Parmenter - Neo-Coherence Therapy

B ruce Ecker and Laurel Hulleys book, Depth Oriented Brief Therapy (DOBT), published by Jossey-Bass in 1996, is among the most thought-provoking books on psychotherapy I have read in my lifetime (and I have read a few, starting in 1953 with Leslie Weatherheads Psychology, Religion, and Healing, and continuing through a career of pastoral ministry, practice and teaching in pastoral counseling, university teaching in marriage and family therapy, and, in my seventy-ninth year, I am still active in clinical supervision of Masters degree students at Lincoln Christian University). Reading in the literature of psychotherapy has been my vocation and avocation through all these years.

Ecker and Hulleys work comes nearly fifty years since I first became interested in counseling, but it does not come too late. It comes in time to provide a perspective which rekindles my hope for what psychotherapy might achieve (not that I had lost faith in the efficacy of psychotherapynow I see a more elegant, effective, and economical way to bring relief to clients).

Ecker and Hulley take me back to my roots, to my first encounter with the power of the subconscious. The aforementioned work by Weatherhead (his PhD thesis at the University of London) contained the case history of a woman with the symptom of an undiagnosed body rash. When no physiological cause could be discovered, she was referred for counseling. She finally rediscovered her uneasy conscienceshe had been unfaithful to her husband while he served abroad in the British army in World War II. The affair had occurred in a certain automobile. When she would go out to shop, she would sometimes see that make of car. Each time, she would break out in a rash. She never had the symptom unless she saw the automobile. These dynamics did not emerge from the clients unconsciousness until she got in touch with her emotional truth.

Ecker and Hulley would see this sixty-year-old case history as illustrating why a symptom is necessary to have. It was necessary in order to protect the clients conscious self from the pain in the unconscious self. The symptom was a bridge to the soul, a signal that the soul was not well. The repressed inner conflict was the clients emotional truth, which, when brought to consciousness, relieved the symptom.

Symptom relief is a worthy goal in and for itself. Pain brings the client into therapy, and relief is the good end for which the client pays the therapist. In this essential business contract, a visit to your psychotherapist is no different than a visit to your dentist. You pay for pain relief, and the psychotherapist is ethically and professionally bound to try to heal or comfort.

The client in Weatherheads account went deep into her soul in terms of uncovering her emotional truth, but full relief of the psychosomatic symptom required confession and absolution (the communication to the client that her sin was forgiventhe revivifying and re-experiencing of ancient healing wordsNeither do I condemn you, go and sin no moreJohn 8:11).

Ecker and Hulley prefer now to call their therapy Coherence Therapy. They presuppose that the symptom makes sense, that it is purposive. But the purpose of the conscious symptom lies hidden in the unconscious. They believe the unconscious can be accessed quickly. Whether Weatherhead entered the unconscious quickly or slowly, I do not know, but he did, in fact, enter a domain of personality which is real in all of us. Weatherhead took his client out of the net which was hidden for her (Ps 31:4). Coherence therapy probes for that hidden net.

Weatherheads account gave me, at age twenty-two, my first awareness of the unconscious. Over the years of my counseling work, I have stumbled on the unconscious inadvertently, and occasionally attempted to break into this secret place, but for the first time, Ecker and Hulley have shown me a way to construct a regular and reliable healing path to the unconscious.

As I read Ecker and Hulley, I became more aware of my own unconscious dynamics. The reading took me back to the dramatic and traumatic events of my childhood. A month before my sixth birthday, my ten-year-old brother, George Henry, died instantly by electrocution. He and his neighbor pals had a tree house in the large maple tree in the corner lawn of our family home. George climbed higher and higher until he brushed against a power line running through the uppermost branches of the tree. Neighbors heard an explosion and saw blue flames shoot out of the top of the tree. Georges lifeless body dropped some thirty feet to the ground. His pals called for my mother, who came from the house, sent my sister Elinor (age 17) in the house for a blanket, and then called the local funeral home for C.R. Cook, the mortician. My father, the town physician and a gun hobbyist, was somewhere in the country target shooting. Someone was sent to find him.