Heidegger: On Silence

"In talking to one another, the person who keeps silent can 'make one understood' (that is, he can develop an understanding), and he can do so more authentically than the person who is never short of words. Speaking at length about something does not offer the slightest guarantee that thereby understanding is advanced. On the contrary, talking extensively about something covers it up and brings what is understood to sham clarity - the unintelligibility of the trivial. But to keep silent does not mean to be dumb. On the contrary, if a man is dumb, he still has a tendency to 'speak'. Such a person has not proved that he can keep silence, indeed he entirely lacks the possibility of proving anything of the sort. And the person who is accustomed by nature to speak is no better able is able to show that he is keeping silent or that he is the kind of person who can do so. He who never says anything cannot keep silent at any given moment. Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing.... In that sense one reticence makes something manifest , and does away with idle talk. As a mode of reticence makes articulates the intelligibility of Dasien (human being) in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-of-hearing which is genuine, and to a being-with-one-another which is transparent."

Query: "What is the coach providing/being/doing that allows a person to be open in this way?"

We are animals first, and I suspect that's a key point here. Before we had words we communicated through gesture, expression and eye contact. These feelings of ours live in us beneath the words. I cry alone pretty regularly these days, and it has a different flavor than crying in front of others. The pain stops and starts when I'm alone --fully open and ragged, then it's gone and I'm back to what I was doing before or moving on. It's different than the rising roll of tears I experience with other people. That may not always be true for me and not at all be how other people experience their pain, but the communication of pain is different than simply the expressing of it. The coach is providing a framework to the expression through exchange, and that framework holds the feelings aloft --it is then clarified and refracted back to the person expressing. They can remember it more clearly and they can see the impact.

When I am alone my expression of feeling is powerful and valuable but it can be lost from the thin context of being alone, like talking to myself --it's just not as sticky as exchanging words with another person and hearing them back through another's lens. And note that reflection happens even in silence, because of what the coach is doing: connecting through gesture, expression and eye contact with the person expressing their feelings.

So what is happening when a coach is present to receive another person's feelings in silence? And how is that silence more powerful than speaking it? The silence allows emotion itself to be the primary subject at hand. Existing at the precognitive level yet written large by virtue of having a witness.

Our minds (where language exists) twist and deflect our emotions to suit the moment, they are not consistent. Deep emotion needs only a place to hang in the air to become a resonating bell. The silence is half of it, the other half is being there. The coach is being present.