Coherence: The Missing Piece of Meaning

Everyone has “their seat” at the family dining table. Mine was furthest from the door, my back to the wall, in clear view of the entrances. It happened to be the most strategic seat, aligning with the “commanding position” in feng shui. The commanding position’s name comes from the idea that you maintain control by minimizing your exposure—especially from behind. It echoes the adage: “Never turn your back on your opponent.” My seat was perfectly positioned for the conversational energy (chi) to flow— but also for a skirmish.

Even before I hit double digits, I brought my sharpest questions to dinner: Why should we listen to teachers who yell at students for yelling? Why did I have to finish my vegetables when my siblings got a pass? My parents weren’t looking to litigate inconsistencies at dinner—they were raising three kids with one parent working night shifts, just trying to enjoy the casserole du jour. Still, I would press and exhaust them, remaining in my commanding position long after my younger siblings had been excused. I wasn’t trying to be impertinent— I wanted to know how they bore the discrepancies and hypocrisies of daily life. What I was chasing —without knowing the word for it— was coherence, the unsung dimension of meaning.

When we think about crafting a meaningful life, we often focus on purpose (having goals and directionality) and significance (making a difference and contributing positively). But unlike purpose or significance, coherence doesn’t sparkle with ambition or superlatives. It’s less flashy, but just as essential.

Coherence is the feeling that life makes sense— that our past, present, and future connect in some intelligible way. It’s the ability to recognize patterns in our experiences, to understand how they relate, and to locate ourselves within them.

We tend to treat coherence as elementary or effortless, something that runs on autopilot without much upkeep. But when life becomes chaotic or disjointed, it’s often coherence we lose first— and without it, we can feel stuck, confused, or untethered.

This is where Gestalt theory and Gestalt psychotherapy offer valuable insight—not just into how we instinctively construct coherence, but how we might reconstruct it when it begins to fracture.

The early Gestalt psychologists were captivated by our innate tendency to perceive wholes rather than disconnected parts. They observed that people instinctively organize stimuli into unified, meaningful patterns and relationships.

For example, they studied how we naturally group elements based on proximity, similarity, and continuity. As the theory evolved, its principles were found to extend beyond visual perception—to the ways we make sense of life events and form beliefs. Several key concepts bridge this gap between visual and psychological, such as figure-ground perception, or how we distinguish an object from its background.

Emotionally, figure-ground perception shows up in the way certain parts of us take center stage, while others get pushed to the periphery. Often, the emotions, needs, or ways of being that recede into the background are those that were unwelcome in our early environments. As Alice Miller writes in The Drama of the Gifted Child, this kind of repression is an adaptive act—a way to secure approval, often at the expense of self-authenticity, internal congruence, and coherence. We exile the parts of ourselves that were met with disapproval, criticism, or indifference. But those fractured parts don’t disappear. They continue to operate beneath the surface, shaping our behaviors and beliefs in fragmented, often confusing ways.

Healing, then, involves reversing the figure-ground dynamic: bringing those banished parts into focus, allowing them to be seen, understood, and reintegrated into our personal narrative— a process that restores a sense of inner coherence.

We’re also wired for closure—the tendency to complete incomplete patterns. Visually, this is what allows us to “complete” objects that aren’t fully drawn, like the Kanizsa square or the panda in the World Wide Fund for Nature’s logo. Psychologically, it’s how we fill in gaps in our stories, often with distorted assumptions. When no one explained why my inquiries were met with dismissal or tension, I filled in the blanks myself, concluding that asking hard questions was socially risky, and that expressing my curiosity came with a gamble of being misunderstood.

I never stopped asking questions, but I did learn to brace for backlash. I cast aside the part of me that believed inquiry could lead to connection rather than disruption. But over time, something shifted. Peers began thanking me for asking the hard questions, and I started to see just how deeply the fear of being misunderstood lived on— how often I anticipated being seen as antagonistic. Gradually, I welcomed that part of myself back—the part that challenged without flinching with shame or fear. By doing so, I started to rebuild a coherent story, one where I can trace the arc of how my fear of being misunderstood has shaped my life.

This inner shift didn’t happen by changing my thoughts about asking questions— it happened when the feeling of asking them changed. For years, I tried to reframe my narrative, attempting to coach myself out of a cognitive distortion. But telling myself “Asking challenging questions is safe and worthwhile” wasn’t enough to change my embodied sense of threat. Reframing was like writing a new caption; reintegration was restoring the missing parts of the picture.

That process involved bringing the disowned part of me back into the foreground, recognizing that it had remained frozen in the painful state it was left in when first pushed aside. But by keeping it in view, I began to re-integrate it with my present-day experiences. It was a process of self-compassion, persistent awareness, trial and error, and substantial support.[1]

In meaning-making and healing, we never start from scratch—we gather the scattered pieces of memory, identity, and emotional patterns already within us. Like an artist constructing a collage, we contrast, layer, and reposition our fragments to gain new self-understanding and deepen self-compassion, creating pathways for greater authenticity. We work with what’s already there, making space for what has been relegated to the margins. We bring into focus the things we've been trained to keep blurry. What once seemed disjointed begins to form new relationships—and through those, fresh meaning emerges. We continually reassemble our narratives to maintain internal coherence, external correspondence, and pragmatic function—a triad echoed in William James’s theory of truth.[2] This is the ongoing upkeep of living a meaningfully coherent life.

Coherence is the thread that weaves experience and perception into meaning. It’s the map that shows not just where you are, but how you got here—and who you’ve become along the way. The dining table was the first place I tried to draw that map. I was trying to locate myself in a world that doesn’t always explain itself. Today, I see that need for coherence as deeply human—a desire to make sense of the world and to see myself in it, whole. Coherence is creating a picture —one where all the pieces, even the dissonant ones, can belong.

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[1] As Gestalt therapist Gordon Wheeler notes, integration and healing are inherently relational processes. Our sense of self is not formed in isolation, but through meaningful contact with others who recognize and affirm our experiences. We co-construct our stories by making contact with those who see us and validate us. See Gordon Wheeler, Beyond Individualism: Toward a New Understanding of Self, Relationship, and Experience in Gestalt Therapy (The Gestalt Journal Press, 2000).

[2] William James articulated three major conceptions of truth: correspondence (truth as agreement with reality), coherence (truth as internal consistency within a belief system), and pragmatic utility (truth as what proves workable and satisfying in lived experience). He emphasized that truth “happens to an idea” through verification over time, suggesting that what we call “true” must not only align with reality and cohere logically but also function meaningfully in our lives. See William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907).