Commentary: We see the beginning of session 2, two weeks later. The therapist begins by following up on the between-session task, because he needs to know how the task went, including whether resistance arose, in order to know what to do next in the process of discovering and integrating pro-symptom positions.

Commentary: It is clear that she used the index card and successfully integrated the part of herself (her pro-symptom position) that strives for well-being by merging with her primary attachment figure.

In addition to that progress with integration, the client has just described a transformation experience that developed in response to her integrated awareness. She has indicated the key elements of a transformation experience as defined in Coherence Therapy and as confirmed by memory reconsolidation research:

In the presence of the reactivated target schema -- in essence, "Merging, as in utero, is what I need for being happy and safe" -- she experienced an emotionally vivid, sharply contradictory knowledge -- "No boundaries equals death" -- and then she sustained and kept revisiting that juxtaposition of those two contradictory knowings.

This is a juxtaposition of two incompatible knowings, one of which is part of the symptom-requiring schema, such that both knowings feel real yet both cannot possibly be true. This experiential dissonance is what Coherence Therapy defines as the brain's and mind's condition for dissolution of the one by the other. Understood in terms of memory reconsolidation, a few repetitions of that juxtaposition fulfill the brain's requirements for unlocking synapses maintaining the target, symptom-requiring learning and re-writing or updating it -- not just regulating and suppressing it -- according to the other, disconfirming knowing.

Note that the experience of two incompatible knowledges is different than mere conflict between two different parts, desires or motivations, such as wanting the expansive experience of travel and also wanting the safety and ease of staying home. Those two desires are in conflict, but they are not incompatible knowledges of the same thing, such as the present client's two incompatible knowledges of how the state of merging affects well-being. She came to a simultaneous awareness of "merging is wellness; I want to be you" (her newly conscious pro-symptom position formed early in life) and "merging is ruinous; I want to be me, separate from you." From her account it is apparent that the former was disconfirmed by the latter and lost much if not all of its compelling realness -- a fundamental shift that she termed "an epiphany for me." (The durability of this deep change is apparent in the next video segment from session 10, her final session, four months later.)

Commentary: The purpose of all of the discovery work and integration work in Coherence Therapy is to make the symptom-requiring schema available for a transforming juxtaposition. In this case, the client already possessed the needed contradictory knowledge, which came to fore of her awareness because of its mismatch with the newly conscious material. The process unfolds in that manner in about half of Coherence Therapy cases. In the other half, the therapist guides a process of finding a contradictory living knowledge, using any of about a dozen pathways and techniques that can be effective for this. (Several such techniques are described in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Unlocking the Emotional Brain, and a manual devoted entirely to those techniques will be available by the end of 2012 on the Coherence Therapy website.)

Commentary: A fundamental point to understand as a student of this course is the completely noncounteractive nature of the Coherence Therapy work. In other words, for juxtaposition and disconfirmation to occur and produce transformation, the client must first be guided into her pro-symptom position, feeling and embracing the emotional truth of it (the integration process). Any move to get away from, counteract or override the symptom or its underlying material is a departure from Coherence Therapy's methodology. In this sense, Coherence Therapy differs fundamentally from the counteractive strategy of many psychotherapies.

Commentary: Later in this session (session 2) the client reported that her focus on her former lover had largely continued, despite the falling-away of the striving to merge with her. When a symptom-requiring schema is dissolved but the symptom continues, this indicates the existence of at least one other, different symptom-requiring schema. The therapist therefore began the discovery process anew. In the course of sessions 2 through 9, which occurred at two-week intervals, two other, entirely different pro-symptom positions requiring her to hold on to her connection with her ex were brought to light experientially. The integration and transformation of these two other positions was similar in style and rhythm to the first one already shown.

For example, one consisted of an unconscious theme that became verbalized as, "After Mom and Dad's divorce, it looked to me like it's a world where love isn't strong enough to keep together people who love each other. I've got to prove that isn't so, and I've been struggling to prove it isn't so since I was 12. If I let go now of this relationship, it means I've failed and it means love fails to keep people together. So I won't let go!" Her integration of this material led to a rich revision of this early model of love and attachment, with the result that letting her own relationship end no longer had a dire, intolerable meaning about love or the kind of world it is, and so became acceptable to allow.

According to the principle of symptom coherence on which Coherence Therapy is based, people cease producing a symptom when it is no longer necessary to have -- which means, when all symptom-requiring schemas either no longer exist, or have been further evolved such that the symptom is no longer necessary. The next video segment, from session 10, shows that after dissolving three such schemas, this woman reports a very natural, complete falling-away of her two-year, anxious, obsessive attachment to her former lover.

Commentary: The naturalness that characterizes symptom cessation, in-depth change and expansion of well-being in Coherence Therapy is apparent here in session 10. Remaining symptom-free is effortless once the emotional learnings that had been necessitating the symptom no longer exist. Client and therapist each now had the distinct, felt sense that there was no longer anything to work on, and no further sessions were scheduled. Almost a year later, when this woman returned to work on a different matter, she reported that her obsessive preoccupation with her former lover had never recurred.

Note that the work involved nothing designed to directly counteract or prevent her obsessive thoughts and feelings or her compulsive behaviors. The work focused entirely on finding and embracing the underlying emotional schemas -- specific problems and solutions in implicit knowledge -- making these symptoms necessary to have. This led to the transformation of those schemas, and then her symptoms, no longer needed, simply ceased. The observation with each client that a symptom ceases with dissolution of the coherent emotional learnings necessitating it is an empirical corroboration of symptom coherence.