Psychological HealthCare, P.L.L.C.

Coaching vs. Psychotherapy: Which is for you?

Both coaching and psychotherapy are organized for the sole purpose of helping the client. Both are based within the interaction between the client and a professionally-trained practitioner. Both begin with a needs assessment during some sort of intake interview and a determination of "goodness of fit;" that is, whether the practitioner seems to understand the needs of the client and feels fairly confident that s/he has some sort of growth process to offer the client. The work in both typically involves some sort of psychoeducation and content-specific training.

However, coaching and psychotherapy differ in the basic focus and meaning of the work. People seek psychotherapy when life is out of control in some way and they feel they need help or things may get worse. Typically they will be experiencing symptoms of either depression or anxiety or both. Since the people in psychotherapy have serious problems their medical insurer typically covers at least some percentage of the fee, and monitors how many sessions are used; to keep control of the process the insurer requires a diagnosis, description of the patient, summaries of treatment and treatment goals. On the other hand, people seek coaching to enhance their lives. Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan both employ coaches to improve their skills.

I have changed my work with fibromyalgia patients from the psychologist's office into a coaching practice because most of the fibromyalgia patients with whom I worked did not have a psychiatric disorder. Rather they needed and clearly benefited from coaching on how to improve their lives.