Coaching and psychotherapy share a lot in common. Both involve one-on-one collaboration with a helping professional, goals, and exploration of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Positive rapport and professional boundaries are also essential in both contexts. Therapy and coaching differ in meaningful ways, however.
In our current healthcare system, therapy typically involves a diagnosis and is framed as treatment for trauma and severe mental distress. In essence, therapy tends to address difficult feelings and experiences in the hopes of accepting, reducing, or alleviating them, and the work might be thought of as healing, repairing, or accommodating via skill-building and equanimity.
In developmental coaching clients also want to skillfully relate to their experience, but they are less seeking healing, repair, or skills. Instead, they engage with growth and optimization in mind, and a willingness to use their discomfort as data to pinpoint exactly how they are being called to evolve.
Trauma versus challenge
A word about trauma: Trauma occurs when our nervous systems are unable to cope with the intensity of our experience (e.g., circumstances like childhood neglect, sexual assault, or other overwhelming situations). In the wake of traumatic experiences, the mind, brain networks, the nervous system, and even bodily cells can change in ways that are meant to keep us safe into the future. This comes at a cost, however, when those changes leave a trauma survivor prone to hypervigilance, dissociation, or flashbacks in their everyday life.
There is a difference between experiencing trauma and being challenged (though everyone experiences adversity differently). Posttraumatic growth is absolutely possible, but the space of challenge is more conducive to human development. Unlike trauma, it is a context that we enter with consent and deliberate safeguards.
I believe therapy and coaching are both vital resources for different life situations, and neither is better than the other.
Bottom line
I offer coaching to USCG professionals and veterans who feel enough safety in their bodies and minds to deliberately engage challenge in the name of personal development. You can learn more about my coaching services here.
I also offer therapy services to clients in Washington State for folks who want to address difficult experiences like anxiety, depression, and compulsions. You can learn more about my therapy services here. Additional nationwide mental health resources are also listed at the bottom of the page.
John M. Kopp 