Why Counselors are Outraged About Life Coaching

People in the counseling professions (that is: psychotherapists, clinical social workers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, mental health counselors, addiction counselors, etc) are very concerned about the growing popularity of life coaching. Might their worries be justified?

While some of the concern is clearly rooted in scarcity consciousness and the perception that coaches siphon off clients who can afford to pay counselors out of pocket (something very attractive to counselors who hate dealing with insurance companies) and thereby cut into counselors income, a very real concern is centered on the potential for coaches to try to coach someone who needs mental health care. Are coaches really qualified to identify mental illness?

Not according to counselors.

Their sense of do no harm is triggered – and rightly so -- when they hear coaches claim to help people solve relationship problems and improve marital communications (the purview of marriage and family counselors), end anxiety (a diagnosable mental illness), relieve depression (another diagnosable mental illness with high rates of suicide), and so on. They believe coaches are acting unethically in this regard.

Many if not most counselors believe that coaches in general – and life coaches in particular – are not well enough educated to recognize when a client is experiencing mental illness, and should be properly diagnosed and treated by a qualified, licensed mental health professional. They are outraged that coaches walk so close to their boundary as an allied profession, but without the depth of academic training, years of closely supervised experience, state administered licensing exams, or public accountability structures to protect vulnerable clients.

They have a point.

Unless coaches come into that field of work with other background as a therapist, most are unlikely to have the advantages of knowing the diagnostic distinctions that any counselor can recite in their sleep. Since there is A LOT of shades of gray in mental illness diagnosis – which is an interpretive art form more than a hard science as any good therapist will admit – how can coaches serve the best interest of clients who may be diagnosable?

After working more than 18 years as a psychotherapist, here are my 4 rules of thumb for coaching:

When a client is unwilling to take responsibility for changing their attitude, perspective, or circumstances, a counselor would be a better helper for them. Coachees need to accept accountability and work on change.

When a client is overwhelmed by their emotions for months on end in ways that interfere with normal functioning and relationships in daily life, a counselor is best suited to help. Coachees need to be emotionally available to tolerate the discomforts of taking risks for change.

Coaches should ask for a brief emotional history before agreeing to contract with clients, as a liability protection. Coachees need to not be actively suicidal, enmeshed in substance abuse, delusional, paranoid, oppositional, nor dealing with behaviors that are dangerous, abusive to others, or illegal in order to be coachable.

When a client can’t be self-regulating and willing to try something new to shift out of worry, fear, anger, sadness, shame, or guilt, and coaching is going nowhere after a number of weeks, short term counseling may be needed alone or in conjunction with coaching. Coachees need to be able to get beyond their emotional responses in order to take action.

Responsive / Reactive: Reflections on Trauma Aftermath

A coaching class today put an all-too-real world perspective on the difference between being reactive and being responsive when a student spoke of these two ways of holding and interacting with our experience in relation to tragic events. Specifically, she spoke about the looming anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th in the US. Another student spoke of being in the lingering impact of hurricane Katrina, with its recent cousins Gustav and Ike re-traumatizing folks on the Gulf Coast.

Psychologically speaking, anniversaries of traumatic events tend to refresh the memory of the horror, helplessness, confusion, and chaos experienced in the original event. When we've been through such a thing as a mass casualty attack or a huge natural disaster, it's difficult to make sense of the randomness of it. We get shaken to our core in a deeply existential way. Beyond the material level of destruction that happens, we are forever psychologically altered as well. Some of us never fully recover.

It is natural to be reactive about these anniversaries. But it isn't good for us to be reactive for too long. Let's examine what reactivity is, in order to understand why responsiveness is more healthy.

When we're reactive, we re-experience the trauma again -- perhaps to a lesser degree but often in disturbingly vivid, cellular memory detail. We get overwhelmed by fear and grief or anger, and feel powerless again.

This reactivity has physiological consequences in the body. Our neuro-chemistry goes on alert, flooding the body with corticosteroids (the stress hormones) whose purpose is to help us flight or flee when necessary. But when this flood is in response to a memory, there is nothing to fight, no real threat from which to flee, so the hormones don't get discharged in the way that's intended, and instead do damage to the immune system and especially to the adrenal glands -- two systems we need to keep us healthy and keep our energy up.

In this class, one student pointed out that sometimes in the aftermath of a traumatic event, we have a bit of guilt-fear over ending our reactivity, as if to do so would dishonor those who died. This is also quite a normal reaction. Connect to this, I believe, is a reluctance to let go of reactivity because in a way it keeps us alert, hypervigilent against the potential of another disaster happening to us again. If we let go, we might forget to be careful, and could leave ourselves vulnerable to being dangerously caught off guard again.

These reasons for staying in reactivity are somehow logical, but not the less harmful to mind, body, and spirit.

Responsiveness takes nothing away from those whose lives were taken on September 11th, or during Katrina. Responsiveness simply shifts our intention from being determined to perpetually mourn and not let it happen again, to the more productive perspective of finding the good, or the opportunity in these anniversary days of remembrance.

Another student in the class shared that in the Jewish tradition when loved ones die, family members honor their memory each year on the anniversary of the passing by making a charitable contribution in their name, or doing some good deed that the loved one is obviously no longer in a position to do. Honoring the day, and the life and life work of others is a great way to be responsive to our feelings of sorrow while at the same time using it as an opportunity to turn it into a blessing for someone else.

Listening to the student discussion in the class, I wrote two question sets that coaches could use with clients who are experiencing the reactivity associated with traumatic anniversaries, to help shift thrm from reactivity to responsiveness.

• How can you bring love and compassion into this moment for yourself? How can you do so for others who are also still struggling? What can you do to increase love and compassion in the world? What's one small thing you could do that would be an act of love or compassion in your family, your community, the world?

• What's one step towards peace that you can take today? How can you honor one or more of the lives lost in these tragedies? What could you contribute to or create that would be a voice for peace? What's the commitment you will make to serving Life, not fear, and how might that change you for the better?