Health and Wellness

Coaching vs. Therapy: Know the Difference

June 19, 2021

Simply Put: Therapy treats mental illness. Coaching helps with distress. Sometimes you’re stuck, not sick.

Coaching and therapy are different even if they overlap in places. Not all individuals who want help living a better life have a mental health disorder and need a mental health provider. Often the people we work with have been in traditional therapy for years and still are not where they want to be. Sometimes you’re stuck, not sick.

A good coach will discuss your needs to ensure they are able to be addressed within a coaching context. If you require more than what is provided through coaching, a well trained coach will make a referral to an appropriate licensed mental health provider. Often coaches will collaborate with healthcare providers and coordinate care to support the needs of clients.

Similarly to integrated/alternative providers, coaches neither make nor treat medical or mental diagnoses. Even when coaches are either licensed mental health providers or pre-licensed mental health providers, a coaching relationship prevents providing mental health treatment. So while a coach may be a therapist, in the coaching capacity they are not operating as licensed therapists, physicians, or psychologists providing traditional medical or mental health treatment.

Issues that are discussed in therapy are also, often, discussed in coaching. It is normal, albeit unfortunate, to collect messages, beliefs, fears, insecurities, etc along the way. Coaching helps remove these blocks. The distinction is the responsibility of the coach, but it is important to be aware as a consumer. A coaching client can have a diagnosis and seek coaching. However, a coach cannot treat the diagnosis. This means that if major depression or anxiety prevents a person from thriving, a coach can work with the client to live their fullest life, even while struggling with mental illness. However, a coach cannot treat depression. A therapist would collaborate instead!

There are benefits to working with a coach. Coaches are able to apply a wide variety of support and are able to offer advice that clinicians cannot. However, there are benefits therapists offer that coaches do not. For example, licensed providers are regulated by the state licensing body overseeing their license. Coaches do not have to be licensed. At all. Anyone can become a coach. This means that it is crucial to research a coach you intend on working with to be sure he, she, or they have proper training and experience.

At Well Coached Life all of our coaches provide ethical coaching. Our team members are formally trained to work with both the mind and the body. We implement strategies informed by Eastern and Western medicine and provide alternative therapy that is complementary to the healing arts services that are offered by providers who are licensed by the state. We offer services that are in compliance with California state laws, including California Business & Professional Code § 2053.6. We have several licensed adn pre-licensed therapists and psychologists to ensure we are aware if a client needs more care than coaching provides. When this happens, we have highly trained therapists with whom we work to ensure full supportive services to our clientele.

We are here to answer questions you may have to ensure you are afforded the best coaching opportunity we can provide.

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Unlocking the Science of Gratitude: A Path to Greater Happiness and Peace

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Understanding Depression and How to Take Care of Your Mental Health

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The Origin Story of Anxiety: Unpacking Core Memories

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Certifications & Training

Trauma may result from a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict. SE facilitates the completion of self-protective motor responses and the release of thwarted survival energy bound in the body, thus addressing the root cause of trauma symptoms. This is approached by gently guiding clients to develop increasing tolerance for difficult bodily sensations and suppressed emotion.

SE offers a framework to assess where a person is “stuck” in the fight, flight or freeze responses and provides clinical tools to resolve these fixated physiological states. It provides effective skills appropriate to a variety of healing professions including mental health, medicine, physical and occupational therapies, bodywork, addiction treatment, first response, education, and others— Excerpt taken from SETI.

Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-oriented approach to the healing of trauma and other stress disorders resulting from multidisciplinary study of stress physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, neuroscience, indigenous healing practices, and medical biophysics, together with over 45 years of successful clinical application. The SE approach releases traumatic shock, which is key to transforming PTSD and the wounds of emotional and early developmental attachment trauma. Trauma may begin as acute stress from a perceived life-threat or as the end product of cumulative stress. Both types of stress can seriously impair a person’s ability to function with resilience and ease. Excerpt taken from SETI

An Embodied approach to healing

Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP) is a complete treatment modality to heal trauma and attachment issues. SP welcomes the body as an integral source of information for processing past experiences relating to upsetting or traumatic events and developmental wounds. SP incorporates the physical and sensory experience, as well as thoughts and emotions, as part of the person’s complete experience of both the trauma itself and the process of healing. Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.

An Embodied approach to healing

SP seeks to restore a person’s ability to process information without being triggered by past experience. SP uses a three-phase treatment approach to gently guide the client through the therapeutic process – Safety and Stabilization, Processing, and Integration. The therapist must pay close attention to the client to ensure that they are not overwhelmed by the process while simultaneously engaging their own abilities and capacities for healing.

