Coaching, Therapy Or Gestalt What Determines A Client’s Choice

Ever since the profession of coaching has entered the arena of mental health services, the topic about which profession is better able to assist individuals - coaching or therapy continues. Each branch provides evidence to support their efficacy and advantages and disadvantages have been a much debated topic among the various health professionals. In the following section gives a brief expose 'of key points for each.

The coaching profession is the new kid on the block. While coaching as such have been around for a while in sport and performance, providing coaching to the public as an opportunity to improve their lives is a relatively new development. Coaches find it important that the potential client to meet the precondition that he is creative, competent, resourceful and whole. The purpose of coaching is helping individuals to assess and create a life that he really wants in relation to their own values and the potential and ambition. The coach-client relationship is one of equality and the client is believed to know best what needs to be amended and how. A coach helps and supports the client in this way to reflect that feedback, ask questions, sometimes challenging, and with permission tender opportunities. Homework is also part of this process. The coaching profession encourages professionals to develop specializations in different areas to better serve a wider range of services. While professional certification for coaches encouraged, ie ICF, it is not necessary, nor is it a thorough knowledge of human development. Everyone hang out a shingle that claims to be a coach.

Unlike coaching, therapy has been around for a very long time. Ever since Papa Freud introduced the possibility that mental disorders can be explored and alleviated with the "talking cure", the focus was and continued to explore "what is wrong." Over time, new developmental theories flourished, as did research (assumptions) and ways to best "healing" human suffering. While the roots of psycho-therapy was in the 18th century, the focus and practice in the 21 century considered to have grown up, so to speak, it is today hardly recognizable for what it once was. In Freud's original writings, did he suffer from a question of soul, and described as mental illness Seelenkrankheit (rare disease). But today, the results in neurosciences contributed significantly to the change in therapeutic focus and practice. Current therapies generally reflects the values of society to mind - think about doing - to be - questions. While there are certainly valid in this research and practice, humanistic practice in previous years, Rogers, etc., have fallen by the wayside. Moving away from integration and totality to fragment the whole person into parts and treat separately ie body, mind, spirit, behavior, others etc. hope to carry on the whole has been considered by many to have been the "soul" out of therapy. The therapist was the expert and the client is assumed to follow expert advice.

Therapists are state licensed and supported by health insurance, limiting the therapeutic application based on the provider's diagnosis. One can safely say that today the insurance companies know best, no therapist or client.

To summarize, coaching work in here and now to the future, therapy focuses on healing or reduce pain of past or present ills.

But as clear as the above sounds to provide a service to select careful consideration and honest client / professional in finding the best approach to meet customer needs and wants. Here's an example:

Tom approached me for therapy, I hope to put a stop to his misery. He was a soft-spoken, deeply distressed single man in his late thirties, who was sober continuously for eight years after sixteen years of cocaine / crack and "you name it 'addiction. He worked AA's strict 12 - step program, very was quickly labeled a 'Saint', a role model, and was in great demand as a sponsor. He also spent 'years' of therapy to address extreme abuse issues from various family members. Once in the process of getting sobriety, he began and went graduated college, interned at a large international company, and within a short time became a top-level executive. "No" was his description of forces. "If I had any, I would not be an addict." But he remained very depressed, he still wanted to find out what he was really all about and what was missing because he thought he already had everything - sobriety, money, and was still dissatisfied. Moreover, he wanted to stop feeling responsible for to live lives of others. He could not imagine how his life would have been different if he would wake up one day and have the life he wanted, because he lived one day at a time and hated it. He hoped that things would change, before he fell back in self-destructive behavior again (Tom was stopped attend AA several years ago).

As a Gestalt therapist and Gestalt Coach who has worked for many years with dependent / recovered population, I was struck by his vanquished attitude and posture without awareness of its strong showing resilience, creativity and perseverance. After having explored both therapy and coaching as an opportunity to continue his enthusiasm (good sign) chose coaching because he was tired of "same old, been there, same old, done that". He decided to see a therapist if coaching would be inadequate.

Gestalt theory and methodology differs significantly from the above coaching and therapy descriptions. Gestalt Therapy is a model of health. Erving Polster, Premier Gestalts in our time, has insisted for years that the Gestalt is too good to be used only for the sick. Extremely, shortened, focused on here and now, with a holistic focus on the individual in relation to the environment creatively and interdependence co creating experience every moment of life. Question is made as to what and how experience and awareness of self / other is facilitated by careful use of experiments in the context of the paradoxical Gestalt theory of change.