Why Silence Skills Matter in Modern Mental Health Care

Written by Kerry Wischusen, LPC

Kerry Wischusen, LPC ~ Mindfulness Expert

As a clinical counselor, I genuinely enjoy what I do. I believe counseling, as it’s currently practiced, brings meaningful value to people’s lives. Every day, I work with individuals navigating depression, anxiety, trauma, and major life stressors—and therapy often plays an important role in helping them regain their footing.

At the same time, I’m also a mindfulness teacher. From that vantage point, I’ve noticed something important: many people aren’t struggling because their minds are “broken,” but because they were never taught how to relate skillfully to the natural fluctuations of the human mind.

More specifically, many people feel ill-equipped to navigate loss, uncertainty, and circumstances they cannot control. The strategies that often serve us well during periods of growth or stability—problem-solving, effort, productivity, and control—can become ineffective or even harmful during times of disruption. When these strategies stop working, people may become obsessive, isolated, or distrustful of their own internal experience.

That’s where silence skills come in.

I use the term silence skills to describe a more foundational set of mindfulness-based capacities. While mindfulness in many mental health settings emphasizes presence, grounding, and relaxation, silence skills point to something deeper: a stabilizing relationship with emptiness itself. When people learn to trust the peace beneath mental activity, the form-seeking, problem-solving mind can be recognized as a habit rather than a necessity, allowing steadiness without suppression or avoidance.

These skills certainly include practices of presence and ease, but they are built on a broader orientation toward open awareness—learning how to allow thoughts, emotions, and sensations to move without becoming overwhelmed or entangled in them. This orientation helps people develop trust in their own minds, even when those minds feel unfamiliar or unsettled.

Silence skills show up in every client session I facilitate. They shape how I listen, how I regulate my own nervous system, and how I orient to difficulty with steadiness rather than urgency. Clients often describe feeling calmer in my presence because their nervous system can co-regulate with mine.

But that cannot be where the work ends.

While a regulated therapeutic space can be deeply stabilizing, it’s essential that people learn how to access these same internal states for themselves. Especially now. The world presents increasing exposure to grief, uncertainty, and rapid change, and no therapeutic relationship—no matter how supportive—can substitute for a person’s own capacity to meet their inner experience with steadiness and care.

Increasingly, I’ve found that people aren’t seeking therapy because they want more strategies, coaching, or optimization. They’re seeking care because something in their life has disrupted how their mind works. Heartbreak, chronic stress, burnout, or prolonged uncertainty can fundamentally alter a person’s internal landscape, leaving familiar coping mechanisms ineffective and internal experience feeling unfamiliar or untrustworthy. Much of my work centers on helping people understand that these shifts are not personal failures, but natural responses to disruption—and that steadiness is a skill they can learn to embody, rather than something they need to borrow from a therapist or environment.

This perspective is what led me to write Silence Is Skillful.

The book offers a practical and accessible introduction to silence-based mindfulness practices as a foundation for mental wellness. It draws directly from clinical work and lived experience, with the goal of providing realistic language and practices that people can integrate into daily life over time.

I don’t consider myself a silence expert so much as a silence advocate. These practices have profoundly supported my own nervous system, and I expect they will continue to do so for the rest of my life. My hope is simply to encourage others to train in this way and to provide coherent resources to help them get started.

Additional resources are available at SilenceIsSkillful.com, including information about a monthly, curriculum-based group training beginning in summer 2026.