It is thought that SP strengthens instinctual capacities for survival and assists clients to re-instate or develop resources which were unavailable or missing at the time the trauma or wounding occurred. Once resources are developed and in place, the traumatic event can be processed with the aid of resources. SP is a well-developed approach with decades of success in the treatment of trauma and developmental wounds. — Excerpt taken from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.

Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was developed within a coherent theoretical and philosophical framework. It is a unique empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility. Psychological flexibility means contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values.

ACceptance and change

Based on Relational Frame Theory, ACT illuminates the ways that language entangles clients into futile attempts to wage war against their own inner lives. Through metaphor, paradox, and experiential exercises clients learn how to make healthy contact with thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations that have been feared and avoided. Clients gain the skills to recontextualize and accept these private events, develop greater clarity about personal values, and commit to needed behavior change.—Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a well-known humanistic approach to psychotherapy formulated in the 1980’s and developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment, a profound developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships. This science has expanded our understanding of individual dysfunction and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds. Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others.

Research supported relational model

The EFT model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions. EFT is best known as a cutting edge, tested and proven couple intervention, but it is also used to address individual depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress (EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and to repair family bonds (EFFT – Emotionally Focused Family Therapy). This model operationalizes the principles of attachment science using non-pathologizing experiential (paralleling Carl Rogers) and relational systems techniques (paralleling Salvador Minuchin) to focus on and change core organizing factors in both the self and key relationships.— Excerpt taken from ICEEFT

Excerpt taken from ACBS Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a comprehensive multi-diagnostic, modularized behavioral intervention designed to treat individuals with severe mental disorders and out-of-control cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns. It has been commonly viewed as a treatment for individuals meeting criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) with chronic and high-risk suicidality, substance dependence or other disorders. However, over the years, data has emerged demonstrating that DBT is also effective for a wide range of other disorders and problems, most of which are associated with difficulties regulating emotions and associated cognitive and behavioral patterns.

radical acceptance and change

As the name implies, dialectical philosophy is a critical underpinning of DBT. Dialectics is a method of logic that identifies the contradictions (antithesis) in a person's position (thesis) and overcomes them by finding the synthesis. Additionally, in DBT a client cannot be understood in isolation from his or her environment and the transactions that occur. Rather, the therapist emphasizes the transaction between the person and their environment both in the development and maintenance of any disorders. It is also assumed that there are multiple causes as opposed to a single factor affecting the client. And, DBT uses a framework that balances the treatment strategies of acceptance and change - the central dialectical tension in DBT. Therapists work to enhance the capability (skills) of their client as well as to develop the motivation to change. Maintaining that balance between acceptance and change with clients is crucial for both keeping a client in treatment and ensuring they are making progress towards their goals of creating a life worth living. — Taken from DBT-Linehan Board of Certification. (click to learn more)

Excerpt taken from EMDR Institute .

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes.

Evidence based tramua resolution

EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes — Excerpt taken from EMDR Institute.

Excerpt taken from Psychology Today.

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a counseling method that helps people resolve ambivalent feelings and insecurities to find the internal motivation they need to change their behavior. It is a practical, empathetic, and short-term process that takes into consideration how difficult it is to make life changes. Motivational interviewing evolved from Carl Roger’s person-centered, or client-centered, approach to counseling and therapy, as a method to help people commit to the difficult process of change. The process is twofold. The first goal is to increase the person’s motivation and the second is for the person to make the commitment to change. As opposed to simply stating a need or desire to change, hearing themselves express a commitment out loud has been shown to help improve a client’s ability to actually make those changes.

A commitment to change

The role of the therapist is more about listening than intervening. Motivational interviewing is often combined or followed up with other interventions, such as cognitive therapy, support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and stress management training.— Excerpt taken from Psychology Today.

According to psychologist, neuroscientist, master trainer and overall badass, Dr. Kate Truitt, "The Havening Techniques system is comprised of protocols and methods that rely on the electrochemical makeup of our body to create healing. Utilizing similar functional mechanisms as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), they include the newest advancements neuroscience. Havening Techniques provide a gentle, client-centered approach to the rapid release of encoded traumatic memories. This allows for fast and effective healing from posttraumatic stress disorder and other fear-based disorders such as anxiety, panic disorder, and phobias.

Havening: healing in your Hands

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