ABSTRACT
The practice of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy involves helping people recognise when essential coherence is getting in the way of pursuing a meaningful life and working towards functional coherence instead. A degree of coherence is needed within language, since the speaker and the listener need to be able to derive the same relations in order to communicate effectively. Practitioners only need to attend a lecture that makes no sense to them to experience the disconcerting effects of a lack of coherence. In this way, coherence is woven into the fabric of language and communicating coherently is reinforced by others repeatedly. As the fusion of the symbolic world and the material world occurs, a kind of essential coherence emerges, in which practitioners want to demonstrate that their internal world and external world add up and fit together.
