I have been noticing the quiet these days. My body is nine months pregnant, moving in ways that insist on slowing down, on withdrawing from the expectations of productivity, of neat schedules, of linear time. I recently returned from a stretch in nature, and the forest, the waterfalls, the breeze, the smell of wet earth, the birds and snakes and the gentle sway of trees reminded me that time is not only linear, neither universal and that movement is never only human.
There was a moment on that trip—I was sitting near a river. Not doing very much. Or… not doing very much in the ways I have been taught to recognise as “doing”. Water moving. Wind passing through trees. Something shifting in the periphery—maybe a squirrel, maybe just imagination. And there was a pause. Not the kind that sits between things. But the kind that generates on its own pace noticings that invites me to take care with ideas of embodied meanings.
In this slowing, in this immersion, I found myself thinking about my supervision practice, about the spaces I hold for others, and the ethical, political, and relational work that those spaces make possible.
Over time, I began to notice that silences in my therapeutic practice carry different kinds of invitations, and do not ask the same thing of me each time. I have been speaking about what I call “span pauses” — moments that seem to call for a gentle adjustment of the scaffolding, bringing the conversation closer to where the person can stand. Alongside these, I have come to notice silences of a very different quality. These do not signal distance, but movement— an attentiveness to what might already be forming, shifting, or gathering within the experience of the relational space. In this instance, I’m speaking about pauses that call to stay with what is already unfolding. Meaning is already underway. Nothing needs to be brought closer.
In these moments, silence is itself the scaffolding—a slow, liminal process in which new understandings are already in motion, unfolding through co-presence. It often follows a question that gently traverse the space between “what is known and familiar” and “what might be possible to know”. I have come to think of these as «threshold pauses». They seem to call for a different kind of response—not one of doing, but of resisting the urge to fill, and allowing the pause to do its quiet work through our active witnessing and intentional and political accompaniment.
In my practice, I am becoming more aware that I am not simply engaging with people’s already formed stories, but actively involved in the co-construction and articulation of stories. This has me reflecting on where movement arises in therapeutic conversations. I recall moments when the question I offer hold space for the step just before a person settles into a certain response, where both of us sit together in the quiet liminal space of “not yet knowing” what is about to emerge.
That’s when I notice myself loosening my grip on certainty. I am not searching for a theory to quickly organise someone’s experience, nor orienting us toward a pre-imagined conclusion. The conversation is not guided by fixed questions or by practices drawn uncritically from literature and trainings, but by what becomes possible in response to the persons responses.
What unfolds between a question being asked and a response being offered is not approached as a space to be pre-written. I am not interested in entering the conversation with a script that predetermines meaning or maps the exchange in advance. Instead, I attend to how silence holds open the co-construction of meaning in the relational moment itself—tentative, alive, and responsive to the previous question, the emerging themes, the particular context of the conversation, and the relational ethics that shape our shared space. These moments feel less like applying a practice and more like entering a threshold together, where understanding is still becoming. They arise through the momentum our co-research generates, as I take up an influential yet de-centered position grounded in performative curiosity.
Within this kind of pause I find myself gently stepping alongside the person into the unfolding moment. Together, we open a liminal space where new meanings, rhythms, and possibilities can emerge collaboratively. Something begins to take shape in the space between us that neither of us could have fully planned for beforehand. Meanings are not extracted or delivered, but slowly co-shaped in the encounter itself.
Feminisms and decolonial ethics invite both myself and the practitioners I work with to lean into these moments, to attend to the present experience of the silence, to stand together in refusal of the ongoing demands to perform, be and exist in certain designated ways. Supervisees often describe this as both unsettling and generative. It can gently unsettle familiar clinical and neo-liberal ideas about therapeutic responsibility—the expectation that we should be guiding, progressing, or moving the conversation toward something identifiable and coherent.
Rather than working within a traditional outcome-based structure or a linear problem-solving model that steers conversations toward quick conclusions or fixed “goals,” in supervision I invite practitioners to stay close to what is already unfolding in the relational space of silence. What shifts when we resist the impulse to immediately interpret, redirect, reassure, or translate experience into what is already known? And what forms of attentiveness become available when silence is not treated as absence, stuckness, or lack, but as part of meaning-making itself?
