You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We all practise selective mutism in some sense, in that none of us has the ability, or choice, to say everything that is on our minds. There is a constant editing process occurring that is specific to each person and place. We use the phrase ‘selective mutism’ to suggest that someone is choosing not to respond verbally in a way that they have previously been quite capable of doing. Selective mutism presents the interlocking puzzles of why is the person not talking and to whom is the person not talking.
Although silence might initially present as a benign form of resistance, the person who remains silent with others where once there was free flowing communication, can create huge feelings of resentment and hostility.
In this child’s background there is a powerful question mark over her parents’ separation. We might wonder what their relationship was like before and after the separation and how it is now, four years on, four years in which Rebecca has grown from a three-year-old to a school child of seven, during which she has not spoken openly at nursery or school. When she sees her father, she doesn’t speak to him either, but just to her baby half-sister. Further silence has grown recently between Rebecca and her mother since a visit to the dentist for a check-up.
There seems to be a link between what she will let out of her mouth and what she fears will be put in her mouth. One of the roles of a therapist is to enable the unspoken and the unheard to have an existence in the world. The carefully framed interpretation, the capacity to hold a helpful silence and the ability to know how to use our eyes, are all therapeutic skills that contribute to the birth of shared thoughts.
The beginning of the session enables a sensitive exploration of her anxieties around separation, particularly from her mother, before the sessions. It feels as though their actual separat