Can Coaching Ever Replace Therapy?

The silence was deafening.

My therapist looked at me first with horror and then disgust, “You’re leaving therapy to have…coaching?”

I suddenly felt so guilty, “Yes,” I replied, “I’m sorry but I don’t feel any further forward, every week raking over what happened. I just want to live my life and right now I haven’t left the delivery room.”

That was my last therapy session, my therapist took the opportunity to lighten her waiting list and immediately let me go, a few days later a letter arrived saying I’d had much more than the recommended 6 months and I was in her words “ready.” That bit was true I’d been sitting in her office for nearly 2 years but I was never in a million years “ready,” suddenly it felt like a risk and I wasn’t sure I liked that, could I really replace the familiar therapy with coaching?

Don’t get me wrong, since I was 12 I’ve sat in front of just about every type of therapist you can find, CBT, Psychodynamic, Person Centred Counselling, Psychiatrists, Clinical Psychologists, Counselling Psychologists, one very particular Dr of Psychology who had been a ‘hanging judge’ in his day who saw me at the end of his career and lets just say loved a gory anecdote. I’ve seen integrative therapists, art therapists, mental health nurses, mental wellbeing practitioners. Some NHS some private and all a very, very mixed bag of results. Now that I think about it I’ve sat in chairs in front of people trying to find a way through my brain for years and if you’ve ever sat in front of someone whose response to your tears and stories is to nod and make sympathetic noises you’ll know how frustrating and wrong it can feel.

Sitting with someone else’s trauma is hard, mental health workers are not immune to it but I think when you can’t muster more than an “hmmm” in response to stories of trauma it’s time to quit. Of course I had periods of feeling ok, the therapy seemed to be working but then I’d relapse and eventually I realised it wasn’t giving me the tools I needed to live fully and it wasn’t making me less afraid of my own brain. All in all therapy for me has been a confusing, re traumatising, quick sanding experience but after 20 years of trying I stopped and started coaching. I gave it my best shot lads; it just didn’t work for me.

Finding any support is hard at moment, we live in a world urging us to talk about mental health, to find help, talk to someone, see your GP but in reality once you’ve accessed all the front line support and find there’s a two year waitlist and strict criteria before you can even access the waitlist, you’re left to sit it out unless you can afford to go private and there is a minefield of overpriced, over booked Drs and exhausted NHS workers trying to make more money by working in private practice, a controversial statement I understand but something I have lots of experience of and many are not at the top of their game.

And there are so many agencies now with banks of psychologists charging eye watering amounts to people who have run out of options. Trust me, in the last 18 months I have sat in front of 8 of these private providers trying to get support for my daughter’s mental health, she has been on the NHS waitlist for over 4 years and has a specific issue she needs treatment for but always just below the criteria threshold for urgent support. Hundreds of pounds later only 2 made the cut as far as I’m concerned, from those 2, 1 literally disappeared overnight, returning full time to the NHS it turned out but stopped answering emails without warning after 6 sessions the second dropped my daughter when they disagreed about her sessions. Accessing mental health support has always been a lottery in Scotland but the pandemic has intensified the need and the system is broken.

Ironically my first coach was a recovering psychologist, who’d hit a brick wall herself with therapy and turned to coaching instead. At no point did she tell me never to go back to therapy, especially if I was in crisis but like her I found coaching a valuable tool to plan in case I ever was in crisis again. I would always, always tell you in a crisis first and foremost seek a medical opinion, speak to a GP if you haven’t got access to a mental health team in place, it would be unethical of me to tell you to seek a coach in a mental health crisis as you might need supported with medication or emergency psychiatric support and coaches can’t provide that. Similarly if you do have past trauma or events you want to explore in detail that too is best done with a therapist, coaching is not designed to explore your past in that way although it certainly doesn’t ignore the past either.

But coaching is not a cookie cutter approach either, it’s highly personalised, therapy can follow strict protocol and from my experience some therapists struggle if you don’t fit the written diagnostic tools or criteria,  because medicalised mental health can be very restrictive with thresholds and signs that need to be reached or you won’t qualify for further help. Coaching takes you from where you are now and works outwards from there, nothing is ever too bad or not bad enough, it’s just where you are and how you are, coaching always meets you in the middle. And there is another big difference, I think between the two, a good therapist will help you process trauma in a non-retraumatising way but that’s a specific skill that isn’t guaranteed and because in coaching you can talk about the trauma or choose not to but are not expected to process by digging into the past it can give you the time and space to build your resources so you lean less into the trauma and more into the present and spend your energy creating the future. Coaching supports you to understand what’s happened and how it happened through process and pattern spotting but it encourages you to build a future that is yours and not the pasts. It is a conversation you have with your coach, yourself and your future, no umming and awwing, no heavy silence and no insincere unsympathetic noises.

Coaching allowed me to develop my own touchstones, I learned what happy felt like, what good days actually were and how to spot the signs of good days I could work with and build on. It has helped me to create better habits and a stress tool kit that is partly in how I talk to myself and work with my moods and partly practical. I know when to stop and when to push, I know that balance is not ideal and stress isn’t always a bad thing. I developed an understanding of my brain, my thought patterns and my behaviour, what I needed and what I didn’t need. And I learned to make decisions with care and not run to the quick fix, to separate needs from wants and to put myself first to stop burning out.

Why did it make the shift therapy could not? I think it comes down to the directness of coaching, the style of conversation, the questions asked and focus on setting goals and working towards them, all things I do now with my clients. The pieces fell into place differently but more effectively and meant I rebuilt my confidence and perhaps more importantly my identity, I knew who I was properly for the first time.

In 2015 my GP sent me for a check in with a Psychologist, they didn’t believe me that coaching was my way of keeping sane, they made me feel like an escaped asylum patient, somehow I’d got away and was damaging myself by not sticking to the well-trodden therapy path.

So I went, I sat in the little room in a rundown health centre with it’s grey walls and spoke with a Counselling Psychologist, who was lovely but looked like he needed a year of sleep. I told him what I had done and I was fine, I’d learned to coach and was coaching others too. He smiled at me and said there was nothing else he could say or do for me, I’d found my way of keeping mentally well and he was impressed…but not to tell everyone or I’d do him out of a job.

Good, research based, ethically delivered, honest, flexible coaching is as good if not better for some people when it comes to mental health and perhaps more importantly life support. If we were taught how to understand ourselves and how to ‘human’ from a young age it would help make us more resilient, more understanding of our brains and how we respond to the world, coaching can help you to do that and so much more, if you’d like to know more about how coaching can support your life and mental health I’d love to chat to you about it, drop me an email.