In these threshold moments, I am interested in how practitioners might reconsider how and when sitting with the pauses and silences that emerge in conversation can become a political counter-practice to normative forms of dominance that often position the therapist’s role within practices of moving ahead of the conversation. Instead, this invites practitioners to accompany emergence with care. This is not passivity or withdrawal, but an active ethical and political stance—one that trusts that understanding can take shape slowly through intentional witnessing and the co-holding of silence and uncertainty as entry points to meaning-making. What happens in the being (together), rather than the doing? And when might silence offer space for experiential and expansive exploration, rather than aiming for conclusions, decisions, or key points?
Often, these generative pauses arrive after I offer a summary or an editorial. Throughout the conversation, I’m taking notes of the particular words and expressions the person uses, keeping track to the different storylines that emerge at various moments. When I offer a summary, I gather these key phrases and threads and gently place them back into the shared space between us. Then I follow with a circular invitation that asks the person to re-position in the conversation as a witness to their own words for that moment, and re-engage with what they said from a slightly different vantage point: “As you describe this, It stood out to me when you said (and then offering back people’s precise words and expressions)”,
- What do you notice hearing this back? Where did it travel your thoughts, memories, imagination?
- What sparked your curiosity as you heard your own words?
- How do these different stories sit alongside each other? Why did you choose to locate one next to the other as you were speaking?
- As you talk about these stories from the past, what feels particularly relevant or resonant to your current experience?
- We’ve returned to this and that in the conversation — why do you think this is? What is important for you in this link that we keep coming back here?
Summaries and editorial often become the ground from which my next question emerges. They offer a kind of transparency, making visible the context from which my curiosity is arising and allowing the person to see how my question is situated within what they have already shared, rather than from some kind of professional tree of “expert” knowldge.
By documenting the different storylines that appear — even when they are only partial, tentative, or not yet fully formed — I can return to them with the person and check how and why we have arrived at this particular point in the conversation. These moments invite attention to the relational threads between stories and create opportunities for me to seek permission about where we might go next, ensuring that the direction of the conversation remains aligned with what feels meaningful to them.
I have come to think of these narrative micro-practices as small acts of accountability — quiet ways of sustaining collaborative practice and confirming that we are still engaged in co-research together, rather than me taking up a position of leading from ahead.
It is in the threshold silence that follows these circular invitations that their effects begin to show themselves. These circular invitations give the pause its generative quality. In the silence, the person begins to re-engage with what they have said, noticing connections between storylines and repositioning themselves in this new layer of noticing. This shift quietly shapes how they re-enter the conversation — often with new curiosities, renewed clarity, and a clearer sense of where they are located in relation to the therapist and to the emerging storylines, allowing the co-research to move into a more stretched and generative level of meaning-making.
These threshold pauses also allow the conversation to develop a different pace and rhythm. It stands out to me when people take a moment to think about my question, sometimes this feels like a moment’s disruption of the dominant story or discourse. These silences don’t ask to be rescued. They feel more like standing at the edge of a lake early in the morning. Nothing seems to be happening in the outset—and yet everything is.
Problems often bring their effects into the therapeutic space in ways that invite people, almost inadvertently, to jump from one story to another. As a result, the movement of conversation does not always follow a smooth linear arc; rather, people often move between stories in layered, complex, and richly textured ways. They share their descriptions in ways that are already densely woven, full of meaning and multiple strands of experience.
To be clear, I am very willing to move with people wherever they wish to go in conversation — they lead the way. And yet, I have come to notice that when we move too quickly from one story to the next without pause, there can be a sense at the end of the session of disorientation: What actually happened here? Where did we go together, and how did we get there? These questions can leave a person uncertain about the shape and purpose of the encounter.
