I didn’t feel like I fully understood this post at the time when it was written, but in retrospect it feels like it’s talking about essentially the same thing as Coherence Therapy does, just framed differently.
Any given symptom is coherently produced, in other words, by either (1) how the individual strives, without conscious awareness, to carry out strategies for safety or well-being; or (2) how the individual responds to having suffered violations of safety or well-being. This model of symptom production is squarely in accord with the constructivist view of the self as having profound if unrecognized agency in shaping experience and behavior. Coherence therapy is centrally focused on ushering clients into a direct, noninterpretive experience of their agency in generating the symptom.
Symptom coherence was also defined by Ecker and Hulley (2004) as a heuristic principle of mental functioning, as follows: The brain-mind-body system can purposefully produce any of its possible conditions or states, including any kind of clinical symptom, in order to carry out any purpose that it is capable of forming.
This principle of general coherence is, of course, quite foreign to the therapy field’s prevailing, pathologizing models of symptom production. Underscoring the paradigmatic difference, Ecker and Hulley (2004, p. 3), addressing trainees, comment:
You won’t fully grasp this methodology until you grasp the nimble, active genius of the psyche not only in constructing personal reality, but also in purposefully manifesting any one of its myriad possible states to carry out any of its myriad possible purposes. The client’s psyche is always coherent, always in control of producing the symptom—knowing why and when to produce it and when not to produce it.
I didn’t feel like I fully understood this post at the time when it was written, but in retrospect it feels like it’s talking about essentially the same thing as Coherence Therapy does, just framed differently.
-- Toomey & Ecker 2007 (sci-hub)