Coherence Therapy was developed over the last 20 years by psychotherapists Bruce Ecker, LMFT and Laurel Hulley, MA. By micro-examining hundreds of deep change events of their clients, they identified the internal and external processes that had taken place. The aim was to identify the built-in rules of profound change and form a psychotherapy made up of nothing but methods tailored to engage these powerful, native processes.

Originally called Depth Oriented Brief Therapy (DOBT), the name was changed to Coherence Therapy in 2005 to reflect more clearly the guiding principle of the approach, which is the complete coherence of the unconscious knowings, meanings and feelings that underlie and maintain the great majority of symptoms and problems presented by therapy clients.