In response to this, I have found it particularly important in my practice to attend not only to the de-centered aspect of my position, but also to how my influential stance is translated in the conversation — particularly through the use of editorials and summaries. When I take the time to read my notes back to the person, something shifts in the rhythm of the conversation. This form of deceleration becomes especially important when problem-saturated stories carry experiences of urgency, confusion, or overwhelm beyond the therapy room. In such contexts, slowing the process inside the conversation becomes a purposeful and political practice — one that resists our participation in the reproduction of those effects. Offering editorial and summaries can therefore function as a counter-practice: a way of gently slowing the pace and rhythm of the conversation in ways that stand in contrast to the intensity of emergency and pressure of the problem’s effects outside the room.
By staying actively influential in holding these generative threshold silences, I am politically responding to the contexts that support the problem’s chaotic pace — where stories and responses can become pulled in multiple directions at once. I’m not rushing toward solving, fixing, or moving forward — power practices that tend to take over when urgency is already present in the room as an effect of the problem itself. As therapists, I believe we are accountable for working within a response-based approach, offering questions that aknowledge and respond to the person’s lived experience and broader life context beyond the therapy room.
Through considering summaries and editorials not only as documentation practices that rescue “the said from the saying of it,” but also as a counter-practice to the operations of problems’ urgency, it becomes possible to step into a political stance in silence that allows the person a moment to stay with what is emerging, notice what has moved, what has re-engaged, and what meaning is beginning to take form.
The experience and effects of a therapeutic conversation can therefore be quite different when there is space for pauses and active engagement with what has been spoken. When people are able to take a breath from the intensity of co-research and momentarily stand as witnesses to their own words through editorials and summaries, the pause that is created, which I call a «threshold pause», offers them a moment with themselves to notice before re-engaging with what is unfolding.
At the same time, the threshold pause created through editorials and summaries is not only significant for the person I am working with — it is also a pause that support my preferred ways of showing up in practice. The slowing down of the conversation directly shapes what becomes possible in my therapeutic positioning: whether I am able to stay close to the person’s language — to the specific words, expressions, and images they use — so that these can directly inform my next question, or whether I become hurried, already moving ahead of the conversation in search of what to ask next.
In this sense, there is a very practical and embodied moment of bridging that unfolds between listening, taking notes, offering a summary or editorial, and formulating a question. As I write down what I hear and then read it back in the form of a brief summary, a pause opens — and within that pause, something shifts in how curiosity begins to take shape. Often, it is in this moment that my next question starts to emerge, not as something pre-planned, but as something that comes into being in close response to what has just been spoken.
Attending carefully to experience-near questions becomes central here, as it opens space for scaffolding stories in ways that support rich story development. This practice of slowing down is never neutral; it is always connected to questions of power, accountability, collaboration and co-research. It helps ensure that the person is not simply carried along by the momentum of the conversation, but remains an active participant in shaping its direction, rhythm, and meaning.
As mentioned earlier, people who come to therapy often offer responses that are generous and expansive — carrying multiple storylines, ideas, and themes within a single account. In my practice, I have come to appreciate, together with the people I work with, how editorial and summaries can offer possibilities for the therapist to respond in meaningful ways. When I offer an editorial or summary back to people, what can initially feel like a series of separate or fragmented storylines begins to gather, allowing the person to name the relational links between them that might otherwise appear disconnected from an outside perspective. I might become curious and ask, for example: What was it in the story you shared about yesterday that led you to this other story from last year?
From my experience, we rarely listen to stories as isolated units. More often, there is an active process of selection and positioning taking place — people may place one story next to another, interrupt a story to move elsewhere, or hold one storyline as more prominent than others. Editorials and summaries create a pause in which these movements can become more visible, opening space for curiosity about what connections the person themselves might be making, and what meanings they are drawing from them.
In this sense, the slowing down of the pace that happens with editorials and summaries can be understood as one more way of translating the influential aspect of our therapeutic positioning.
The summary is not the end, but part of the scaffolding or introduction for the next question, opening up a space where new understanding begins to emerge — quietly, in the pause that follows. In this way, silence is not empty time. It is the threshold that stretches the liminal space into a generative kind of pause. I was drawn by the way a person I was in therapeutic conversation with described the threshold silence as “an active, influential participant” of how the co-research unfolded.
