Coaches are Not Therapists, The Differences Matter
By: Kimi Ceridon
Tags: Life Lessons, Personal Growth, Self, Life Coaching, Self Improvement

Following my mother’s funeral, I completed an intensive therapy program, took classes focused on using writing as a healing tool, and saw a licensed therapist biweekly. Still, I went through a profoundly self-destructive phase, where I nearly lost my marriage.

During that time, a therapist diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from childhood abuse. She felt my mother’s illness and death triggered depression and anxiety related to PTSD.

I worked on coping mechanisms like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectic-behavioral therapy (DBT) techniques for managing symptoms. I also tried a few medications to alleviate grief under the supervision of a psychopharmacologist.

Why I wanted a career coach

Before my mother was diagnosed, I left my job as a technology innovation manager to get a master’s degree in food studies. I worked odd jobs during the program, my mother’s illness, and my grief, but generally, I was jobless.

It took time, therapy, self-care, and self-exploration before I was ready to think seriously about my future. I still went to therapy, but I wanted to engage with someone with more prescriptive and directive exercises related to my career.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a job. I left tech burned out and tired of being a ‘woman in tech.’ Jumping into culinary school and food studies were more about escaping tech than pursuing a new path. It was fun, but I wasn’t sure about career opportunities. I enjoyed my freelance writing but was on the fence about being a career writer. I also wanted to consider entrepreneurship.

I spent years out of the workforce, so I wanted to connect with someone who would help me make sense of my experience in engineering and tech management as well as my new education in food studies to forge an original career path. A career coach could help me tune up my resume, LinkedIn profile, and career network. I thought the right one could also facilitate professional connections and get me interviews.

How I found a career coach

Once I decided a career coach was the way to go, I did what I do with most everything in my life; I googled it. The search results were overwhelming. Clearly, some coaches were better at search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Adwords because their names and ads popped up with every search.

I created a list of criteria for a coach. I preferred to work with a woman. She should be in her 40s or 50s to better identify with me. I wanted someone who’s worked with women in technology and career changers. And, finally, any coach I worked with had to have a recognized professional association or certification.

Coaches do not require state or national licenses to operate. Anyone can call themselves a coach. There are many types of professional certifications for coaches, and some amount to a coach paying an annual fee to get listed as a “certified coach.” I decided to look for a coach with a professional- or master-level certificate from the International Coaching Federation with training from the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC).

Although ICF certifies a great many coaching programs, I felt it offered a level of accountability, including a way to file formal complaints if needed.

Coaches are expensive, and I looked at hiring one just as I looked at hiring any other contractor. I wanted to interview them, get a proposal for engagement, and shop around for competing bids. If a coach didn’t offer a free 20- or 30-minute information session, I didn’t even consider them.

I selected six coaches to interview. All had an online questionnaire to provide background information. I made sure I was upfront about my history of grief, childhood abuse, PTSD, depression, marital problems, medications, and that I also had a nephew, who I loved dearly, dealing with a life-threatening illness.

I made it clear that I wanted more than a career coach to helps me prepare interviews, networking, and presentation; I wanted someone to work with me to me figure out what I wanted to do and help me set goals to do it.

After three weeks of interviews, emails, and negotiation, I selected a coach.

Warning signs

When I interviewed this coach, she had mentioned she had a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She told me she had not pursued psychotherapy because she felt the licensing was too restrictive on how she engaged with clients. At the time, I thought her therapeutic education was an asset.

After I hired the coach, my therapist told me she was leaving the practice, moving out of state. She gave me a list of nearby therapists to contact. When I mentioned to the coach that I needed to find a new therapist, she thought I shouldn’t. “I want you to rely on me for whatever you need. If you feel down or whatever, you call me. If you need support, I want you to come to me first.”

The suggestion should have been a red flag, but I had prepaid for six months of coaching. It was a lot of money, and I wanted to give myself over the process. I wanted to trust her, and I felt like I needed to throw myself wholly into being coached to get the best results. So, I set the list of therapists aside.

Coaching versus therapy

I knew coaching and therapy were different. The differences were why I sought a coach at this stage of my life. I don’t have the educational background to articulate the differences between a coach and a therapist adequately. But when I contacted the ICF, they emphasized that coaching and therapy use are different modalities, and a coach should not represent themselves as a therapist.

