Coaching Therapy

Within the past two Reflections, I have posed some therapy questions of coaching and self- actualization:

• — Can we use the coaching methodology in doing therapy with someone?
• — Would this be a wise choice?
• — Can we coach therapeutic issues with people who are in need of remedial change?
• — Where is the line between therapy and coaching?
• — Can the coaching of self-actualization be applied to neuroses or psychoses?
• — Can it be used for the reordering of the disordering of personality?

In the previous Reflections I have danced around these questions talking about the unique role of Coaching, what Michelle and I are doing in pushing out a space unique for Coaching in contradistinction to therapy, and some of the unique distinctions of both therapy and coaching.

Psychotherapy (or therapy) differs from counseling in that, typically, counseling addresses how to cope with everyday problems whereas therapy addresses how to re-adjust in mind-body- emotion to the problems regarding how we order our inner world (e.g., our “personality”).

Developmentally, when we fail to appropriately grow through the first stage of differentiation of self and reality, we develop what’s called psychosis, that is, the lack of clear boundaries, sense of reality, sense of self. This makes us unable to cope with work, life, reality, or even self. When we fail to manage the stage of self-boundaries, we develop a borderline disorder. Then, suffering from weak emotional boundaries, we are easily overwhelmed by anxiety, depression, fear, etc. due to getting close to people and experiencing intimacy. And when we fail to navigate the developmental stage of accepting ourselves with all of our fallible emotions, needs, and so on, we develop neuroses. Because we repress the emotions, needs, and thoughts that we’ve mapped as “unacceptable,” this leads to hypochondria, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, irrational fears, and so on.

As a model, psychotherapy began with Psychoanalysis as an expert-based, authoritarian approach derived from the Medical Model. Freud based Psychoanalysis on the assumption that the doctor knows best the patient needs. So the doctor diagnoses the patient’s condition, prescribes the intervention, evaluates when the patient has completed therapy, and if there is any resistance, codes it as the patient’s defensiveness.

This approach is designed to get through all of the ego-defenses of the patient and help the patient develop ego-strength to face the Reality Principle. “Where there is id, let there be ego” was the gospel according to Freud. If the therapy is not progressing, the patient is resisting.

It began here, but it did not stay there. By the middle of the 20th century all of this was in a process of change. Increasingly more psychoanalysts tired of the authoritarian approach and began to pioneer new approaches. Frankl took psychoanalysis to a new level in creating Logotherapy; Ellis rejected psychoanalysis and created REB; Glasser did the same and created Reality Therapy and then Control Theory; Beck followed the same path and created Cognitive Therapy. Milton Erickson transcended psychoanalysis with medical hypnosis and from that many others created Brief Psychotherapy, Solution Focus Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and the list goes on and on.

The movement toward a less authoritarian approach continued until the late 20th century when most of the new therapists were entirely facilitative and based upon the paradigm that Carl Rogers’ launched with Client-Centered Therapy in the 1950s. This model made therapist and client co-partners in a search for wholeness and working from the premise that clients only need an appropriate learning context.

As the old assumptions were turned upside down, new premises were identified.

• — The person is not a patient at all but a client— a responsible and capable person.
• — The client’s defenses are symptomatic of threat and should be respected.
• — The client’s defenses always makes sense when we discover his or her inner contexts.
• — The client has sufficient resources within for healing and responsibility.
• — The client’s Id needs is not the problem, nor the unconscious, or society (superego).
• — Conscious awareness alone is usually not sufficient for healing.
• — Human problems involve the mental maps that we operate by.
• — There’s more to people than their psycho-sexual stages.
• — People also develop cognitively, socially, emotionally, etc.
• — Our mind-body system is a self-organizing system designed for self-healing.
• — Our past does not cause the present, it only provides the contexts in which we learn to cope and adapt as we have.
• — The past identifies the contexts in which we made our first maps for coping.

Actually, the idea of facilitating or coaching therapy has been gaining favor for several decades as the principles of the human potential movement have been increasingly accepted about the nature of human nature. Accordingly, as we understand that we growth not only through psycho-sexual stages (Freud), but also through psycho-social stages (Eric Erickson), psycho- mental or cognitive stages (Piaget), faith stages (Fowler), etc., we realize that we can coach therapeutic blocks, issues, and challenges in these stages. This doesn’t mean that Coaching is the same as Therapy. They are not. It only means that it is possible to use the facilitative process of coaching for handling some therapy issues. Until the field of Coaching is established as a profession, it is not wise to mix and confuse these modalities. There’s enough confusion without adding to it! [That’s why it is also critical for Coaches to refer therapy issues to Therapists. It is not only the legal thing to do, it is business-wise as we emphasize in Meta-Coaching.]

Roger’s client-centered approach changed the paradigm. He led the way in researching the critical variables that generate therapeutic change and discovered that it rested not so much in the therapist’s ideas, models, or processes, but in the therapist’s way of relating to the client. He argued that people are healed via the therapist’s unconditional positive regard, congruency of authenticity, and non-possessive empathy. So the new facilitative therapeutic approach invites a true partnership of co-creating outcomes and exploring together the full range of factors that influence a client’s hurt— cognitive, behavioral, emotional, relational, cultural contexts, physiological. As the therapeutic relationship evolves, the client increasingly becomes his or her own expert her with the therapist as an expert partner for guidance.

So, can we coach someone through the developmental stages to address therapeutic blocks and interferences? Can we use the coaching of self-actualization to work with neuroses and psychoses? The ultimate answer is yes. And how to do that with the Neuro-Semantic models of Self-Actualization —that will be the direction that some in this community will be developing in the future. If you’re interested in that, I’d recommend you register for one of the Ultimate Self- Actualization Workshops coming in 2007.