Perhaps another way of approaching these moments of silence is through the lens of the rite of passage metaphor. When someone does not respond immediately, it is not always that they “do not have an answer.” Often, they are participating in the slow work of co-constructing meaning, engaging in the conversation moment by moment, letting the silence hold space for witnessing of their own tellings, emergence, and re-positioning in the conversation from a new layer of meaning-making. Conversely, when someone answers immediately, it may not always signal insight or movement; it can also indicate they are dwelling in what is already “known and familiar” to them, drawn into dominant discourses that are already settled, rehearsed, performed or available.
Attending to both the timing and the rhythm of responses—whether they arise immediately or unfold slowly—becomes a political and ethical act. It is a way of noticing which stories, which forms of agency, and which access to meaning are emerging, and which may be constrained by assumptions, expectations, or the pace we bring into the room.
These sensibilities are not confined to therapeutic practice. They can also be noticed in the more-than-human world, where rhythm is not organised around efficiency or resolution. Waterfalls do not rush, wind moves unpredictably, trees grow in their own time, and birds sing in rhythms that cannot be measured in minutes. In this sense, nature offers not a model to apply, but a reminder of relational pacing that is already present beyond human-centred logics. Returning to therapeutic and supervision spaces with this attentiveness, the question becomes how attending to such rhythms might shape what is able to emerge in the unfolding of silences.
Practitioners I work alongside in supervision often speak about how tempting it can be, as therapists, to step into silence with their own answers. I recognize this pull in myself as well. It is a strong and familiar force—one I am continually trying to be mindful of in how I bring myself into my role as supervisor. There are countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways to do this — ways that try, often without noticing, to align someone else experience with my own. It might look like steering a conversation toward a particular perspective, offering assumptions disguised as questions: “Don’t you think this could mean…?” Or making interpretations that are presented as fact rather than invitation: “Perhaps this problem came about because…” Even research or theory can slip in as a way of filling the gap: “Studies suggest that…
The hazard is that all of these moves can quietly overshadow the person’s own noticings, curiosity, the small shifts happening quietly in the pause.
I am not advocating for non-influence or neutrality. But I do need to be clear about what I know and what I don’t. I am an expert in my own life. As a therapist, I have ways of structuring sessions, ideas about what narrative practices might be helpful, how I have seen things work for others, and my own experience of how the conversation unfolds. But none of that gives me insight into how someone else should live, or how meaning will emerge for them. Thus, I try to hold my knowledge lightly. Rather than filling the silence with my own language, meanings, or interventions as practices of power, I attend to the stories that are arising and offer them back as editorials, inviting the person into the meaning-making and into shaping what comes next.
In supervision and workshops, practitioners often wonder how to recognise the kind of pause they are encountering, and how to discern what response might be most helpful in that moment — whether the pause calls for them to gently step in and scaffold the conversation, or to hold back and trust what is already unfolding. In those moments, I invite practitioners to reflect not only on what they might do, but on how they are positioning themselves within the encounter, and what assumptions are shaping that positioning. I wonder whether it can become a taken-for-granted idea that the practitioner is the one responsible for deciding what to do with silence or pauses. And I am curious about what becomes possible if, instead, we consider ways of offering the person’s words back in a form that invites them to articulate what feels most important to them within that pause — allowing the meaning of the silence to be co-shaped, rather than decided from one side.
In my role as supervisor, I encourage supervisees to notice the grip of dominant therapeutic discourses that position both therapist and person as separate, self-contained individuals in the therapeutic conversation, and to consider alternative, more relational ways of understanding what is unfolding in their work. I invite them to consider what it means to move toward a more collaborative, relational practice. Part of that is acknowledging that the only person who can make distinctions about what is resonant in a pause is the person in front of us. In my therapeutic practice, I am becoming more interested in what happens when I position myself not as someone who leads people out of silence, but as someone willing to step into it with them.
At times, this may take the form of gently checking in with the person consulting me through questions such as: How did this question I just offered land for you? Does it feel generative, or does it pass you by? Does it feel close to your experience, or a little distant right now? Would it make sense to stay here, or to move somewhere else? What is it like for you to sit with the not-knowing of where to go next? Does sitting alongside uncertainty and silence feel familiar in your life, or is it something new? Is this a place your body recognizes, or does it feel strange or mysterious?
