ABSTRACT
A further principle governing the therapeutic use of process is timing. Descriptively the principle is easy enough to grasp: seek the right intervention at the right moment. Pursuing something too soon, before the client's growing edge is receptive to it, will produce resistance at worst or intellectual or behavioral compliance at best, and pursuing it too late will halt the client's forward momentum and redundantly reaf®rm what is already clearly enough grasped or accomplished. Both of the latter represent the cardinal constructivist ``sin'' of therapeutic tracking errors (R. A. Neimeyer & Bridges, 2003), in which the therapist loses the leading edge of the client's meaning making, like a surfer who leans too far forward on a wave's crest and is dashed beneath it or who falls too far back, loses momentum, and ends up in a lull. An example of this occurred in my otherwise effective work with a bereaved mother, Darla, who 10 minutes earlier in the session had described how other members of her family retreated in silence from the pain of their shared grief, leaving her alone in wanting to introduce her son back into the family conversation, sharing his memory and the feelings it evoked (R. A. Neimeyer, 2004). At the later therapeutic point she had moved beyond this topic to the issue of ®nding some new way to relate to her suffering, to ``not treat it as the enemy.'' Still preoccupied at some level with the family's lack of openness to sharing the loss, I paused and then said, ``It seems important to have people who respect your suffering, the way [your son] might have respected it.'' Even if the statement were true in some sense, it was poorly timed, and Darla rightly looked at me blankly, added a, ``Huh . . .,'' with diverted eyes that suggested she was continuing to pursue her own line of
thought. When I then joined her in fuller process and inquired, ``What's the `huh'?'' she my prompting to extend the implications of her comment in strikingly fruitful directions, leading us to enact a dialogue with the suffering, personifying it in keeping with the implicit anthropomorphism with which she had spoken of the need to ®nd a way to ``work with'' this seeming antagonist. Only with appropriate timing, derived from a close attunement to the client's process, can an intervention ®nd the fertile soil it requires to germinate into fresh possibilities.
