ABSTRACT
A corollary to the principle of following the affect trail is that all therapeutic change is initiated in moments of experiential intensity; all the rest is merely commentary. That is, potent interventions need not be heavy handed, but they entail ushering a client into new awareness, clarity, and possibility by engagement in an emotionally signi®cant experience of something, not merely a cognitive discussion of it. My imagery work with the woman bathing in radiant connection with her mother was a case in point: once she had had this experience, consolidating it descriptively by (her) framing it as connection with her mother was relevant and useful, helping to hold the moment through ``word-binding'' the preverbal bodily feeling, as Kelly (1955/1991) would have said. But absent the experience, mere discussion of changed connection with her mother would have been simply abstract discourse, divested of concrete referents or novelty, and ephemeral in its effect. This strong tendency to explore and discriminate among aspects of an experience, attending to both internal and external sources of information as a prelude to their novel integration into a new perspective has been identi®ed as a hallmark of constructivist as distinct from cognitive therapies in psychotherapy process research (Winter & Watson, 1999).
