Mental Health Coaching vs. Psychotherapy
Coaching is not a replacement for psychotherapy or psychiatry — it’s a compliment.
Traditional talk therapy helps clients understand why they’re feeling and behaving the way they are, and perhaps work through trauma (past oriented). It’s mainly concerned with how your emotional/behavioural dysfunction came to be. In contrast, coaching helps clients to plan and execute the healthy changes they want to make (future oriented).
When you empower a person and show him or her what they can do — instead of focusing on what they can’t do — you can improve their overall mental health and life dramatically.
I want to make it very clear that I’m not bashing therapy — at all. On the contrary, I believe that therapy saved my life. Awareness of self is a critical ingredient when it comes to healing and wellness, but in my experience, there’s also more to the equation…
My experience with psychotherapy led me to coaching.
Some people come to coaching after having already tried psychotherapy — whether it helped them a great deal or it didn’t. Personally, I discovered the field of life coaching after my first four years of psychotherapy. Those initial years of counselling were a pivotal time in my life. The experience was indispensable to my self-discovery and the acceptance and forgiveness I needed to process in order to begin healing deeply rooted childhood wounds and trauma. And while therapy absolutely changed my life for the better, there came a point where I kept asking my therapist: “Now what?”
I wanted to know how to make lasting changes to my behaviour that would stop my depression from constantly resurfacing. My therapist and I had done so much work around why I think, feel, and behave the way I do, but what was missing was the how to move forward. How could I make the positive life changes I so desperately knew I needed to make? I felt stuck.
It wasn’t until I started seeing a life coach that I began using those insights to make the necessary changes in my behaviour. In my opinion, there is no substitute for the insights that psychotherapy can provide, but I think the best case scenario is that you take those insights and turn them into actionable steps.
One last note on the importance of therapy…
Therapy isn’t about fixing or curing you — it’s about finding self-awareness, developing coping mechanisms to help you through life’s ups and downs, and providing support to help you develop strength and resilience. Often it’s a powerful preventative tool, which is why I have never stopped seeing a counsellor. I can help you explore triggers, learn tools for nervous system regulation, explore unmet needs and develop strategies for coping… but I am not a licensed mental health professional… yet! *One day I hope to go back to school and train as a counsellor. My dream would be to integrate therapy with coaching and change as many lives as possible.