This is the view that any response of the brain–mind–body system is an expression of coherent personal constructs (or schemas), which are nonverbal, emotional, perceptual and somatic knowings, not verbal-cognitive propositions.
[5] The principle of symptom coherence can be found in varying degrees, explicitly or implicitly, in the writings of a number of historical psychotherapy theorists, including Sigmund Freud (1923), Harry Stack Sullivan (1948), Carl Jung (1964), R. D. Laing (1967), Gregory Bateson (1972), Virginia Satir (1972), Paul Watzlawick (1974), Eugene Gendlin (1982), Vittorio Guidano & Giovanni Liotti (1983), Les Greenberg (1993), Bessel van der Kolk (1994), Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey (2001), Sue Johnson (2004), and others.
[7] In other words, the theory states that symptoms are produced by how the individual strives, without conscious awareness, to carry out self-protecting or self-affirming purposes formed in the course of living.
This model of symptom production fits into the broader category of psychological constructivism, which views the person as having profound, if unrecognized, agency in shaping experience and behavior.
Hence the third and higher orders constitute what Ecker and Hulley call "the emotional truth of the symptom", which are the meanings and purposes that are intended to be discovered, integrated, and transformed in therapy.
Neuroscientists subsequently determined that these same steps are precisely what unlocks and deletes the neural circuit in implicit memory that stores an emotional learning—the process of reconsolidation.
In a series of three articles published in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology from 2007 to 2009, Bruce Ecker and Brian Toomey presented evidence that coherence therapy may be one of the systems of psychotherapy which, according to current neuroscience, makes fullest use of the brain's built-in capacities for change.