These questions are not only part of exploring the problem or alternative stories; they are part of the co-research of the practice itself — how we are being together in the conversation, particularly in moments of silence and pause.
Sometimes this also involves loosening the grip of immediacy by saying, “There’s no need to answer this now — or at all. You might want to carry it with you and see what, if anything, arrives later.”
Even when someone chooses not to engage with a question, I do not experience this as a rejection of the co-research or a dead end. I am mindful that, across many histories, even invitational questions can be heard as obligations or demands, no matter how gently they are offered. When someone lets me know a question is not helpful, I become curious about what this makes possible for collaborative practice. I might ask, “What made it possible for you to say that this question isn’t helpful today? What do you think has been established in our relationship that allows you to say this? As you notice the question doesn’t fit right now, where do your thoughts find themselves travelling instead? What feels important for you to speak about in this moment?”
One of the navigational ideas I hold close when engaging in this kind of checking-in with people is a hope to support them in coming closer to the articulation of their experience — either by finding words for what has not yet been named, or by articulating the finer textures and nuances of their lived experience in ways that open new possibilities for understanding.
What is more, when I offer summaries and editorials as a bridge into my next question, it is also a way of making visible how I am receiving their stories and how I am documenting them in my notes. It lets people see from which place of curiosity my question is arriving and the intentions that sit behind it. Offering this context creates space to check whether my questions rest on my own assumptions. When people are invited into this noticing, they often feel able to say when my questions do not quite fit their lived experience. They may also find ways to articulate how their experience has shifted since we last met. In doing so, they begin to locate themselves more clearly within their experience and to describe, with greater precision, the shape, form, and meaning their lived experience holds for them now, as well as what direction they wish our co-research to take from here.
In moments like these, I am not rushing forward. This kind of threshold pause offers an opportunity to turn together with the person and look at different parts of the conversational landscape, until the person says, “Yes, this is what I want to talk about.” For me, this process is one of the greatest joys in therapeutic conversation — not because of the topic that comes into focus, but because the person feels safe and comfortable enough to articulate their own choice.
This, too, is part of the work: contributing to a relational space in which people can exercise agency in choosing the direction of the conversation. It is a way of moving past politeness — often shaped by gendered expectations, automatic responses, or trauma-driven alertness. It allows the person to engage with their own positioning, to notice what they want to put at the centre of the co-research, and to re-enter the conversation on their own terms.
In this sense, editorials and summaries can be understood as practices of accountability. They are not simply methods of recording what is said, but deliberate and intentional ways of inviting both the therapist and the person consulting them to locate themselves within the conversation and its silences as they unfold. Through this process, there is an ongoing checking-in — a moment-by-moment attentiveness to whether there is a shared understanding of what is being talked about, and a shared sense of why we are talking about it, or choosing not to talk at all for the time being. It is often in the threshold pause that follows an editorial — in the brief silence that opens after something has been offered back — that this work of positioning becomes most visible.
In reflecting on both span pauses and threshold pauses, I find myself thinking about moments in practice and supervision where silences and pauses seemed to gently orient attention, as if saying: «this question needs to come closer», while at other times, it seemed to whisper: «wait… something is on its way». And perhaps the question is not how to use silence or what to do with it, but how to be in relationship with it — how to check in with the person about what kinds of silences we are navigating. What are the nuances, the textures, and the intentions of these silences? What are they making possible or restricting? What temporalities are moving within them? How are they shaping power and collaborative practice? What might they be asking of us—and whether we are willing, even briefly, to stay with the gap of in-between-ness together.
This fragment of writing is part of a larger “book-in-the-making” project— a project drawn from over fifteen years of experience in facilitating supervision conversations, shaped by feminist, decolonial and narrative therapy ethics and practices.
© 2026 Kassandra Pedersen. All rights reserved. If sharing or referencing any part of this publication in any form, please credit the author and include appropriate attribution.
