Set of four demonstrations of Coherence Therapy dispelling chronic compulsive inaction at its roots.
 
Actual therapy sessions—not reenactments—by Coherence Psychology Institute co-directors Sara K. Bridges, PhD and Bruce Ecker, LMFT
Each session was done as a live demonstration of Coherence Therapy in a clinical training workshop, and each client was a workshop participant who volunteered to do the session.
 
1. An ordinary repair task.  The client is a woman who has been compulsively avoiding a seemingly ordinary domestic repair task, even though this prevents very desired activities.  The discovery work brings her into awareness that her inaction is an urgent self-protective tactic learned in the complex trauma of her childhood.  With that lucid recognition, her emotional learning and memory system further recognizes that the original danger is no longer present, which renders the repair task easily doable soon after the session.  This session, conducted online via Zoom, shows that tele- therapy does not have to diminish the depth and power of experiential work.
One entire session, 55 minutes

2. Writing and painting.  The client is a man who is chronically blocked internally from pursuing the writing and painting that deeply matter to him. The discovery work finds the cause of the blockage in both his childhood shock of searing invalidation and shaming by his stepmother and his lifelong living knowledge of systemic racism.  He had learned from each of those that expressing himself is too vulnerable and unsafe to do, but was not aware that those learnings were still ruling him in the present.  As he sits with this new awareness, at different points in the session he experiences two somatically felt shifts, which have fully liberating effects on his writing and painting thereafter.  One entire session, 36 minutes

3. Emptying a storage locker.  The client is a man who is baffled by his out-of-character, rigid avoidance of dealing with his storage unit, a pattern of five years duration, ever since he emerged at age 74 from a long series of major health crises and surgeries.  The discovery work ends the mystery by bringing him into facing, feeling and voicing the totally unfamiliar vulnerability and the intensely daunting challenge to his identity that aging has wrought.  With the existential issues recognized, entirely new meanings and solutions emerge, disconfirming those that had been generating his task avoidance and his crisis of identity.  One edited session, 25 minutes

4. Writing process notes after therapy sessions.  The client is a woman who cannot make sense of why, throughout her psychotherapy career, she compulsively postpones writing her therapy session notes.  The urgent necessity of not attending to that writing task is found, during the discovery work, in one of the emotional learnings produced by intense relational trauma in her family in childhood.  Now well aware of what the great danger was back then, the absence of that danger in the present becomes plainly apparent to her, disconfirming the original schema and ending her procrastination of her session notes.  One entire session, 53 minutes, plus 8 minutes from a subsequent session