Coherence Therapy for Behavior Change: How Deep Healing Happens

Why do people go to therapy anyway? It’s a good question. When I think back to my pre-psychologist self and consider reasons someone might benefit from therapy, I probably would have come up with ideas such as grief, trauma, or abuse. Behaviors too—like depression keeping you stuck in bed or loneliness making you socially avoidant and anxious. Maybe I would have considered general experiences like feeling miserable, wanting change but not knowing where to start, or a deep desire to know oneself.

Be it stigma, general misconceptions, or my own family culture, it probably wasn’t until college—or even graduate school—that the full range of mental health treatment really started to clear up for me. Today, I want to talk about behavior change.

What Is Behavior Change?

Behavior change can be defined as the process of stopping, starting, or modifying a target behavior. The target behavior often includes a habit you wish to eliminate but that requires enormous willpower to interrupt or disengage from. While we might immediately think of overeating, smoking, doom-scrolling, or staying up too late, habits also include other behaviors that seem out of your control—or even part of your personality.

These might include reacting with irritability, lashing out at your partner, yelling excessively at your children, declining plans you’d otherwise enjoy, remaining in a soul-destroying job, worrying, procrastinating, or overworking (“workaholism”).

There have been many self-help books about behavior change and hacks such as habit stacking that have likely shifted the cultural tide a bit on the concept of willpower. Nevertheless, the idea lives on: that if we just had more “self-control,” we could improve all aspects of our lives. Many people believe that with more willpower they would eat right, spend less money, exercise more, stop procrastinating, and be better versions of themselves.

While that belief isn’t entirely untrue, research consistently shows that willpower alone has a high failure rate—a topic I’ll explore further in a future blog post.

Why Therapy Helps with Habit Change

Psychotherapy with a well-trained therapist using evidence-based modalities can help you break old patterns that no longer serve you—or even cause harm. It’s a deeply human experience to feel stuck in a pattern that you know rationally isn’t helping but can’t seem to stop. Or at least, not for long.

This is a common reason people seek therapy in my practice, Mindful Psychological—to address feeling blocked, stuck, or frustrated by behaviors and emotions they can’t seem to change, despite being intelligent, competent adults.

Coherence Therapy for Behavior Change

Coherence Therapy is an evidence-based treatment that facilitates transformative, lasting behavior change in a unique way. Rather than forcing yourself into change or replacing one habit with another, Coherence Therapy helps illuminate the underlying emotional purpose of the behavior causing distress.

We start with the assumption that most symptoms or behaviors you hope to change are completely coherent—that is, they make sense, even if not immediately obvious. Because these behaviors serve a subconscious purpose, trying to will them away can feel like a tug-of-war with yourself.

Once emotional learning is brought to awareness and fully felt, the therapist guides you through experiential exercises that tap into the brain’s natural ability to revise and rewire old learnings. Ultimately, this process leads to deep, lasting change rather than temporary improvement.

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