Coherence therapy starts from a simple, loving, respectful truth: often what looks like a “problem” in adulthood began as a wise act of self-protection much earlier in life.

When we’re very young, or when something overwhelming happens, the mind scrambles into protecting us. It tries to make sense of the moment to keep us as safe as possible in that moment. Either because we’re too little or because the situation is too intense, this learning doesn’t form as a thought. It's more of a felt sense — a wordless rule about who I need to be and what the world is like. It can take shapes like:

“If I show my true nature, I’ll get hurt.”

“If I’m not perfect, I’ll be shamed.”

“Unless I’m big and impressive, people will leave.”

This isn’t a weakness or a pathology. It’s the most intelligent, creative, adaptive response that was available at that moment. A liberatory move. And thanks to what neuroscience now understands about emotional memory, we know that these early rules live in a subcortical part of the brain that doesn’t update on its own. It is timeless and contextless.

So even if life has changed and we’re no longer in danger, the old rule still surfaces. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we handle relationships, and even how we make professional choices. And because it was never verbal in the first place, we don’t always know why we’re reacting the way we do. From the outside, what was once liberatory - what once saved us - can now look like a symptom, something that's “wrong,”.

Coherence therapy offers a way to find this hidden emotional rule again — not by analyzing it or thinking hard about it, but by helping the felt sense of it arise in a safe, therapeutic environment. When the old emotional truth is held side by side in a felt sense with the reality of one’s current life, an important neural connection is made: at the felt level we experience that the two truths no longer match. That felt contradiction is what, according to neuroscience, allows the old emotional learning to dissolve. There’s no forcing, no replacing the belief, no trying to behave differently through willpower. The process isn’t about overriding anything. It’s about uncovering what once protected us, honoring its intelligence, and letting the nervous system naturally release what is no longer needed.

That’s the heart of coherence therapy — non-pathologizing, respectful, and rooted in how emotional learning actually works in the brain.

Learn more here and here.