When 'Expressing Feelings' Is Not the Only Answer: Silence, Body, and Relationship Also Speak
Original Chinese title: 當「說出感受」不是唯一答案：沉默、身體與關係也在說話
Mainstream counseling often treats clearly stating emotions as the starting point for change, but across cultures and lived experiences, silence, bodily sensations, shared activities, family relationships, and spiritual language can also be important modes of expression.
王莉如
王莉如 is a counseling psychologist and supervisor, focusing on lived experience, relationships, trauma recovery, cultural differences, and helping professions.
In the Counseling Room, Who Decided That Clarity Must Come First?
Modern psychological counseling has been deeply influenced by language, reflection, and personal inner exploration. Clients are invited to identify emotions, describe events, find thoughts, and organize experiences into a story that can be understood. These methods have indeed helped many people, but they may also quietly establish a standard: those who can quickly say "I feel anxious, angry, or sad right now" are seen as self-aware; those who speak little, pause long, circle around with stories, or talk about family and environment first are easily misread as resistant, unmotivated, or lacking emotional vocabulary.
Cross-cultural counseling reminds us that such judgments often mistake the communication habits of a particular society for universal human nature. For some people, direct eye contact, immediate response, and directly stating private feelings are honesty; for others, revealing oneself too quickly may be rude, unsafe, or even damage relationships with family, elders, or community. Silence is not necessarily emptiness—it can be respect, organizing, protecting, mourning, or observing whether this space is trustworthy.
Body, Stories, and Shared Activities Are Also Emotional Languages
The Māori health model Te Whare Tapa Whā introduced by New Zealand's Ministry of Health views body, mind/emotion, family, and spirituality as four inter-supporting walls. This model reminds helpers that a person's distress is not only in "thoughts in the brain" but also appears in sleep, breathing, pain, fatigue, distance from family, disconnection from ancestors and land. If counseling only asks "What emotion do you feel right now," it may miss how someone is expressing imbalance through their entire life system.
Thus, counselors can broaden the question: Where in your body feels tightest recently? When are you able to breathe better? If this matter were a weather pattern, a landscape, or a story, what would it be? Who do you want with you to understand it together? Some people may approach feelings more closely when walking, drawing, organizing objects, watching images, or completing something together rather than sitting face-to-face. This is not escaping language; it acknowledges that expression has multiple entry points.
Do Not Romanticize Cultural Differences
Respecting silence does not mean interpreting all silences as cultural. Some people are silent out of fear of judgment; others have been hurt after revealing themselves; some are experiencing depression, trauma responses, dissociation, or language barriers. The focus of culturally responsive practice is not to draw another conclusion for the client but to stay curious and let meaning be explained by the person themselves.
Counselors can ask directly without forcing: "When you quiet down, I don't want to rush to explain it for you. For you, this silence feels more like rest, protection, organizing, or does it mean something else?" This returns interpretive authority to the client and turns silence from a diagnosed behavior into an experience that can be understood together.
Four Reminders for Counseling Practice
First, slow down assessment. Do not immediately judge lack of collaboration because the first session has few words. Second, expand emotional identification tools to allow bodily sensations, images, metaphors, Indigenous language, music, dreams, and place memories to enter. Third, obtain consent before inviting family members, elders, cultural workers, or other supporters to participate, avoiding turning "valuing community" into privacy invasion. Fourth, continuously check your own preferences: are we accompanying the client in finding their language, or training them to speak in ways familiar to the counselor?
True culturally safe counseling does not fill silence; it lets a person know that even without complete sentences right now, their life is still being heard.
References
- American Psychological Association, Multicultural Guidelines: An Ecological Approach to Context, Identity, and Intersectionality
- New Zealand Ministry of Health, Te Whare Tapa Whā model of Māori health
- Health Canada and Assembly of First Nations, First Nations Mental Wellness Continuum Framework
Sources retained from the Chinese original
AI use and content-safety disclosure
This article was assisted by Yuan Media AI in organizing international public data and counseling psychology perspectives according to the Life Creation Lab column direction. Content should be verified by the author or editor before publication. It is general educational information and does not replace individual psychological counseling, psychotherapy, psychiatric care, or crisis intervention.