wait in uncertainty, which is not something clinical training typically prepares you for. And so questions come quickly: What are you noticing? What came up? What do you get? Sometimes those questions are exactly right. But sometimes they’re a way of managing the therapist’s own nervous system — restoring a sense of control, confirming the intervention is “working,” filling a gap that felt uncomfortable to leave open. The problem is that trauma doesn’t wait for a good moment to emerge. Some of the most significant processing I’ve witnessed in EMDR sessions has happened in silence, in the two or three minutes when I resisted asking anything at all. Had I intervened earlier, I would have interrupted something the client’s system was in the middle of completing. Not every silence is the same This nuance is where the real challenge begins, because not every silence carries the same meaning, function, or therapeutic implication. Sitting quietly with a client who is deeply integrating an old trauma is a different situation from sitting quietly with a client who has just dissociated and is no longer meaningfully present in the room. They can look similar on the surface; that’s the challenge. Reflective silence usually has a kind of aliveness to it. The client is still there, even if they’re not speaking. You might notice small shifts in their expression, a breath that deepens, the faint movement of emotion crossing their face. Something is clearly happening, even without words. Dissociative silence feels different — and most experienced clinicians will tell you it has a texture you eventually learn to recognize. The client seems to vacate. Their eyes go flat or unfocused, posture may collapse slightly, and there’s often a subtle but unmistakable sense of relational disconnection in the room. The session stops feeling alive. Shame-based silence is another thing entirely. It tends to show up as a kind of collapse inward — the client is still present, still feeling something, but the feeling has turned on them rather than moving through them. The gaze drops. The voice, if it comes, minimizes. There’s a quality of bracing for judgment, even when no judgment has been offered. And then there’s what I think of as freezing silence — when the body seems to have made a decision that the thinking mind hasn’t caught up to yet. Shallow breathing, stillness, a kind of held-breath quality. This is not an absence of processing. This is survival physiology doing exactly what it was built to do. Learning to tell these apart is one of the harder skills in this work, and I don’t think it can be fully taught — it has to be developed through sustained attunement over time. Why trauma often goes quietly before it goes into words There is a neurobiological reason silence appears so frequently in trauma work, and it matters for how we understand what we’re seeing. Traumatic memories are frequently linked in the brain in ways that predate language — as sensory fragments, body states, emotion without narrative; action impulses that never completed. Under high enough stress, the cortical systems associated with verbal processing can become less active while subcortical networks take over. This mismatch between experience and language is why clients often say some version of the same thing: “I can feel it, but I can’t explain it.” “I know something happened, but I don’t have words for it.” During EMDR processing, when these implicit networks activate, silence is sometimes simply what that looks like from the outside. The client isn’t avoiding language — they may be moving through something that hasn’t reached language yet. For clients with developmental or preverbal trauma, this dynamic is especially true. Their most formative experiences may have happened before they had words for anything at all. The body holds those memories, and the body often processes them first. A trembling hand. A shift in breathing. Tears that appear before the client understands why. These shifts are significant. They are often the beginning of something important, and a therapist who rushes to make verbal sense of them may inadvertently interrupt a process that needs more room. Silence as a relational message One thing that gets underemphasized in technical discussions of EMDR is that silence in therapy is never purely intrapsychic. It’s also relational. Many trauma survivors learned very early that speaking was dangerous. Not in the abstract, but in real and specific ways — emotional expression that was ignored, punished, mocked, or that reliably led to worse things happening. In those environments, going quiet was adaptive. It was how you stayed safe. When those clients sit in silence in your office, they are not just processing old material. They are also, in some part of themselves, waiting to see what you will do with it. Will you push? Will you get frustrated? Will you interpret their silence as failure? Will you move in too close, too fast? The therapist’s ability to stay present without intruding — regulated, patient, genuinely curious rather than anxious — is itself a therapeutic intervention. It creates a relational experience that may be completely new for that client: the experience of not being pressured to perform their healing, of being allowed to move at the pace their nervous system actually needs. Sometimes the most useful thing a therapist does in a session is nothing. Staying. Witnessing. Choosing not to fill the space. The harder clinical question All of this said, the hardest question in EMDR therapy is not whether silence matters; it clearly does. The harder question is knowing when to wait and when to act. And there is no clean algorithm for that. What I look for is the presence or absence of dual awareness — whether the client still has enough of a foothold in the present moment to remain in contact with the process, even if they are not speaking. Physiological fluidity, subtle emotional movement, the sense that something is unfolding rather than frozen, these are encouraging signs. In contrast, signs such as flat affect, disorientation, sudden cognitive absence, or difficulty reconnecting suggest that I may need to intervene rather than simply remain present. When I do intervene, it usually isn’t with a content question. It might be a grounding prompt. An invitation to feel their feet on the floor. A slower bilateral set. Or just naming what I am noticing: “I notice you’ve gone quiet. Take your time: I’m here.” Sometimes the most important thing is simply confirming that the silence is being witnessed, and that the client is not alone in it. There’s a version of this work where the therapist’s job is to fill every gap, to keep the session moving, to ensure there’s always a next step. I understand the appeal of that version. It feels productive. It feels in control. But some of the deepest shifts I’ve seen in EMDR therapy happened in moments that looked, from the outside, like nothing at all. A client sitting quietly. A few minutes passing. And then something lifting — some long-held piece of experience finally finding its way through. Silence, in those moments, wasn’t an obstacle to the work. It was the work. Prof. Dr. Adrián Cillo is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in Argentina whose clinical and academic work focuses on neuroscience, EMDR, psychotraumatology , dissociation, and the neurobiology of trauma. He serves as Director of the Diploma Program in Trauma and Dissociation at the University of Favaloro and is a guest lecturer at the University Distance of Madrid (UDIMA) , and an EMDRIA Approved Consultant ™ and faculty with the EMDR Institute . Cillo has delivered lectures and taught in more than nine countries on neuroscience and psychotraumatology , and is the author of Neuroscience and Memory: How the Brain Stores Pain and How It Can Be Transformed and Giving Too Much: When Love Overflows , both published by Dunken Publishing House. References Cillo, A. (2025). Neurociencias y Memoria: Como el cerebro guarda el dolor y es capaz de transformarlo [ Neuroscience and memory: How the brain stores pain and how it can be transformed] – ( Spanish Edition). Dunken Publishing House. Cillo, A. (2025). Dar y recibir de más [ Giving too much: When love overflows] (Spanish). Dunken Publishing House. 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