Coherence Therapy - History

History

Coherence therapy was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley investigated why certain psychotherapy sessions seemed to produce deep transformations of emotional meaning and immediate symptom cessation, while most sessions did not. Studying many such transformative sessions for several years, they concluded that in these sessions, the therapist had desisted from doing anything to oppose or counteract the symptom, and the client had a powerful, felt experience of some previously unrecognized 'emotional truth' that was making the symptom necessary to have.

Ecker and Hulley began developing experiential methods to intentionally facilitate this process. They found that a majority of their clients could begin having experiences of the underlying coherence of their symptoms from the first session. In addition to creating a methodology for swift retrieval of the emotional schemas driving symptom production, they also identified the process by which retrieved schemas then undergo profound change or dissolution: the retrieved emotional schema must be richly activated while concurrently the individual vividly experiences something that sharply contradicts it. Neuroscientists subsequently determined that these same steps are precisely what unlocks and deletes the neural circuit in implicit memory that stores an emotional learning - the process of reconsolidation.

Due the swiftness of change that Ecker and Hulley began experiencing with many of their clients, they initially named this new system Depth-Oriented Brief Therapy (DOBT).

In 2005, Ecker and Hulley began calling the system coherence therapy in order for the name to more clearly reflect the central principle of the approach, and also because many therapists had come to associate the phrase 'brief therapy' with depth-avoidant methods that they regard as superficial.