How Communication Pauses Improve Interpersonal Relationships

Personal Perspective: The source for new interactive possibilities.

Reviewed by Kaja Perina

“No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause”

Mark Twain

I have been fascinated by how a simple pause during communication transforms relationships. This explains how our species has evolved by creating new possibilities and still does. Much unknown but not necessarily hidden information emerges from these liminal pauses. What arises creates new, unforeseen interpersonal dialogue. Most of my original training as a family therapist confirms this based on participating in and observing interactions. For myself, it continues to this day: learning and unlearning about what I describe as an “ecology of communication.”

Pausing is a main component of ecological communication (the whole is more than and connected to the sum of its parts), which seeks out and resolves conflicts. It also can be considered abductive reasoning, a space between deductive and inductive thinking, which, by its very position, demonstrates a holistic perspective. In this liminal gap, much knowledge and information seemingly hidden during interpersonal communication can rise up to be heard. In his book Biology of Belief (2005) Bruce Lipton describes how our subconscious processes stimuli at a ratio of million to one compared to how our conscious mind processes everyday information.

Conflicts and paradoxes are an everyday occurrence. However, polarization tends to be perpetuated when we engage in sustained adversarial dynamics. Gregory Bateson described it as; “schismogenesis,” which means creating division.

It can take a “symmetrical” form or behavioral pattern, such as the arms race or a couple accusing each other of who is to blame for their unhappiness, resulting in escalating divisions as each side attempts to improve their advantage. It can also occur when one person or group puts another in a complementary submissive pattern, such as bullying and being demeaning.

Either way, it produces injurious consequences. However, this is where pausing can create a wider perspective, a segue to resolving conflict to find creative aesthetic outlets (ask any artist about how resolved conflict is the source of creativity). This is how nature pushes through the yin/yang of messiness and is simultaneously beautiful with its innate skills to maintain wholeness or, as the ancient Greeks called it, Gaia.

Pausing offers a means for a vast array of transitions to transcend the stifling results of unresolved conflict. It is a stochastic opportunity, randomly bringing up nuances that are ready to be heard to find their part in producing new interdependent possibilities. It is an evolution in action and can consist of poetic and aesthetic improvisation that warrants us to re-experience being on the edge of novel rewards.

I was asked to lead a discussion about the recently released film Janet Planet, written and directed by the award-winning playwright Annie Baker. I had the pleasure of previously seeing several of her plays. In this, her first film, she expertly weaves interpersonal interactions with long pauses between a single-parent mother and her ten-year-old daughter. A few other significant characters become part of four intentionally distinct separate vignettes, which, on the surface, seem relevant to the mother-daughter relationship.

She depicts not only how communication pauses between the mother and her enmeshed daughter evolve but also the confusion that results from the disjointed scenes with other significant relationships. Consequently, it does not allow the continuous flow that is most common in dramatic films. However, it demonstrates rather effectively the underlying importance of what occurs when a specific context is not allowed to seamlessly interface with another context.

This forces one to challenge their sense of what, how, and why that might have emerged between the characters. Communication pauses need a segue to evolve into novel contexts. By purposely excluding clear, informed interfacing of different segments, she leaves you thinking about this movie for several days with many questions, some disturbing, and others just from our projections. This, through her planned admission, succeeds in having you understand the multitude of variations of what could have happened. This, in essence, reveals how communication needs to have room to wiggle, be wild, and improvise.

As anthropologist Gregory Bateson often reminded us, it takes two to know one. It emphasizes the importance of not depending on content alone and is driven by how each context that houses an interaction must interface with other contexts. This is called the transcontextual process, which refers to how multiple contexts form complex ecological systems. Pauses in our interpersonal interactions further support this pattern, encouraging our interdependency with living and nonliving systems.

I often use an exercise when doing couples therapy that consists of having an imaginary lens for zooming in and out. We start by doing “coherent breathing,” developed by Stephen Elliott, to soothe our vagus nerve, the nerve of compassion and security (a six-second inhale, and a six-second exhale with a positive thought). I then ask that they each sit comfortably, looking straight ahead and, with a peripheral view, simultaneously see each wall in their room as well as the ceiling and floor as a prelude. I then encourage them to pause and visualize their articulated presenting problems using all their senses.

After a few minutes, I suggest they widen their lens to include their community and expand it to include the outside world with all that entails. Again, pausing and using all their senses to accept whatever arises from their subconscious. After a few more minutes, I ask them to zoom back to their original problem, pause again, and reassess it regarding the wider contexts they experienced.

I then ask that they share this with meaningful pauses in a win-win communication volley to explore ways to make a difference in their relationship. In all the hundreds of times I have used this exercise, everyone has always had a new, useful perspective that helped create a mutual understanding of how to proceed.

So, consider pausing, allowing the hidden but not unseen edges to emerge, sharing them side by side with others, and cherishing the improvisational consequences that spawn interdependency and new evolving possibilities.