This talk spells out the close correspondences between Coherence Therapy’s model and methods of profound change and the brain’s process of memory reconsolidation recently discovered by neuroscientists. Session recordings illustrate a well-defined, built-in process that therapists can foster to make transformational shifts a regular occurrence in day-to-day clinical practice. Emphasis in this succinct presentation is more on the science than the art of Coherence Therapy.

The many meta-analyses of psychotherapy efficacy studies have shown that with investigator bias taken into account, all studied therapies have essentially the same, modest level of efficacy, equal to that of placebo therapies. This talk offers a new, paradigm-shifting explanation of the observed cap on efficacy and how it could be surpassed. A potential master key to a new level of therapeutic effectiveness is the concept of emotional coherence, the view that a therapy client’s presenting symptom is a coherent expression of the person’s existing, learned, implicit constructions of self and world, not a “disorder.” This talk explains why the coherence-focused therapy co-developed by the speaker could be expected to break the longstanding effectiveness barrier. This optimistic expectation is based on both extensive clinical observations as well as neuroscience research findings on memory reconsolidation, the brain’s built-in process for dissolving the neural encoding of implicit emotional learnings and the responses they maintain.