A 2013 Global Advances in Health and Medicine piece titled “Coaching vs. Psychotherapy in health and Wellness: Overlap, Dissimilarities, and the Potential for Collaboration” by Meg Jordan Ph.D., RN, CWP, and John B. Livingstone, M.D., FRSH offers a thorough discussion of the differences between coaches and therapists.

“Coaching Versus Therapy A Perspective” by Vicki Hart, John Blattner, and Staci Leipsic in Consulting Psychology Journal also discusses the difference through interviews with therapists who also practice coaching.

Learning the differences the hard way

In hindsight, some things happened that were neither therapeutic or helping me with my goals.

During our sessions, the coach offered suggestions or feedback then casually tossed in, “but I’m not a licensed therapist” as a throwaway line. It had not occurred to me that this frequent qualifier was more of a cover-her-ass statement.

On a few occasions, I got distraught during the session. The coach would push more until I was panicking and agitated. At the time, I told myself that my feelings were part of pushing me to try new things and get out of my comfort zone. But I’d never had a therapist amplify a triggered moment until it was out of control.

The coach did not know how to de-escalate bad situations. Instead, she’d end the session and tell me to think about why I was uncomfortable. I realize now, she panicked, disengaged altogether, then left me in an amped-up state of panic.

I’m not saying coaches don’t know how to handle these situations: this coach didn’t know how to handle these situations. Although her training included psychotherapy, she had not done the supervised clinical work required of licensed therapists. According to Jordan et al

Sometimes, affecting change is extremely difficult due to underlying emotional or relational problems. In those cases, a psychotherapy approach is essential, and the client should be referred. This is also true when the client experiences symptoms, somatic and/or psychological, driven by past experience and emotional/relational development that are being triggered by their current health situation.

She knew my mental health background, and she told me dealing with a client with my history was no problem. She bragged about her psychotherapy degree, but probably only encountered things like PTSD in textbooks.

Ultimately, she should have told me to seek a new therapist and go back on her original assertion that I rely only on her. It was arrogant to assume she could keep winging it.

Not only did she advise me not to seek a new therapist, she later discouraged me from finding a marriage counselor for my husband and I. The coach knew I had had some difficulties in my marriage She said: “Things seem to be okay right now, so I don’t think it is a good idea to disrupt the work we are doing by getting a marriage counselor.”

Overwhelmed and looking for an exit

My aunt died on a Wednesday. I received the results of an Emotional IQ test from the coach that same day and I had a regularly scheduled session with the coach on Thursday.

The test results compounded my grief, and I felt overwhelmed with sorting out a trip for the funeral with my sister (the mother of the nephew with a life-threatening illness. I texted my coach.

Me: I won’t be on the call. I don’t feel like talking to anyone today.

Coach: That’s not how this works. Can you jump online with me our scheduled time anyway?

She didn’t ask why I felt terrible; instead, she jumped to explaining to me about the test results BY TEXT. I told her I was too depressed to talk to anyone. She didn’t ask why I was depressed, or whether there were other aggravating factors, or even whether I was safe.

We next spoke at our next session, which she opened up by asking, “I want to know how you think this is going because you bailed on our last meeting, and that indicates to me this isn’t going well.”

I was dumbfounded. I told the coach my aunt died, and I was flying to her funeral the next day. I told her it was difficult coordinating travel with my sister, given her situation. I told her the mess reminded me of my mom.

The coach offered a few sympathetic words but quickly returned to asking me to admit our relationship wasn’t going well. It became clear she wanted the relationship to end, but she wanted me to make the verbal concession.

There was little point in continuing with someone I no longer trusted. I felt the coach simply wanted to be rid of a difficult client, and she didn’t have my mental wellness in mind. So, I conceded.

Loss of Trust

I have taken a hard look at the three months I worked with this coach. More than halfway through our contract, we had not talked about work-life or set any career goals. We did not dig into my job interests or skills. I mostly remember being asked to do things I found loathsome to push me to “shed my ego.” These detestable things seemed to have nothing to do with sorting out my career goals.

I don’t know if it was arrogance, ignorance or greed that lead this coach to misrepresent her self initially, but it was professional incompetence to continue doing do for as long as she did. When she became overwhelmed with working with me, rather than correct her mistake, she got rid of the problem and that was professional misconduct.

This experience left me distrustful of the coaching experience. I’ve found a new therapist, but I have no plans to seek a new coach. One bright side of this experience is the ICF. They have taken my complaint seriously, and I believe whatever the outcome, they will ensure this professional will not make the same mistake.