Neo-Coherence Therapy: A Bridge to the Soul

Neo-Coherence Therapy

A Bridge to the Soul

Bruce Parmenter

Neo-Coherence Therapy

A Bridge to the Soul

Copyright © 2013 Bruce Parmenter. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-461-5

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7118-9

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All scripture quotations in the text, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All scripture quotations in the Appendix, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com  The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Permission to quote from Depth Oriented Brief Therapy has been obtained from John Wiley and Sons.

To my wife Judy and our children, Linda, Cindi, Patti, Todd, and Eric, and with special mention and gratitude to Cindi for sharing her personal experience of Coherence Therapy.

Always love to all,

Dad

The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

—Irenaeus (ca. 180 ad)

Acknowledgments

Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley are the authors of Coherence Therapy, set forth in their 1996 book, Depth Oriented Brief Therapy. Neo-Coherence Therapy is an interpretation and exposition of the psychotherapeutic concepts in Depth Oriented Brief Therapy. Neo signals adaptations of Coherence Therapy to my own worldview and practice modalities. Ecker and Hulley bear no responsibility for these adaptations. Permission to quote from Depth Oriented Brief Therapy has been obtained from John Wiley and Sons.

Skilled artist Kristina T. C. Panizzi Woodley, MAE, Program Director, Undergraduate Medical Education, UAB Department of Medical Education, Birmingham, Alabama, has transformed my primitive figures into images much less offensive to the eye.

Deb Siltman has rescued my handwritten pages by use of an instrument called a computer, and Lori G. Thomas has done the copyediting.

Special thanks go to my colleague, Brenda Sommer, MAC, LPC, who was my dialogue partner in clarifying our understanding of Coherence Therapy. Many months of discussions of Coherence Therapy and Neo-Coherence Therapy in relation to the wide range of problems drawn from Brenda’s counseling practice provided one of the best learning experiences of my life.

Special thanks also to Megan Kegerrief, former supervisee, who first called my attention to Coherence Therapy.

Introduction

Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley’s 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 Weatherhead’s 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 Master’s degree students at Lincoln Christian University). Reading in the literature of psychotherapy has been my vocation and avocation through all these years.

Ecker and Hulley’s 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 psychotherapy—now 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 conscience—she 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 client’s 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 client’s 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 client’s 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 Weatherhead’s 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 forgiven—the revivifying and re-experiencing of ancient healing words—Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more—John 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.

Weatherhead’s 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. George’s 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.

I was present at the scene, either in the house or the yard—no one in my family could recall my location, and I can remember nothing of the accident. Perhaps I was taking a nap—who knows? I do remember the funeral, which was held in the living room of our home (1937). I remember nothing of the accident scene.

As I sit in my study now (Monday, June 21, 2010, seventy-three years after the event), I look up at George’s picture on the wall and try to remember. I add nothing to my memories. But I do recall an event which occurred in my forty-second year. I sought therapy for depression from Dr. Richard Dayringer. I had some inkling that the depression was connected to George’s death. Dr. Dayringer, using hypnosis, took me back a decade at a time until I arrived at age six. I still remembered nothing from the accident, but I began to cry with wracking sobs lasting minutes (I still cry a little now as I write). I believe I was feeling delayed grief, the grief which a six-year-old cannot express. I had discovered/recovered a portion of my emotional truth, and I did experience significant relief.

But Ecker and Hulley have made me feel there is more, and I think the key is the word abandonment. I was the youngest of six siblings, four brothers and two sisters. George was just above me in the sibling line. I must have felt abandoned by my playmate. I must have felt abandoned by my mother, whose crushing grief must have made her less emotionally available to me. I think my two older sisters, Elinor and Lois, nurtured me in Mom’s place, but four years later World War II broke out, and my sisters left home to work in war factories, and my brothers put on uniforms. From 1937 to 1941, I was abandoned by all my siblings, and my mother must have been preoccupied with her grief for George and her anxiety that other sons were in harm’s way. My father was a busy medical doctor deeply involved in his care for a community in wartime.

My emotional truth is a fear of abandonment. It manifests itself in various symptoms. They seldom threaten my functioning, but they sometimes rob my joy. I see Coherence Therapy (C.T.) as a bridge to the soul. The soul is the deep self and the total self. The Greek word for soul (psuche) describes the total self. Ecker and Hulley’s use of the term soma-kinesthetic is close to the meaning of psuche—a mind–body unity. The modern term psychology is derived from psuche. Biblical history links the soul to God, taking its origin from the breath of God which formed humanity into God’s image. Coherence therapy gave me clearer insight into my emotional truth than any other theory I have encountered. For that, in these closing years, I am deeply grateful.

From this perspective, radical inquiry (Ecker and Hulley’s term for the therapeutic search for the client’s emotional truth) is a search for the soul, the deep and total self, which I believe is not only a quest for emotional truth, but also a search for truth, wisdom for life which is graciously revealed by God beyond the constructions of the client. I agree with Ecker and Hulley that the client’s inner world is grounded in constructivism, a perspectival construal of experience, but I do not think that truth is always written with a small t. Nor do I think that emotional truth is merely emotional. I think it is also existential and transcendent, a marker pointing to Wisdom for Life.

The goal of this book will be to elucidate Coherence Therapy, per se, ascribing highest value to this theory and therapy, while listening with a third ear for transcendent Truth. I will begin with a Five Finger exercise, an aid to memory based on the seminal ideas in Ecker and Hulley’s book. (I use the Five Finger exercise with apologies to Walter Scott, who used it with different content and for a different purpose. Yet Scott’s original paradigm does have surprising relevance to C.T.—more on that later.)

The book will unfold with an explication of the ideas summarized on one’s fingers, together with illustrative case histories. I shall address Coherence Therapy in broad outline. For the details of the theory and therapy, one should consult the text, Depth Oriented Brief Therapy, by Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1996. Ecker and Hulley are in no sense responsible for the interpretation of Coherence Therapy found in this book. Nevertheless, I have tried to give accurate