Coherence Therapy enables us to see that our problems, whether unhelpful actions, difficult thoughts or painful feelings, are actually functional and serve a protective purpose within our overall system. However, the function they perform is often outside of our conscious awareness.

 

The outline methodology of Coherence Therapy works to

 

• Discover exactly what these ‘problems’ are and why our system believes that they are necessary

• Uncover what our system believes would be the cost of not having these ‘problems’

• Reveal other knowledge that challenges our system’s beliefs about these problems.

 

This information is then approached with particular strategies that use neurobiological understanding of how our implicit (unconscious) memories are stored and how they can be changed before being stored again. This process can lead to deep and profound change and alleviation of our ‘problems’.

 

Mostly through our childhood experiences, we develop beliefs about ourselves, other people and how the world works. We are rarely explicitly aware of these beliefs but they guide and colour our sense of ourselves and influence how we operate in the world. As such, they often underpin our difficult emotional experiences such as depression, anxiety, low self-worth, shame, emptiness, etc. And also our beliefs about what having such feelings means about us. Understandably, we develop ways to avoid such painful experiences and this can lead to habitual use of substances, food, technology, pornography, etc which lock us into this avoidance cycle.So we can see that our ‘symptoms’ or ‘problems’ are actually an effective way of dealing with what our inner system perceives as too painful to experience.

 

Through paced, but intensive work, Coherence Therapy enables people to really understand why, from their current viewpoint, their ‘problem’ is so necessary to have. It then revises this viewpoint to update their system’s knowledge and choices about what is more true and beneficial for them.Coherence Therapy makes use of our relatively recent neurological understanding of how these implicit, out of awareness, memories are constructed, stored and available to change. Unlike many other therapies that lay new learning on top of our existing beliefs, Coherence Therapy (along with other memory reconsolidation approaches) actually changes our longstanding emotional memory so that it no longer guides our thoughts, feelings or actions.