Coherence Therapy - Evidence From Neuroscience

Evidence From Neuroscience

In a series of three articles published in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology, Bruce Ecker and Brian Toomey present evidence that coherence therapy may be the system of psychotherapy which, according to current neuroscience, makes fullest use of the brain's built-in capacities for change.

Ecker and Toomey argue that the mechanism of change in coherence therapy uniquely correlates with the recently discovered neural process of 'memory reconsolidation', a process that can actually unwire and delete longstanding emotional conditioning held in implicit memory. The indications that coherence therapy achieves implicit memory deletion are circumstantial but significant: (a) procedural steps match those identified by neuroscientists for reconsolidation, (b) immediate, effortless symptom cessation, and (c) the emotional experience of the retrieved, symptom-generating schema can no longer be evoked by cues that formerly evoked it strongly. The actual removal of the emotional and neural basis of a symptom's existence is a fundamentally different process than the counteractive strategy of most therapies, in which new, preferred patterns are built up to compete against and hopefully override the unwanted ones. The counteractive process, like the 'extinction' of conditioned responses in animals, is known to be inherently unstable and prone to relapse, because the neural circuit of the unwanted pattern continues to exist even when the unwanted pattern is in abeyance. Through reconsolidation, the unwanted neural circuits are unwired and cannot relapse.