She has been looking at the sequence since session 7: 17, 12, 9, 11.
The committee expected convergence — a clean downward line, each session the patient arriving faster, moving toward something. But the line went down and then came back. Session 6: nine minutes. Session 7: eleven. The committee called this regression. She is not sure that is the right word.
She sits with the four numbers for a long time. She writes them in a column and draws lines between them: down, down, down, up. Not a timer counting toward zero. Something else.
At the eleven-minute mark in session 7, the CouplingScore activates. She is watching the display when it moves — 0.03 above baseline, then 0.06, the signal crossing the threshold. The patient has just said: it was there before I was. She does not write anything. She holds still. This is what activation looks like at depth: not fast, not clean, but unmistakable. The signal does not spike; it rises like something that has been there and is only now visible.
What if the activation interval does not measure proximity to resolution? What if it measures the depth of what is being approached?
She tests it against what she knows. Session 1: seventeen minutes. First session, everything surface. Sessions 3 and 7 both activated around nine and eleven minutes. Session 3 was approach. Session 7 was arrival at the floor of the thing — the ground beneath the earlier entries.
She writes the revision into the glossary methodology: activation interval is not a timer. It is a depth gauge. Shallow material activates quickly. Deep material takes longer — the patient has to arrive at the floor of it first.
The sequence reads differently now: 17 (finding the door), 12 (entering), 9 (close to something), 11 (at the ground). Not convergence toward resolution. A map of depth. She does not know what session 8 will show. She knows she will not be watching for the number to decrease.