Coherence Therapy - the art and science of transformational change

What Is Coherence Therapy? The Neuroscience of Deep, Lasting Change

If you've been in therapy before, you might have had moments where you said something like: "I know I shouldn't feel this way, but I still do," or "I understand where it comes from, but it still won’t go away." You might have tried every strategy to fix a pattern or cope with a feeling, only to watch it return again and again. This is where Coherence Therapy offers something different: a way to not just manage symptoms, but actually dissolve them at the emotional root.

Coherence Therapy is a deeply experiential, neuroscience-informed approach to transformation. It doesn’t focus on challenging your thoughts or building skills to cope with difficult feelings. Instead, it helps you discover why your symptom exists in the first place. Because here's the truth: even the most frustrating emotional patterns often make perfect sense when you understand what they are protecting you from.

Let’s walk through what Coherence Therapy is, how it works, and what to expect if you choose to explore this powerful approach to healing.

The Problem with Just Coping

For decades, therapy has focused on helping people manage symptoms. That might mean using cognitive techniques to challenge negative beliefs, teaching grounding skills for anxiety, or offering reassurance for low self-worth. These approaches are often helpful, and they can make life more manageable. But they rarely lead to deep, permanent change.

That’s because most emotional symptoms don’t come from distorted thinking alone. They come from emotional learning — unconscious lessons we learned through emotionally intense or traumatic experiences, often in childhood. These lessons are not thoughts you decided to believe. They’re emotional truths that got wired into your nervous system. You feel them, even if your logical brain disagrees.

So when therapy only addresses the logical brain, it often misses the deeper emotional system that’s driving your symptoms. Coherence Therapy is different. It helps you access and update the emotional learnings that are creating your symptoms, using the brain’s natural healing mechanism: memory reconsolidation.

What Is Memory Reconsolidation?

Memory reconsolidation is a neurobiological process that allows the brain to revise previously unconscious emotional learnings. Neuroscience research has shown that when an emotional memory is reactivated and then met with a new, contradictory experience that feels equally real, the brain can rewrite the original memory.

This isn’t about forgetting the past. It’s about transforming how the past is encoded emotionally. Once this transformation happens, the symptom no longer feels emotionally real. It doesn't have to be managed anymore, because it no longer arises. This is what makes memory reconsolidation so powerful: it enables change at the level of the brain's emotional prediction system, not just the level of thoughts.

Coherence Therapy is designed to reliably facilitate memory reconsolidation. That means it doesn’t just help you understand why you feel the way you do — it helps your brain actually let go of the emotional learning that makes the feeling necessary.

Emotional Learnings and Symptom Coherence

One of the core insights of Coherence Therapy is that symptoms are not random or irrational. They are emotionally coherent. That means they make sense, once you uncover the emotional learning that’s creating them.

Take for example someone who constantly avoids conflict and struggles to assert themselves. The symptom might feel frustrating, even shameful. But through experiential exploration, the person might realize that asserting themselves as a child led to anger or abandonment from a caregiver. The emotional learning might be: "If I upset people, I will lose them." In this case, passivity isn’t a flaw — it’s a survival strategy. It served an adaptive purpose in a painful environment.

This is what we call symptom coherence: the idea that a symptom is actually the lesser of two sufferings. It causes distress, but it protects the person from an even more unbearable emotional truth. As long as the deeper suffering remains unprocessed or overwhelming, the symptom remains necessary.

The Process of Coherence Therapy

The process of Coherence Therapy follows a consistent, yet flexible arc:

1. Symptom Identification We start with what’s not working: the symptom, pattern, or emotional struggle that brings you to therapy.

2. Discovery and ExplorationThis is where the real work begins. Together, we explore the symptom experientially. When does it show up? What does it feel like in your body? What memories or dynamics does it remind you of? We’re not analyzing here — we’re helping you feel into the emotional truth of the symptom.

Eventually, this process reveals the pro-symptom position — the unconscious emotional logic behind the symptom. This might sound like:

• "If I believe I’m unworthy, I won’t have to feel the grief of being rejected."

• "If I shrink myself, I’ll stay acceptable to my family."

• "If I stay anxious, I can stay hypervigilant and maybe prevent something bad from happening."

These emotional truths are often painful, but they are also profoundly clarifying. Suddenly, your symptom makes sense. It has a purpose.

3. IntegrationWe don’t rush past this insight. Instead, we help you really inhabit the emotional truth of the symptom. We slow down. We let you speak from the part of you that holds the emotional learning. We reflect it back, not to fix it, but to understand it. This is what makes the learning "labile" — open to being updated.

4. Juxtaposition and DisconfirmationOnce the emotional learning is fully conscious and active, we help you come into contact with a new, contradictory experience. This might be a present-day relationship that disproves the old learning, an adult perspective that wasn’t available to you as a child, or a moment of self-worth that directly contradicts the shame.

Both knowings — the old emotional truth and the new one — are held together in your awareness. And when that happens, the brain updates itself. The old learning gets overwritten. The emotional charge disappears.

How This Actually Feels in Therapy

You might find yourself revisiting emotionally significant scenes. Not to analyze them, but to connect with the felt senseof what was learned there. You might speak from a part of yourself that you’ve never given voice to before. You might imagine a moment without the symptom and notice what feelings arise in its absence — grief, fear, vulnerability.

This is what makes Coherence Therapy so different. We’re not trying to correct your beliefs or change your thoughts. We’re trying to help you discover the emotional necessity of the symptom, and then gently guide your brain through the process of letting go.

It’s not always easy work. The symptoms we carry are often protecting us from very old pain. But the work is always paced with care, attunement, and respect for your emotional system. You’ll never be pushed to confront something you’re not ready for. But you will be invited to feel, to discover, and to let go.

Common Questions About Coherence Therapy

Is this like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)?Not at all. CBT focuses on challenging and changing your thoughts through logic and skills. Coherence Therapy focuses on uncovering the emotional learnings that make your symptoms necessary, and transforming them through experiential work.

Will I have to relive traumatic memories?Not in a re-traumatizing way. You may revisit emotional scenes, but only in a titrated, safe, and supported way that allows you to stay regulated. The goal is not to retraumatize, but to connect with the emotional learning that came from the experience.

How long does this take?Some shifts happen quickly, in just a few sessions. Other patterns are layered and may take longer. The key is not how fast we go, but how deeply we understand the purpose of the symptom and how ready your system is to release it.

What kinds of issues is this good for?Coherence Therapy is especially powerful for issues rooted in shame, trauma, attachment wounds, chronic self-doubt, relational patterns, anxiety, depression, and more. If there’s an emotional pattern that you’ve tried to change but haven’t been able to, this work can help.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to fight yourself to heal. You don’t need to constantly manage your symptoms or convince yourself that you're okay. Your symptoms are not evidence that you’re broken — they’re evidence that your brain learned something important in a difficult context. And now, with the right support, your brain can unlearn it.

Coherence Therapy is not about fixing you. It’s about helping you understand the emotional truth of why your symptoms exist — and then guiding your brain through the process of no longer needing them. When that happens, change feels effortless. Not because you're trying harder, but because the old pattern simply isn’t there anymore.

If you’re interested in exploring this kind of deep, experiential therapy, reach out. I’d be honored to walk with you as we uncover the deeper emotional story behind your struggles — and help you discover what’s possible on the other side of them.