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Sensitive NLP Coach - coach or therapist: what is the difference?
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I am writing an article on this topic - in the meantime here are some brief notes.
The boundaries between coaching and therapy are a constant source of confusion.
Here are the main questions:
Is coaching different from therapy, and why?
Should practitioners be mixing coaching and therapy?
Should clients move from coaching to therapy with the same person?
Let's attempt some answers - these are not meant to be written in stone, but just exploratory opinions.
First of all, coaching evolved in the USA and its models in other countries have tended to inherit very American attitudes. One of those attitudes is that coaching and therapy do not mix. This is mainly for legal and insurance reasons - in America psychotherapy or counselling is normally paid for by insurance schemes and follows some sort of diagnosis. If coaches are seen to do anything like "therapy" they lay themselves open to all sorts of legal difficulties.
In America, also, liability (malpractice) insurance for counselling and psychotherapy can cost a small fortune and is considered a different risk from coaching, which again is why the two are normally kept separate. UK coaches who are also therapists normally get insurance from one company covering both therapy and coaching, and the cost is very reasonable. UK insurance companies generally don't care whether therapy or coaching is being offered.
So in the US, as many barriers as possible between the two fields have been put in place, such as insisting that coaching focuses on the present and the future but not on the past; different behaviours expected from coaches and therapists; coaches should not even talk like therapists at any time; and so on.
A fundamental difference remains between coaching and therapy and that has to do with the autonomy of the client and the equality of the relationship between coach and client. A therapist is, theoretically, in a position of power; a coach is the equal of the client. Coachees direct the agenda; therapy clients are led, fed interpretations, and so on.
However in real life the boundaries are fuzzier, especially in the UK where most therapy, and all coaching, is private and not covered by medical insurance or the National Health service. For years before life coaching was a distinct profession, people were going to counsellors and therapists for help with the sorts of issues that they now take up with coaches. In fact, when coaching emerged, many therapists jumped on the bandwagon, calling themselves coaches without any specific qualifications in it!
As for the different type of relationship, if you are not talking about severe psychological problems or very long-term therapy, most therapy clients are pretty much in control and decide what, when and how to tell the therapist! They also fire their therapists pretty often! Therapy clients as well as coaching clients resist doing tasks set as homework and can tend to expect the helper to do all the work.
For a long time, therapy clients towards the end of their therapy sought a lighter form of help from the same person, focusing on getting their lives together in the present and looking towards the future. What else could you call this but coaching? Moving from therapy to coaching - without explicitly naming it as such, was normal, but moving from coaching to therapy with the same person is questionable - why? Only if you assume the client is suddenly weaker and the therapist suddenly has more power. But there is another way of looking at it - imagine the "therapy" as a specialised technique offered by the coach (also a trained therapist) when an issue deeply rooted in the past emerges, or when more in-depth work is obviously required. As long as there are no insurance, legal or licensing complications, what is wrong with that? The whole is taking place within a framework of helping the client towards a better life. It is an insult to the client to imagine he or she is suddenly going to lose power or be more vulnerable because he /she is asking for more help. Moving from coaching to therapy within a caring professional relationship can be likened to "increasing the power of the microscope" to focus on what is really going on with the client.
In the UK, various forms of help have developed forms for both working with the present and future AND for working with the past. Hypnotherapy has developed various forms of hypnotic coaching (at least one of which does not actually involve much hypnosis!) And cognitive behavioural therapy, has both therapeutic and coaching "flavours" yet concentrates on the present and future rather than the past. NLP and EFT practitioners may deal with both the past and the present/future yet neither of them is in itself counselling or psychotherapy (so may ignore the whole present/past boundary completely!)
So, boundaries between coaching and therapy in the UK are much more flexible and many people offer both or a mixture of the two. In the US, depending on local state laws and regulations, ways around the past/present boundary can involve declaring that one is not a therapist, or operating under the banner of a religious ministry, etc.
As the psychotherapies become more regulated in the UK, there will be a shift towards more therapists redefining themselves as coaches, NLP practitioners, etc. if they do not have the "right" up-to-date training and do not want to spend years and a small fortune retraining. (In the UK, being a member of some form of alternative ministry does not give a person any special status or rights as it can do in the US.)
Do you need coaching or therapy? Unlike coaches in the US, or coaches who do NOT have any experience as therapists/counsellors, I will not impose any artificial limitations on where your work with me can go. I will listen to you first and together we will decide on the way forward.
Morris Berg
This page is copyright © Morris Berg 2009 and must not be reproduced without permission in writing.
email Morris at hspcoach@gmail.com
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