What Is Coherence Therapy and is it Right for You?
What is Coherence Therapy?
Coherence Therapy (CT) is an evidence-based and experiential approach to healing deeply held emotional wounds.
CT therapists believe that symptoms of diagnoses such as anxiety, depression, OCD, or PTSD are not bad (although we acknowledge the suffering they cause), but they were actually developed to help you avoid a deeper suffering. The concept of The Two Sufferings is important here. One suffering is the one that comes from our symptoms and the other, deeper suffering is the one we unconsciously believe we’ll face if we stop having our symptoms.
Where do we Begin in Coherence Therapy Work?
Let me give an example. Maybe you needed to be perfect growing up so that your parents wouldn’t hit you or so that you wouldn’t be bullied or embarrassed at school and so you learned at that time (wisely and unconsciously) to do all you could to be perfect. And years late, you come to therapy so frustrated by the very thing that allowed you to avoid suffering.
You’ve noticed just how much of a toll it takes on you to strive for perfection all the time. You lose out on fun with your loved ones, you wish you could relax, you stop yourself from doing things because you fear you can’t do them perfectly, and you can’t seem to make a mistake without feeling ashamed.
What is my Therapy Approach?
I’d ask you to recall a significant experience where you just HAD to be perfect. I’d then have you re-image that experience but this time, you allow yourself to imagine making mistakes. What are you deeply afraid will happen if you weren’t absolutely perfect? Answers will always vary depending on the person, but what I expect to hear from clients is that there is something they believe to be far worse that will happen if they gave up their perfectionism. We honor the function of the perfectionism and the conditions that made it necessary.
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My job is to help clients discover what terrible, painful, or scary thing they expect will come their way if they gave up all that comes with their “symptoms”. Once that’s discovered compassionately and empathetically, I support them to either create or “bump into” emotionally significant experiences where they weren’t perfect and it went so differently than how their brain thought it would. Maybe someone in your life was gentle with you or held space for your imperfections and loved you just the same if not more. Maybe you have a person or people in your life that you know at your core would never berate, shame, or harm you for being human.
How Does Coherence Therapy Work?
At that moment- when your brain is aware of both the emotional learning about why its so important to be perfect AND the significant experiences where your humanity was met with compassion-the brain becomes open for updating. That learning about needing to be perfect to avoid terrible outcomes gets to be updated and changed at it’s core. Once that happens, your brain no longer sees the need to be perfect. Your life starts to change and expand. You finally get to be a human without the shame. The best part is that you will not need to intentionally try to maintain this progress.
That’s just one example of how the CT process can go. It’s all about memory reconsolidation.
Is Coherence Therapy Right for You?
What I love about CT is that it’s so nonjudgemental. I won’t call your fears irrational or distorted. This method is powerful because it’s experiential. So often, clients come to therapy and they talk about what happened as if they’re reporting on something. CT facilitates a much deeper process for clients that can eliminate problem areas at the root.
This approach is great for treating trauma, working with intellectualizers, folks that struggle with self-compassion or just feel so bewildered by their symptoms. It can treat various diagnoses as well.
If you’re interested in working with me using CT, scheduled a free 15-minute consultation here.
